Read Online Echoes of the Dead by Sally Spencer - Free Book Online

shelf was filled, from end to end, with stuffed toys – most of them cuddled threadbare.
    Woodend sighed. What he was seeing was pretty much what he had expected to see – but, even forewarned, it was still sad.
    What did come as a surprise were the drawings. They were pinned to the walls, and there were so many of them that very little of the purple-flowered wallpaper underneath managed to show through.
    Some of the pictures were of animals – rabbits, hamsters and donkeys, inexpertly but loving drawn – but the majority of them were of a girl and a man.
    â€˜So why are there no pictures of her mother?’ Woodend said softly.
    Then, as he studied the pictures in more detail, the answer to his question slowly came to him – and, as it came, he started to feel nauseous.
    The girls in the pictures never varied. They were all excessively small – totally out of proportion to the men – and had a desperate fragility about them. None of the men, in contrast, looked like any of the others. Some had dark hair, some were fair. Some smoked a pipe, others a cigarette. The only thing that they had in common was that they were holding the little girl’s hand.
    There are no pictures of her mother because her mother’s not bloody well dead , Woodend thought, angry with himself that he’d taken so long to grasp this simple point.
    What he was looking at, he now realized, were not pictures of her real dad – she had seen him slowly waste away, and knew he was not coming back.
    No, they were an attempt to create a new dad for herself – someone who would fill the aching void she felt deep inside her.
    She had tried, and she had failed. None of the men had seemed quite right, and so she had kept on drawing, hoping against hope that she could eventually produce a figure who she could believe in.
    Her coloured pencils lay on the dressing table. They were Lakeland brand, Woodend noted, some of the most expensive available. Lilly’s mother, living on a meagre widow’s pension, must have thought long and hard before buying them. So perhaps the fact that she had bought them meant she understood her daughter’s need, and had seen to it that she had best tools available to her as she embarked on her hopeless quest.
    He picked up one the pencils, and saw that the end had been bitten into so deeply that the coloured lead was exposed.
    â€˜It didn’t really help, did it, Lilly?’ he asked, as he felt a great wave of sadness wash over him. ‘However hard you tried to draw yourself a new dad, it didn’t really help.’
    He found himself thinking of his daughter, Annie – who, as his mother had pointed out, resembled the dead girl in so many ways.
    The two girls’ faces merged together in his mind, and he pictured Annie in this room, drawing frantically as tears slowly slid down her cheeks.
    â€˜Don’t do it, Charlie,’ he told himself urgently. ‘For Christ’s sake, don’t bloody do it!’
    But the idea was in his head – the connection was made – and the thought would simply not go away.
    He imagined Annie being dragged into a car against her will . . . taken to a shed on an abandoned allotment . . . having her legs roughly forced apart as she screamed out for a little kindness . . . gasping desperately as her killer’s hands closed around her throat . . .
    He felt the sudden urge to vomit.
    â€˜Easy, Charlie!’ he ordered himself, as he tried to regulate his breathing. ‘Remember who you are. You’re a hardbitten copper – a professional – an’ you should be able to keep all this under control.’
    But he was fighting a losing battle – and he knew it.
    He turned and rushed from Lilly’s bedroom to the bathroom. He only just had time to lean over the toilet bowl before his stomach heaved and all the sadness – and all the anger and all the fear