Silent Truths Read Online Free PDF Page B

going to end, because I just can’t imagine my life without him.’ She gasped and choked, and her voice became a thin, high-pitched whisper as she said, ‘The bastard. Doesn’t he ever think about anyone but himself? He has to know what I’m going through. So why doesn’t he call? For God’s sake, it’s making me think he really did do it!’
    ‘He didn’t,’ Georgie assured her.
    ‘But he was there, wasn’t he? Whatever he did or didn’t do, he was there, in her flat. So tell me, how the hell’s he going to explain that away?’
    ‘I don’t know,’ Georgie answered. ‘Maybe someone else was there too. Someone we don’t know about yet.’
    Beth pressed her fingers to her eyes and held them there until she could feel herself starting to calm down. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said finally, her voice thickened by tears. ‘It’s just that I’m so afraid … I suppose I’m trying to prepare myself for the worst, when really I should know he could never have done it.’
    ‘Of course he couldn’t,’ Georgie said warmly.‘We both know that. You’re still trying to get over the shock of it all.’
    After a while Beth gave a dry, anguished laugh. ‘What makes you think this is all?’ she said, closing her eyes.
    Georgie frowned. ‘What do you mean?’
    Beth shook her head. ‘Well, Colin obviously knew the girl, or why else would he have been at her flat? And whoever killed her must have done it for a reason. So maybe what I should be preparing myself for now is just how messy that reason is going to get.’

Chapter 2
    COLIN ASHBY WAS thinking about irony and coincidence and symmetry, and how they related to the last time he’d been in this very cell. Was it twenty-five, maybe even thirty years ago? It had been the morning after a rock singer who was still famous today had been banged up for the night for trying to steal a police car. Having got an early tip-off to the story, Colin, with his young reporter’s dubious flair for the different angle, had thought it would be interesting, after covering the judicial process, to write about the cell that had housed this icon. So a friendly officer here at Notting Hill had indulged his request and allowed him to see for himself what the cell in question looked like. He remembered now how severely it had tested his powers of description, since there’d been nothing to describe, beyond the knobbly grey-green walls whose graffiti, over the course of time, had been painted over and over, leaving only faint shadows of its existence, ghostly reminders of its writers who had long since been discharged back into themêlée of life, or death or other, more permanent, prisons. Then there was the small meshed window cut into the wall above eyelevel, a stone sarcophagus-looking slab which was covered by a thin, waterproof mattress, and the inevitable steel door with its built-in food and communication trap. In the end the cell article had been cut anyway.
    How ironic that he should find himself in that very cell all these years later, reflecting on how simple life had been back then, in the starting paddock of the ambition race. How utterly complicated and frightening it was now.
    It was probably some time between two and three in the morning, he guessed. Bruce and Giles Parker had left hours ago, looking almost as haggard as he felt. Since they’d gone, there had been little distraction beyond the inevitable sound-only entertainment of a couple of drunken arrests, and the occasional scrape and clatter of his communication trap, as the duty officer checked to make sure he hadn’t hanged himself. Since they’d confiscated his belt, shoelaces and Hermès tie on arrival, checking for that eventuality was a perversely morbid waste of time.
    It was hot and airless in the cell. Earlier the moon had thrown enough light for him to see the bleakness of his surroundings, just in case he should forget. It was darker now, but his eyes, swollen and sore as they were, could still make