Bleak Spring Read Online Free Page B

her.
    She slipped a yellow sweater over her head, then fluffed out her blonde hair. “Do you think I should call Olive?”
    â€œNo, I’ll do the sympathy bit for both of us. Tell Claire not to call Jason, not till I’ve got the police bit sorted out down at their place. I’ll be home for lunch, I hope.”
    She came round the bed and kissed him. “Don’t be too hard on Olive.”
    â€œ Why should I be?”
    It was 9.30 when he knocked on the door of the Rockne home in Coogee Bay Road. It was a solid bluebrick and sandstone house, built with the wide verandahs of the nineteen-twenties, when sunlight in a house was as welcome as white ants. It stood on a wide block, thirty metres at least, behind a garden where early spring petunias, marigolds and azaleas mocked the gloom he knew must be in the house itself.
    The door was opened by a middle-aged woman instantly recognizable as Olive’s sister, though she was plumper and had kept pace with her birthdays. “I’m Rose Cadogan. We’ve been expecting you.” She looked past him, seemed surprised. “You’re on your own?”
    â€œI thought Olive would prefer it that way.”
    â€œOh, sure. Come in. But what one sees on TV, police are always swarming over everything . . . This is our mother, Mrs. Carss. And this is Angela Bodalle, a friend of Olive’s. I’ll get Olive, she’s with the kids. They’re taking it pretty bad.”
    â€œWe all are,” said the mother, the mould from which her daughters had been struck. Ruby Carss was in her sixties, had henna hair worn thin by too much dye and too many perms, was thin and full of nervous energy and looked as if she had suddenly been faced with the prospect of her own death.
    Malone sat down, looked at Angela Bodalle. “I didn’t expect to see you, Mrs. Bodalle.”
    â€œI’m here as a friend of the family, Inspector, that’s all.”
    She was, Malone thought, the most decorative, if not the best-looking, of the barristers who fronted the Bar in the State’s courts. There were only five female silks in New South Wales and she was the most successful of them. She was in her late thirties or early forties, he guessed, a widow whose husband had already made his name as a Queen’s Counsel when he had been killed in a car accident some years ago. She had then gone to the Bar herself and last year had been named a QC. She specialized in criminal cases and had already gained a reputation for a certain flamboyance. The joke was that she wore designer wigs and gowns in court, her arguments were as florid as the roses that decorated her chambers, she castrated hostile witnesses with sarcasm sharper than a scalpel. Even the more misogynistic judges tolerated her as she stirred blood in desiccated loins.
    â€œDo you want to sit in while I talk to Mrs. Rockne?”
    â€œWe all do,” said Mrs. Carss, settling herself for a long stay.
    Malone looked at her. “I think it’d be better if you didn’t. I’m going to have to ask her to run through everything that happened last night.”
    â€œThen she’ll want us to be there, to support her—”
    â€œI think what Inspector Malone is suggesting is best,” said Angela Bodalle.
    â€œEveryone’s taking over—” Mrs. Carss was resentful, outsiders were taking away her role as mother.
    Olive Rockne came into the room with her sister. She was dressed in a light blue sweater and dark blue slacks; the frilly look had gone, she was fined down, this morning the girlish woman had vanished. Her hair was pulled back by a black velvet band and her face was devoid of make-up. Malone wondered if, for the first time, he was about to see the real Olive Rockne.
    â€œLet’s go outside,” she said in a calm firm voice and led him and Angela Bodalle out to a glassed-in back verandah that had been converted into a pleasant garden room. It looked