Deadly Friends Read Free

the lead weight sitting on my diaphragm feel heavier and heavier, and I have even more trouble trying to breathe.
    Nobody answered at her sister’s. She’s called Rachel and they have hardly spoken since they were schoolgirls. Their family was well-off until daddy ran away with his secretary and their mother hit the bottle. Annabelle went to work in the Third World, married young, was widowed and fell in with me. Rachel married HarleyStreet’s Osteopath to the Stars and enjoys the fruits of his success. Christmas was some sort of attempt at reconciliation and I think it worked. We had lunch at the golf club – fifty quid a head – and, while the sisters gossiped, George, Rachel’s husband, introduced me to his friends and explained all the fascinating golfing memorabilia that adorned the walls of the clubhouse. I’d have preferred having extensive bridgework without anaesthesia.
    I pushed the phone away and wandered into the annexe where we make the tea. Some kind person had washed all the mugs. I dropped a teabag into one with ‘The Boss’ in gold letters on the side and plugged the kettle in. There was a new notice above the sink, printed in forty-point Hippo. It said: ‘Please do not leave your used teabags in the wastepaper bins.’ The advent of the word processor has greatly improved the quality of informal notices. When I’d brewed I left the bag sitting in the spoon on the draining board because I couldn’t see a more preferable alternative.
    Nobody answered again. Or should that be still. They must have gone out somewhere. I put my feet on the radiator and fished the top document out of my in-tray. It was a request for next year’s budget forecasts. I wrote: ‘Deal with this, please, Nigel,’ in pencil across the top and dropped it on his desk. After a sip of tea I reached for the next document but immediately slid it back on to the pile – this was becoming too much like work. When my phone rangI grabbed it before realising it couldn’t possibly be Annabelle.
    ‘Charlie?’ enquired Maggie’s voice.
    ‘Yep.’
    ‘This woman. She’s in the rape suite. Apparently the offence took place on Christmas Eve, so there’s no point in a medical or anything, but she knows the bloke. I’ve asked her if she has any objection to a male officer being present and she says she hasn’t.’
    ‘I’m on my way.’
    My tea was too hot to finish, and no doubt they were having one themselves, so I carried my mug down with me. The rape suite is a haven of luxury and calm in the midst of the normal utility and hurly-burly of the nick. It’s all pastel tints and deep armchairs, but there’s a sophisticated tape recorder on the wall and a medical examination room through a door. I chose the pictures. I was an art student before I became a policeman, so I get all those jobs. My own choice would have been Pollock and Kandinsky, but I’d reluctantly decided that they weren’t to everybody’s taste and settled for Monets. I knocked and went in, sliding the bolt across to the occupied position behind me and engaging my empathy mode at the same time.
    I was right: they all had disposable cups from the machine. ‘Hello, Mr Priest,’ Maggie greeted me. ‘This is Janet Saunders.’ Turning to the woman she said: ‘Inspector Priest is the senior officer at Heckley at themoment.’ Looking back at me she said: ‘You know PC Kent, don’t you?’
    It was the nearest I’d get to an introduction. I nodded at her without smiling.
    ‘Do you need me, now?’ PC Kent wondered.
    I turned to Janet Saunders. ‘We have you outnumbered, I’m afraid, but do you mind if PC Kent stays?’
    She shook her head and mumbled: ‘No.’
    ‘Thank you,’ I said. It was all experience for the young PC, and it didn’t create the impression that she had something better to do.
    Janet Saunders was about thirty and had once been blonde. There were crow’s-feet around her eyes and deep lines down her cheeks, but you could still tell that