The Final Silence Read Free Page A

in that back room, you can give it to charity, or dump it, or . . .’
    She screwed her eyes shut. Her shoulders jerked.
    Rea tightened her hold on her mother, brought Ida’s head to her shoulder. The tears came, Rea felt the wetness through her T-shirt, and Ida seemed to melt against her. Only for a few seconds. Then it passed, and Ida came back to herself, sat upright, stiff and proper like before. Only a redness to her eyes offered any proof of what had happened. They would not mention it again, Rea was sure.
    She went to speak, but Ida’s mobile phone pinged.
    ‘Och, fiddle,’ she muttered, reading a text message.
    ‘What?’ Rea asked.
    ‘Your father. He’s not coming. He got held up at a committee meeting.’
    ‘All right,’ Rea said. ‘I’ll take the stuff to the dump. It’ll take a few runs, but no matter. Why don’t you go home and get some sleep?’
    ‘Sleep?’ Ida snorted. ‘I haven’t slept for a week.’
    ‘Well, go and try. I can manage from here.’
    Ida smiled and stroked Rea’s hand. ‘You’re a good girl.’
    The closest she’d come to affection in years. Rea leaned in and planted a kiss on her mother’s cheek.
    ‘Get off!’ Ida swatted her away in mock outrage.
    She stood and descended the stairs. At the front door, Ida turned and regarded her dead brother’s life bagged up and ready to be disposed of. She shook her head once, offered Rea a regretful smile, and left.
    Rea stayed on the stairs for a time, watching the ripples of sunlight through the door’s stained glass. It wasn’t a bad house, and it was a nice street. A small tingle of excitement in her belly.
    A house of her own.
    For the last couple of years she’d shared a place with two other women in the Four Winds area, a sprawling suburb to the south-east of the city. The two housemates were younger than Rea, one of them by more than a decade, fresh out of university and working for a legal practice. They made Rea feel older than her thirty-four years. She caught herself wanting to mother them, to scold them for staying out too late, or for the clothes they wore. And she felt they regarded her as a desperate old spinster aunt, constantly trying to set her up with their work colleagues.
    Once, she had reluctantly agreed to go on a blind date with one of them. He’d been a pleasant enough gentleman, not bad looking, tidy, polite. When he showed her a photograph of his youngest grandchild, Rea felt like screaming.
    Three months had passed since Rea had lost her job. She’d been at the consultancy firm in the city centre for almost six years, specialising in recruitment processes, devising interview strategies and aptitude tests. A good salary, too, enough for her to save a decent amount towards a deposit on a house. Since she’d been laid off, the rent on the shared place was eating into her savings, and she had been facing the horrifying prospect of having to move back in with her parents.
    Rea suppressed a shudder. Now a lifeline, a chance to have a house without the burden of a mortgage. But could she take a dead man’s home? And it needed work. A new kitchen, new central heating, and probably a list of things hidden beneath the surface. Rea knew from her friends’ tales of buying houses that the real costs were the hundred secrets the previous owner kept from you. She doubted her savings would cover it.
    But still, a house of her own.
    She thought of the room upstairs. Her mother was probably right, nothing in there but dust and air. But if she was going to take this place as her own she wanted to see every room, locked or not.
    Rea Carlisle decided that before the day was done, she would have the door to the back bedroom opened.

3
     
    DETECTIVE INSPECTOR JACK Lennon coughed and wiped his nose with an already damp tissue. The tail end of another cold, his third in as many months. The surgeon had warned Lennon he’d be prone to infections now that he was without a spleen. She’d been right.
    His buttocks