Bleak Spring Read Online Free

in fancy dress was enough . . . It looks like just the one shot, through the right eye and out the top of the cranium. Death would have been instantaneous, I’d say.”
    He looked past her at the dead Will Rockne. The body was slumped backwards and sideways, one hand in its lap, the other resting on the dislodged car phone, as if he had made a last desperate call for help, from God knew whom. The car keys were in the ignition and the steering wheel was twisted to the left, as if Rockne might have tried to drive away before he died. The dead man’s face and the front of his shirt and jacket were a bloody mess.
    â€œWe’ve got the bullet, Inspector.” That was Chris Gooch, of the Physical Evidence team, a bulky young man with more muscles than he knew what to do with; he was forever strenuously denying he was on steroids, but no one believed him. “Looks like a Twenty-two. It was in the roof. Looks like the killer shoved the gun upwards at the victim, maybe at his throat, but missed and shot him in the eye.”
    â€œYou done with the body?” Malone asked Romy.
    She nodded towards the government contractors who had now arrived. “They can take it away.”
    She drew the high collar of her coat up round her throat against the wind; her dark hair ruffled about her face. She looked glamorous, ice-cool, she whose own father had been a four-times murderer and a suicide. Malone did not understand why she had stayed on as a GMO at the city morgue, but he had never asked Russ Clements if he knew the reason. She still worked with cool efficiency and a detachment that Malone, when he saw it, found troubling. But she was Clements’s problem, not his. It was Russ who was in love with her.
    He walked across to the green Toyota where Clements, in dinner jacket, black tie unloosened, sat behind the wheel like a moulting king penguin. “They tell me it’s a guy named Rockne. You know someone with that name, don’t you?”
    â€œ It’s the same one. We were with them at Holy Spirit tonight. They’ve just taken the wife home. Are you on call tomorrow?”
    â€œYes.” Clements looked at Romy, who had got into the car beside him. “It looks like he’s gunna spoil our Sunday.”
    She smiled at him, then at Malone. They were the men who had caught her father, who had been there when he had committed suicide; yet she loved one and almost loved the other. They, and Lisa, were the ones who had reconstructed the floor of her life when everything had fallen apart around her. “Why don’t the three of us open a post office or something? Five days a week and no overtime.”
    Clements smiled at her. He had had countless women friends, but Malone had never seen him so openly in love as with Romy. “With our luck, there’d be a body in the parcel post.”
    â€œI’ll see you tomorrow morning,” Malone told him. “You’re on this one with me. Don’t bother to come dressed up.”
    The Toyota pulled out of the car park and Malone turned as Ellsworth stepped up beside him. “Do I work with you on this, sir?”
    â€œI guess so—Carl, isn’t it? I’ll see Mrs. Rockne in the morning, but I’d rather do it on my own. I know her, slightly anyway, and I think she’ll talk more freely to me if no one else is there. You do the legwork on what the Crime Scene fellers give you.” He still sometimes slipped into the old name for the Physical Evidence team. In recent years the New South Wales Police Service had undergone so many reorganizations and name changes that some joker had fed it into the police computer system as the AKA Force. “Mrs. Rockne may give us a lead. In the meantime set up a van here, see if anyone comes forward with any information.”
    â€œShe’s a bit odd, don’t you think? Mrs. Rockne.”
    â€œMost wives are a bit odd when their husbands get blasted. You