Murder of a Dead Man Read Online Free PDF Page A

my flat, but not in my bed. The biggest things between us are our differences. You invited us both, we came.’
    ‘There’s nothing more to it than that?’ She sounded disappointed.
    ‘Only banter.’ He opened the back door, deposited the bag in the dustbin, shut the lid and returned to the kitchen. He took his time over washing his hands, delaying the moment when he’d have to look at her again. He was policeman through and through. Conditioned to interrogate, question, detect criminal activity, and somewhere in the process of conditioning he had lost touch with his emotions. It was bad enough when they surfaced in the form of sympathy for a victim during a case, impossible when he tried to deal with them in his private life.
    ‘You were married once.’
    It was a statement, not a question, and he realised Trevor must have told her. ‘It was a disaster.’
    ‘Because you were never there for her when she needed you?’
    ‘Because we wanted different things from life.’
    ‘If you were that different why did you marry her?’
    ‘Too much moonlight, too much booze. Why does anyone marry? For her, I think it was the nesting instinct. She wanted a home and with my salary taken into consideration she qualified for a larger mortgage and a better house.’
    ‘That’s a foul thing to say about someone you lived with.’
    ‘Foul maybe, but true.’ He looked at the clean, simple lines of the blue and white kitchen. Her taste was – is – horrendous,’ he corrected himself. He’d become so used to relegating his ex-wife to the past he occasionally had trouble remembering she was alive. ‘Fitted carpets with patterns that knock you in the eye. Fence to fence garden gnomes. Collections of knick-knacks that covered every inch of the house, even the kitchen worktops, and all inscribed with A Present From Brighton in gold ink.’
    ‘You’re joking?’
    ‘I’m not. Less than a year after taking my trip down the aisle I began drinking in the White Hart. I had to find another home. I simply couldn’t face all those gnomes every time I got pissed…’
    ‘Peter!’
    ‘In the end she found someone who understood her and the gnomes, so we split.’
    ‘Trevor told me you gave her the house.’
    ‘I couldn’t have lived with myself if I’d made the gnomes homeless. Not even a jumble sale would have taken them.’ He folded the fresh bag he was holding into the bin. ‘It’s a sad story,’ he said with a gravity he intended to be mocking, but didn’t quite pull off. ‘And in the force a common one. The super’s wife left him.’
    ‘I heard. And Dan Evans is a widower.’
    ‘He joined as a widower,’ he said.
    ‘And Trevor lived with a girl for six years.’
    He leaned back against the cupboards. So this was what she’d been building up to. He had no intention of telling her anything Trevor hadn’t. Lyn was Trevor’s business, not his. Just as Trevor’s past was his own, and no one else’s, unless Trevor chose to share it with them.
    ‘He told me about her,’ she sensed that Peter disapproved of her prying into Trevor’s past. ‘Her name was Mags and after she left him he couldn’t even live in the flat they’d bought together.’
    ‘He bought,’ Peter corrected. ‘Mags never contributed a penny. But then Trevor has always been a soft touch. Makes a point of paying all his ladies’ bills.’
    A deep blush spread over Lyn’s face.
    ‘Oh hell!’ He opened a can of warm beer that was standing on the work surface and drank it. ‘I didn’t mean that in relation to you.’ He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.
    ‘It’s not money.’ She stared at her reflection mirrored in the blackened glass of the window. ‘I would love to hand over my share of the mortgage every month. It would give our relationship some permanency. As it is, I never see Trevor. I feel as though I’m in the way. As if I’m nothing more than an encumbrance.’
    ‘You are important to him, Lyn. Probably the only