Whispering Death Read Online Free PDF Page A

victims and if he thought police resources, already overstretched, should be wasted investigating a bit of graffiti.
    So Challis handed the investigation to Scobie Sutton, who never complained.
    Pam lingered a while, yarning with Scobie. He hadn’t seen anyone—certainly not a naked woman, he told her, blushing a little.
    Then, almost immediately, they heard a voice, ‘Help me, please help me.’
    Startled, they glanced across the road.
    Jan Overton’s victim, thought Pam, beginning to move. Young, naked, filthy, she must have stumbled through bushland to get here.
    Sutton followed her across. The woman was clasping the top fence wire with both hands, rocking and keening like an abandoned child. As though the notional obstruction of the fence was a kind of last straw.
    â€˜It’s okay, it’s okay, you’re safe now,’ Pam crooned, helping her bend between the wires.
    â€˜I was raped, someone raped me,’ the young woman said.
    Scobie draped his suit coat around the thin shoulders and Pam noted the scratches automatically, the blood, the bruises, looking for drifts of dry semen. Then they were at the car. ‘Scobie, could you get my first-aid kit from the Subaru?’ She gave the woman a drink from a bottle of water.
    â€˜My name is Pam, and that’s Scobie,’ she said. ‘We’re police officers.’
    The woman stiffened as if she might bolt. ‘I’m Chloe,’ she whispered.
    â€˜Do you know who did this to you, Chloe?’
    At that moment, a police car came down the driveway from the house, the engine decelerating, tyres growling on the gravel as the car nosed through the gate posts. John Tankard got out, a man with a barrelly torso and vast thighs barely contained inside his constable’s uniform. ‘What’s up?’
    The response was instantaneous. Bucking violently in Pam’s arms, Chloe screamed: ‘Keep him away from me, keep him away from me.’

5
    Hal Challis was stroking Ellen Destry’s bare feet, thinking how shapely they were, and how much he was going to miss them over the next eight weeks.
    Noon, an early lunch on the deck of her house before the taxi came to collect her. Five p.m. flight to London with a stopover in Singapore, so she needed to be at Melbourne Airport by three. Allowing ninety minutes for the taxi ride—covered by her study grant—she’d need to leave by 1.30. Plenty of time for lunch in the sun.
    They’d already had the quickie.
    Challis kneaded an instep absently. Ellen’s feet seemed light in his lap. He admired the fine down on her legs, the taut length of her calves. She was watching him with a drowsy smile, so he halted his gaze at the hem of her shorts and admired the view beyond her side veranda.
    Ellen had bought this house in Dromana, on the southern slope of Arthurs Seat, two months ago. He could see why she liked living here. Small, shaded houses on narrow, sleepy streets, some sealed, others no more than potholed dirt tracks marked ‘no through road’. The bay visible between the houses and trees further down the slope. A village atmosphere, with shops at the bottom of the hill and the beach close by for her morning walk. And the freeway only a quick couple of blocks away.
    But it wasn’t a place he could live in—not that either of them wanted that. But they did want each other, so it was all right. A modern arrangement, some nights spent together at his place or at hers, others spent apart.
    â€˜You could fly to Europe with me,’ she said.
    â€˜I could.’
    No he couldn’t. Spend eight weeks as a tag-along boyfriend while she studied regional sex crimes policing in the UK, Ireland and parts of Germany, France and Holland? Ellen busy with her European colleagues during the day and writing up her notes at night, while he trudged over the hard flagstones of one cathedral after another?
    It was only for two months. He had ongoing criminal