Stranglehold Read Online Free PDF Page B

‘There’ll have to be an inquest.’
    She nodded gravely, studying her bright red nails. ‘What happens there?’
    â€˜Oh, it will all be over very quickly. And we won’t need you for that, I don’t think.’ He had meant to be comforting, but she looked a little disappointed. ‘One of Harriet’s – Hetty’s – parents will give formal evidence of identification. Someone from CID will say a little about how she was killed. The Coroner will recommend the verdict of “Murder by person or persons unknown”. Then we’ll get on with finding out who did it.’
    She nodded sagely, as if she was digesting new information, then said, ‘Hetty wouldn’t have hurt a fly.’
    Someone nearly always said that about a victim of violence, but poor Debbie Cook wasn’t to know that. Hook looked round the room with its faded flowered wallpaper, its two unmatching single beds, its brown stain of damp in the corner of the outside walls. There was a single small and uncomfortable armchair, which he now occupied and overflowed, and two painted blue wooden stand chairs. The WDC sat on one of these. Debbie was sitting on her bed, turning the threadbare candlewick bedspread to try to make its holes a little less obvious. There was a cheap plastic shade on the light which hung in the middle of the room, but someone had put too strong a bulb in the socket, so that one side of the shade was burned dark brown.
    He said, ‘You and Hetty rented this room together?’
    She nodded, crushing the small handkerchief between her palms until it disappeared. The WDC pushed a tissue between her fingers. He thought she was going to break down again, but she said with a touch of defiance, ‘We were going to get ourselves something better, before too long.’ Then she looked up at him in fear, as though she felt that the little spurt of pride had tricked her into an indiscretion.
    Hook said gently, ‘How long had you been here, love?’
    â€˜Ten months.’
    â€˜You didn’t grow up down here, though, did you?’ The girl’s Black Country accent had been stronger in the extremes of her distress than it was now.
    â€˜No. I came here from Walsall. To work at ICI in Gloucester. That’s where I met Hetty. She’d come from Nottingham, just before me.’
    â€˜So you both wanted to get away from home.’ He made it a simple statement, and she accepted it as that.
    â€˜Yes. I had a stepfather who decided when I was eighteen that it would be more exciting to fuck me than my mother.’ She produced the word defiantly; its sudden harshness broke through the monotone of the sentence to hint at the bitterness she felt.
    If she had thought to shock the avuncular figure who sat opposite her, she would have been disappointed; Hook heard worse tales than this far too often for his comfort. He merely nodded and said, ‘And was Hetty’s home situation similar to yours?’
    â€˜No, I’m sure it wasn’t. Her parents are still together, for a start. But her dad was unemployed, and he wouldn’t give her any freedom.’
    Hook, who had two boys of his own who were not yet ten, thought of the trials of adolescence which lay ahead of them and him. He said gently, ‘What kind of freedom, Debbie?’
    She shrugged, looking at him for a moment with a flash of petulance. ‘The usual things. When she went out with a boy, her father had to know who it was the whole time. Every time she was in later than they thought she should be, there was a shouting match.’
    It was a familiar, even a routine story. And now a girl lay dead. But that was just bad luck for the father who had shouted, and the girl who had shouted back. ‘So she left home. How old was she?’
    â€˜A year older than me. Nearly twenty-one.’ That was the child in her, he thought, still wanting to be as old as she possibly could, counting away