Read Online Bad Blood by Aline Templeton - Free Book Online Page B

feeling cross now and she flings open the sitting-room door and hears her mother saying, ‘And then he just—’
    She breaks off. She’s been crying but now she turns angry. ‘What the hell do you want?’
    There’s an empty bottle of wine on the table and another one half-full and the air’s thick and smoky. Anita has turned to look at her too. She’s slim and small and very smart in a cream trouser suit, with long blonde hair and bright-red fingernails and beside her Mum looks sort of faded with her jet-black hair and grey tracky bottoms and black sweatshirt.
    She swallows. ‘When’s supper?’
    ‘For God’s sake, you’re ten! You’re old enough to get something for yourself.’
    Anita smiles at her but doesn’t speak. Anita often does that but she hasn’t worked out whether it means anything.
    ‘Can I have sausages?’ she says.
    ‘You can have champagne and caviar, as far as I’m concerned.’ Mum gives a sort of nasty laugh. ‘If you can find any.’
    It’s a stupid thing to say. They never have anything like that. Probably it means she can have the sausages, though, and she retreats.
    Anita gives her another smile as she goes. Before she closes the
door she hears her saying, ‘I should be getting back to Dunmore, anyway.’
    That was really all she knew about Anita. She didn’t know her surname and she’d never been to her house and she didn’t know where Dunmore was. Even if she did, she could hardly go to a strange place and wander round asking for Anita.
    It wasn’t a common name, though. She’d nothing to lose by trying to find her mother’s best and indeed only friend as far as Marnie knew.
    The bath water was no more than tepid now, and though she turned on the hot tap again hopefully only a trickle of hot came out and then went cold again. She got out of the bath and rubbed herself as dry as the inadequate towel would allow. At least, though, she had a plan for tomorrow and she went back to her room feeling a little more purposeful.

    DC Hepburn had only just come on shift when the summons to DI Fleming’s office came, and she had barely entered the room before Fleming, waving her to a chair, demanded, ‘Well? What does Marnie Bruce want?’
    Hepburn sat down with severe misgivings. Fleming was clearly on edge about this and she wasn’t going to like what Hepburn had to tell her. It was just her luck that MacNee was off today; normally she would have filtered it through him. Taking the flak direct from Big Marge was definitely above her pay grade.
    She began cautiously. ‘I have to say first that she seems a bit flaky. It’s hard to put a finger on it but she often seems distracted when she’s talking to you and if she’s reporting on something that happened it’s – well, it just seems too detailed.’
    Fleming raised her eyebrows. ‘What do you mean?’
    ‘I’m struggling to explain. It’s almost as if she’s describing something she’s looking at – sometimes she even uses the present tense.’
    ‘Mmm.’ Fleming considered that. ‘Anyway, what’s the general drift?’
    Hepburn gave a nervous cough. ‘What she
says
is that she was taken into care when she was eleven after her mother disappeared and she wants to know what happened to her mother, whether she’s alive or dead and whether she chose to vanish or – or somebody killed her. And, er, why she never heard about any inquiry.’
    ‘I see.’
    Judging by the grim expression on Fleming’s face, what she was seeing didn’t please her one little bit.
    Hepburn hurried on, ‘I’m sure there would have been and it’s just that perhaps being a child she wouldn’t have heard about it or she doesn’t remember, or something.’
    That was Fleming’s cue to say, ‘Oh yes, of course there was.’ She didn’t say it. There was just an awkward silence, and feeling required to fill it Hepburn blundered on.
    ‘Were you involved in it, ma’am? Marnie had a very clear recollection of you. You had a ponytail at the