Blood Sisters Read Online Free

directly. It’ll only take us another half-hour to finish off our interviews with all of the residents here. Especially the chair fellow. I can remember how my grandpa used to get pure tick if anybody sat in his favourite seat.’
    ‘Fair play,’ said Katie. ‘People have been killed for less than that, after all.’
    * * *
    She returned to the station and put on the electric kettle in her office to brew herself a mug of ginger tea. As she poured the boiling water into it, her iPhone pinged. It was a text message from John, asking her if she would be finished early enough for them to have supper that evening at the Eastern Tandoori.
    She hadn’t yet told him that she was pregnant. She hadn’t been able to think how she was going to explain it to him. He had come all the way back from San Francisco to be with her and mend their relationship, and he had sworn that he hadn’t been unfaithful to her with any other woman while he had been away. Sooner or later she would have to tell him, though, and she would also have to tell him that the baby’s father had been her next-door neighbour, and that he had eventually turned out to be a wife-beater.
    So far she had managed to conceal her morning sickness, too, just as she had pretended to Detective Inspector O’Rourke that she was feeling unwell because had she eaten a bad prawn at an Indian restaurant. It had been the most nauseating thing she had been able to think of, but now John wanted to go for a curry. The Eastern Tandoori had been one of her favourite restaurants, on the first floor on Emmet Place overlooking the river, but now the very thought of it made her feel queasy. In her imagination, she could even smell fenugreek.
    She sat down at her desk and texted back: Might be held up. Sorry. Major case just come up. Prob. have to make do w. takeaway. XXX .
    She was still texting when Chief Superintendent Denis MacCostagáin came in, as tall and round-shouldered and mournful as ever. Detective Horgan called him ‘Chief Superintendent Aingesoir’ behind his back, which meant ‘Anguished’ because he always appeared to be so sad. Since he had been promoted, though, he had taken to his new position very comfortably. He was mournful, but he was highly organized and so methodical that sometimes he could make Katie itch with impatience. However, he was not at all misogynistic. He talked to Katie in the same dreary drawn-out tones as he talked to all of his other officers, and showed her no prejudice – although he showed her no favours, either.
    He came up to her desk with a torn-off sheet of notepaper in his hand and studied it for a few moments before he said anything, as if he wasn’t at all sure where he had found it.
    ‘There’s been some dead horses found,’ he said at last.
    ‘Dead horses?’ Katie asked him. ‘Where exactly?’
    ‘Down at the foot of the cliffs at Nohaval Cove. Twenty-three of them, according to Kenneth Kearney. A member of the public reported it and Kenneth sent one of his ISPCA officers to investigate. The officer found one animal still alive but in a very poor condition with three of its legs broken, so he put it down.’
    ‘Nohaval Cove?’ said Katie. ‘Those are fierce steep, those cliffs there. How did the horses get down there? They weren’t driven over, were they?’
    ‘Kenneth seems to think so. Either driven over or thrown over bodily. It’s near on eighty-five metres from the cliff top down to the beach, so it’s a miracle that even one of them survived it.
    Chief Superintendent MacCostagáin checked his wristwatch, even though there was a clock on Katie’s office wall. ‘How are you fixed?’ he asked her. ‘The thing of it is the media are all gathering there and I know how good you are with the media. It’ll show how concerned we are, too, if we send out a senior officer. You know that the public get much more upset about cruelty to animals than they do about women and children being mistreated.’
    ‘You’re not