Speak No Evil Read Online Free PDF

looking at them. ‘Just, just … a pane of glass come loose last night. Blew in. In the kitchen.’ She looked at him, hoped the explanation was enough. ‘I got cut gettin’ it cleared up.’
    They moved upstairs into the meeting room, took their positions on sofas opposite each other, the coffee table in between. They had tried talking at various locations – her flat, a couple of cafes and restaurants Donovan knew – but nowhere made Anne Marie feel as relaxed as this room. It was comfortable and warm, she had said, more like a living room than a meeting room.
    He had to agree. That had been done deliberately. Books on the shelves, pictures on the white walls. Movie posters, they were, all old ones. Crime, horror, Sixties British, Woody Allen. Sofas so welcoming you didn’t want to get out of them again. Most of the people who came to see them, Donovan had told her, were troubled. The last thing they needed to feel was uncomfortable too. There was even the smell of real coffee wafting through. It was like Starbucks, Donovan had said, but without the world domination overtones.
    Anne Marie clumsily put her cigarettes on the table, the bandages inhibiting her, kept her eyes away from him.
    â€˜Shouldn’t you get it seen to by a doctor? You might need stitches.’
    Anne Marie tried to smile. ‘No it’s OK. It’s OK.’
    â€˜OK.’
    He checked his notes, fiddled with his iPod-attached recorder. ‘Fine. Let’s get cracking then. You all right to start?’
    Anne Marie nodded. He always asked her. And she always said yes. Not because she wanted to, he knew, but because the sooner she started, the sooner it would be finished.
    â€˜I thought we’d pick up from yesterday,’ said Donovan, trying not to look at her bandaged hands. She tried not to look at them too, instead taking in what he was wearing, checking out what T-shirt it was today. He never wore suits. Instead he had adopted his own uniform of jeans, boots, hoodie and T-shirt, this one bearing the slogan: ‘Harlem Heroes – Cut the jive, let’s play AEROBALL!’ alongside a cartoon image of a helmeted black sportsman from 2000 AD comic in the Seventies. He caught her smiling at it.
    â€˜Right,’ he said, switching on the recorder. ‘Childhood. Your mother.’
    â€˜Oh God.’ A shiver ran through Anne Marie.
    Donovan tried to forget about the blue door, concentrate on the present. The job in hand, the person in front of him.
    He waited for her to speak. The counter on the recorder moved on.
    â€˜Right. My mother.’ She cleared her throat, shook her head, kept her hands still. ‘My mother wasn’t an easy person to get on with.’ She cleared her throat again. Anne Marie kept her eyes on her hands as they twitched in the bandages. ‘There wasn’t much … she wasn’t what you’d call maternal. Not really.’
    Donovan watched her, waited, focused, his eyes resting on her face. Just the thing to take his mind off his own problems, he thought, listening to a child killer. Then castigated himself for being unfair. Slightly. He was being paid to do a job and he would execute that job as professionally as possible. Then mentally censored himself for using the word execute.
    â€˜She was … a bitch.’ Anne Marie stopped clearing her throat. Her cheeks flushed. ‘Yeah, a bitch.’
    â€˜Tell me about her.’
    â€˜What d’you want to know?’
    Donovan shrugged, his voice low, unthreatening. ‘What she was like. The kind of person she was. What it was like living with her.’
    â€˜What it was like living with her?’ Her hands twitched all the more. ‘She … I don’t blame anyone in my life. For what I did.’ She put her hand to her throat, as if to ease the passage of the words. ‘It was me …’ Her hands shook. She couldn’t take her eyes off them.
    She was