End in Tears Read Online Free

didn’t see his face. He was wearing a hood. I mean, he was wearing a fleece with a hood. Well, mostly it’s the young that wear them. I don’t think he was that young. He wasn’t a boy.”
    â€œTall or short? Fat or thin? How old?”
    â€œTallish,” she said. “Quite thin, I think. I wish I’d taken more notice. But people always say that, I expect, don’t they? I don’t think he was that young, though I couldn’t say how I know. Forty, I think. At least forty.”
    â€œA pity you can’t be more precise,” said Hannah. “You didn’t see Amber? No, I suppose not. Do you know if she often went clubbing?”
    Wexford wished Hannah could bring herself to sound less censorious. She was a beautiful woman in any man’s eyes, tall, slender, with the face of an El Greco saint and raven’s-wing hair, but he wondered if she had ever been clubbing or possibly been up after eleven P.M . except in the course of duty.
    â€œI really don’t know,” Lydia Burton said. “I was never close to Amber. We just said hi when we saw each other.” Wexford asked her who lived in the other houses in Jewel Terrace. “The elderly man at number one is Mr. Nash, then Mr. and Mrs. Brooks at number two, they’re called John and Gwenda.”
    They watched her let herself into the first house in the terrace, a neat cottage as each of them was, red brick with a slate roof. Her front garden was a small square lawn surrounded by lavender bushes, Mr. Nash’s a plantation of huge sunflowers, ten feet tall, their sun-shaped faces turned skywards, the Brookses’ stone paving within a rectangle of closely trimmed box hedges. The morning was already very hot with that heat which is peculiarly English, the air heavy with humidity, the sun scalding where it touched. Hannah Goldsmith looked to Wexford as unruffled as ever, her pale smooth skin as white as in winter, not a hair out of place.
    â€œYou can start on Jewel Terrace, Hannah,” he said. “Before the occupants go to work. Take Baljinder with you.”
    They made a beautiful couple, he thought, as Hannah and DC Bhattacharya crossed the road, the woman so slender, her hair streaming down her back like a dark waterfall, and the tall very upright man, impossibly thin, his cropped hair making hers look brown, his own was so pitch black. Their profiles were somewhat alike, regular, classical, utterly Caucasian. They might have been brother and sister, offspring perhaps of a father from Iran and a mother from Iberia. Thinking how this area had changed in the short time since the Simisola case, when there had been no more than twelve people from ethnic minorities, he walked with Karen Malahyde back to his car, where Donaldson waited at the wheel.
    â€œGoing to be a hot day, Jim.”
    Donaldson said, “Yes, sir,” in a stony way, treating this deeply banal remark with the contempt it deserved.
    â€œYou know, I don’t think I’ve ever been here before. To Brimhurst, I mean.”
    â€œIt’s not the sort of place you come to unless you know someone. All there is is the village hall and the church, and that’s been locked up since the vicar went. The shop closed ten years ago.”
    â€œHow do you know all this?”
    â€œMy mum lives here,” said Donaldson. “People like it because it’s quiet. Nothing ever happens—well, not till this.”
    â€œNo. Can you turn up the air-conditioning?”
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    Postmortems held no attractions for him, but he attended them, looking the other way as much as he could. Detective Inspector Burden was less squeamish than he and fascinated by forensics. They sat and watched or, in Wexford’s case, pretended to watch, while the pathologist opened Amber Marshalson’s body and examined the dreadful damage to her head where she had been struck by some heavy object. He had asked the time of death and been told