Read Online No Cherubs for Melanie by James Hawkins - Free Book Online

thought. “Young woman really, I suppose. She was about twenty but you wouldn’t have thought it. Always bouncing around the place bumping into things. Used to bring half-dead animals and birds into the kitchen asking for food for them. I soon put a stop to that. Health regulations, and all that.”
    â€œSo tell me about the suicide.”
    â€œFrom what I could make out it happened in the middle of the night. She came down and tied the end of the chandelier’s rope around her neck. Then she musthave unhooked the rope from the cleat and the weight of the chandelier…”
    Bliss stared up at the monstrous silver and crystal bauble, trying to gauge its weight. “And it was definitely suicide?”
    â€œSo they said, although more than one person thought he’d done her in. You see there was no note or anything, but she’d been funny for years. Her other daughter drowned you know, when she was three or four.”
    â€œSix actually.”
    â€œSo you knew about that then?”
    â€œDone my homework.”
    â€œWell, apparently she was never right after that. Round the twist they said, that’s why the old man kept her out of the way. Some people reckon he kept her locked in her room from that day on.”
    Suddenly everything became clear and Bliss swore under breath, “Shit.”
    â€œInspector, are you all right?”
    â€œYes,” he said, but inwardly he was feeling some of Betty-Ann’s pain. She had known all those years, he realized. Known her husband killed her youngest daughter and lived with that torment every day. No wonder her body language was wrong when I interviewed her, he thought. That’s why she couldn’t look me in the eye, why she couldn’t answer any questions without checking with her dear husband. It wasn’t surprising he kept her out of the way all those years. He didn’t want her breaking down in front of the staff or the guests, saying, “Oh by the way, did I mention my husband drowned my little girl?”

chapter four
    The Grand Marnier in the gateau had started him drinking early, and the chef’s revelation that Gordonstone’s wife had committed suicide didn’t help. If ever there was a woman with a reason for murdering her husband, thought Bliss, she was it; but being dead and buried for ten years gave her a fairly convincing alibi. He would just have a single scotch he kidded himself. The news about Betty-Ann’s death gave him a convenient excuse, as if he needed one. A toast to a woman he’d met briefly twenty years earlier — a woman with whom, in some ridiculous way, he suddenly felt an affinity.
    He selected a pub as opposed to a liquor store. Home held too many bad memories, and he didn’t fancy drinking alone there. Anyway it was early, very early. Too early to start in earnest; he would have to drive home from the pub, so he couldn’t afford to risk drinking much.
    A sullen twenty-year-old in a baseball cap and Grateful Dead T-shirt was attempting alcoholic suicideat a nearby table. “I wuz up all night, thinkin’ about my life,” he said to a similarly dressed companion. “Where I am? Where I’m going? What I’m gonna do?” he added, with the rhetoric of a depressed pop singer. As if he had a choice, as if fate had not already laid out its plan. “That’s the story of my effin’ life.”
    Bliss was tempted to tell him, from experience, that he may as well get used to it, when a fierce-faced young woman stormed up to the young man and casually dumped his beer in his lap. Punch-up, thought Bliss, readying to leave. But the man didn’t flinch; just turned to his companion with his voice so full of controlled anger his jaw was quaking, and said, “I guess it’s over then.” Bliss sat back, wishing he could have ended his relationship with Sarah so succinctly.
    An hour and three drinks later he sat contemplating the