Tell No Tales Read Online Free PDF

fine rain had begun to fall, the wind rising. She brushed her hair away from her face and it whipped straight back.
    ‘The hospital just called,’ she said. ‘Sofia Krasic has come round. She wants to talk to someone.’
    ‘Is she coherent?’
    ‘She said she knows who was driving the car.’

6
    THERE WAS A figure standing at the foot of the bed when Sofia opened her eyes, a small, dark man in a white coat stabbing his mobile phone, his tie bright red like a knife wound. She thought of a man she had seen lying dead in the street, his chest cut open, a wiry ginger dog lifting its muzzle from the wound, fur stained with blood and flecks of black gore.
    That was not now. She had been almost the same size as the dog then.
    This was a hospital bed. She could smell disinfectant, vomit. There was no noise though. She was in a private room. This was strange. The private room and the man who must be a doctor watching over her.
    A foggy feeling came down over her and she drifted for a while, aware of a woman’s voice at a distance, a man’s answering, low and rumbling. Hands moved quickly across her body and she wanted to protest but she was too weak.
    The pain was no more than a smudge at the edge of her consciousness, an unpleasant grey, like a looming storm cloud. Sofia ignored it, listened to the rhythmic sound of the machinery.
    The man was speaking again and through her lashes Sofia saw him, standing close to her bed, holding a clipboard, heard words coming out of her mouth but couldn’t control them. He smiled, patted her shoulder and at some point, without her noticing, he must have left because she was alone.
    Gradually she became more aware of the pain gnawing at her, a dull ache in her legs and her arms, a sharper pain every time she inhaled.
    She tried to remember when that had happened but the memory was jumbled and elusive. Jelena’s pale face, her bright blue eyes, a scream.
    She gasped.
    Jelena standing on the roof of the tractor shed, ten feet above the ground and the ladder gone. Their mother shouting and the wind rising, thunder or gunfire in the distance. She told Jelena to jump. She’d catch her. And Jelena did, without hesitation.
    Sofia felt the tears running down her cheeks and was sure that she would choke on them, knowing that if she did it wouldn’t matter.
    She saw Jelena turn away from the road, lower her gaze and frown. She saw the car aiming for her. She saw her own hand shoot out stupidly as Jelena flew into the air, screaming until her head hit the windscreen.
    Sofia tried to roll over, away from the memory, but the pain in her ribs flared so sharply that she passed out again for a minute or an hour.
    In her delirious state the same few seconds kept replaying, disjointed and unreal, the car sometimes a tank, sometimes a bullock, Jelena dressed in her confirmation dress and work boots, eleven years old and dead, twenty-four and alive.
    She saw Tomas dressed in black, his gloved hands and his face covered. But she knew it was him in there. Hiding from her.
    She didn’t want to see what happened next. Knew there was blood coming. Lots of blood.
    She turned away from the memory, resurfaced in the room, starting at the sensation of someone gently patting her cheeks dry with a tissue, standing over her, blocking out the light from the car’s headlights.
    No. That was not here or now.
    This was not him.
    Did she know this man from home? His flat, high cheekbones and hooded green eyes looked so familiar. When he spoke she didn’t know what she was hearing and what she was remembering, the words coming out disconnected from the movements of his lips.
    She closed her eyes and when she opened them again he was sitting very close to her. She tried to focus but he was hazy around the edges.
    ‘I’m Detective Inspector Zigic. Dushan. Can you hear me, Sofia?’
    It was like being underwater, everything muffled and blurred, and she tried to fight her way to the surface.
    ‘Please –