Whispering Death Read Online Free PDF Page B

tone.’
    â€˜What’s wrong with it?’
    â€˜It’s the same as that woman’s in Love, Actually .’
    â€˜What woman?’
    â€˜The one with the mad brother.’
    Challis couldn’t remember the film or the ring tone. He wasn’t someone who had favourite films. Ellen was. On her reckoning, she’d seen Love, Actually a million times.
    He pressed the talk button. ‘Challis.’
    â€˜Boss, we’ve got a rape,’ Pam Murphy said.
    And Ellen Destry, about to jet off and learn how to deal with rape cases, read his face and swung her graceful feet to the floor.

6
    Mid-afternoon, a room in the Waterloo hospital, Pam Murphy briefly clasping Chloe Holst’s forearm. ‘Do you mind Inspector Challis being here, Chloe?’
    Challis was propping up a wall, trying to be unobtrusive. He smiled but remained silent where he was. ‘I don’t mind,’ Holst said, her voice damp, cracking a little.
    â€˜We spoke to your parents and the doctor, and they said if you’re up to it we could ask you a few questions. Meanwhile, no one’s going to carry out any more forensic indignities on you, okay? But we do need to ask you what happened.’
    Chloe Holst collapsed against her pillows, stared at the ceiling, and said, in a rapid monotone: ‘I was on my way home when he flashed his lights at me from behind. Then he—’ ‘Could we go back a bit?’ Pam said, her voice low and warm in the chair beside the bed. ‘Home from where?’
    â€˜The Chicory Kiln.’
    â€˜Don’t know it.’
    Challis murmured from the wall, ‘It’s a winery-bistro place on Myers Road.’
    â€˜Okay.’
    Challis said, ‘Had you been drinking? We have to ask these kinds of—’
    The young woman in the bed tossed in anger, then winced. ‘Why doesn’t anyone listen? I work there. I hardly ever drink, and I don’t drink at work. I was simply going home.’
    â€˜I’m sorry,’ Challis said. ‘By the time information gets to me sometimes it’s wrong or inadequate.’
    â€˜I’ve told this story so many times.’
    Once, thought Challis, to Pam—and a million times to yourself. And when the sex crimes squad gets involved, you’ll have to go through it all again. ‘When we have all the details we won’t need to bother you again,’ he said lamely.
    Chloe Holst shot him a look from her right eye. The left looked pulpy and black, swollen shut, three stitches bisecting the eyebrow. Angry finger-bruising around the neck, bruises to the upper arms, and, hidden beneath the bedclothes, bruising to the thighs and tears to the vagina and anus. ‘What about in court?’ she asked, almost inaudibly.
    Pam Murphy mustered a smile. ‘You didn’t see his face, so it may not come to that.’
    Holst touched her hand to her split lip and grew teary. She was about to speak but sank again into the pillows heaped behind her.
    The little room, like the corridor outside it, smelt of life and death and blood and cleansers and chemical intervention. Murphy knew the smell all right. She’d visited enough suspects and victims in emergency rooms over the years, been treated for cuts and bruises. She glanced around at Challis and then out of the window and saw nothing to guide her through this. Sergeant Destry would know what to do, but the sergeant was on her way to Europe.
    She turned to Holst again. ‘What happened after he flashed his lights?’
    â€˜It happened near the intersection with Balnarring Road, so I was slowing down anyway. I hate that corner.’
    A high-speed blind corner, a fatal corner over the years, with no clear view of traffic belting down the hill until you were halfway across the intersection. ‘Me too,’ Pam said.
    â€˜He flashed his lights at me from behind, then cut across in front of me as I was stopping. Then he got out and started waving