Kill My Darling Read Online Free PDF Page B

detective and treated her as one, and at least had the decency to appear not to notice her gender. After one early, disastrous mistake she had made it an iron rule not to go out or get involved with any of her colleagues. After a time they had stopped trying and written her off as frigid and probably a lesbian, which she had borne patiently; and eventually had accepted her as one of them, an honorary bloke. Her nickname, Norma, was a tribute to her machismo, and she had worn it with pride. It had been hard won.
    So for years she had maintained an icy virginity at work and a wonderfully patient, amazingly understanding secret boyfriend at home; but eventually Tony had grown restless. He disapproved of her refusal to go for promotion. Well, the money would have been nice, but she did not want to have to go through that whole process of training a new lot of resentful males to accept her for herself. The very prospect exhausted her. Also, patient though he was, Tony was still all man, and he didn’t like the fact that she kept him secret, as if she was ashamed of him. Not ashamed of him, she told him, but of them . But in the end she had to give him something , and the price of being allowed to go on being her was first marriage, and then the baby.
    She was very happy being married, and Tony had reverted to being patient, adaptable, and helpful to a saintly degree when her job prevented her doing wifely and motherly things; and she adored little Ashley and wondered how they had ever lived without her. But she paid with whole new layers of sensitivity towards lovers, married people, parents, the bereaved; and new layers of fear that the things she saw happening daily to the anonymous victims of crime might happen to her own small family. She had become vulnerable; she had lost her ice. She hoped she had not also lost her edge.
    But she approached the present task with resignation. There were lots of things in the Job you didn’t necessarily relish – smelly houses, vomiting drunks, decomposing corpses, road accidents – but you did them just the same.
    Melanie Hunter’s parents weren’t called Hunter – she had them down as Wiseman, Ian and Rachel, so either the mum had remarried, or Melanie had changed her name for some reason. They lived in a nice part of Ealing, typical suburbia, Edwardian semis on a street edged with those trees that went into pink blossom like screwed up tissue paper in spring. Of course, they were bare now, the freezing weather having held everything back. Most of the houses had turned their gardens into hardstanding for cars, but where they still had front gardens, they were neatly kept, with clipped privet hedges, and hard-pruned sticks that would be roses later, and oblongs and squares of bare, weeded earth that would be flower beds, showing only the blunt green noses of bulbs.
    The faint, watery sun had broken through, and even though it did nothing to mitigate the biting cold, it gave an air of festivity to the street. As it was Sunday, there were cars parked before most of the houses, kids were trundling about on bikes and scooters, and one brave or barmy man was washing his motor with a hose with a foaming sponge attachment. All very Mrs Norman Normal – as were all lives until the meteor of chance hit them, the hurtling rock from the sky crashed at random through their roof.
    In the front garden of the Wisemans’ house, there was a girl of about eleven or twelve, in a cropped top and skinny jeans that exposed her belly button (why the hell wasn’t she freezing? Kids these days! Swilley thought), picking the sugar-pink varnish from her nails with all the destructive boredom of Sunday afternoon. She eyed Swilley with intense interest, scanning her from her pull-on woolly hat down through her camel wool wrap-around coat to her long boots.
    â€˜Hello,’ Swilley said. ‘Are your mum and dad Mr and Mrs Wiseman?’
    She nodded.
    â€˜Are they