Hindsight Read Online Free Page B

subsided. ‘Can’t help testing my limits, sorry.’
    ‘You want me to give the lecture today?’
    She waved him off, knowing that one by heart already. ‘Take it easy. Take my time,’ she recited. ‘But it’s not just the pain, Ben. This was a crime scene.’ Her stomach soured more at the thought of describing it. ‘A nasty one.’
    ‘Anyone … get hurt?’
    She heard him gulp.
    ‘Nobody we know this time, so relax. There’s no way I’d put your life at risk again by blabbing about it.’
    ‘Your life too,’ he reminded her. ‘There’s a trio of fishermen behind us on the old tram bridge. If they’ve noticed us poking around down here …’
    ‘It’s a public park, isn’t it?’
    ‘Sure, but hardly anybody ever comes here. Fishermen and a few local glue sniffers.’
    ‘It’s still public. We have every right to be here. Besides, nobody else was involved — at least not as far back as I can see.’
    ‘Is ten days not enough?’
    Mira shrugged. ‘I missed the worst bit — but I’m not sorry. It’s bad enough just looking at the aftermath.’
    ‘So it’s possible there was someone else involved?’
    ‘Doesn’t matter. It’s history now. Doesn’t affect us.’
    ‘If you missed the worst bit, how can you be so sure? Please, Mira, I need to know if there’s anything here that can affect us.’
    ‘What else can I say? What’s done is done. It’s not like I can change anything. Seeing back through time isn’t nearly as useful as going back in it.’
    ‘No, but it can be more dangerous here and now.’ He lowered his voice, muttering a curse for losing his patience. ‘Sorry, I can only imagine how hard it must be for you, living in the past as you have to, but you know the risks. There are too many people out there who’d kill to get you on their slab as a lab rat! If anyone could ever replicate what you do, there’d be no secrets safe from them. We need to be better prepared from now on and that means I need to know as much about the dangers around us as you do, okay? There’s no good can come from trying to shield me — especially when it’s me who’s meant to be the guardian, for all intents and purposes.’
    ‘But it’s just a dead girl on a beach.’
    ‘Just a dead girl on a beach? Oh, yeah. That’s very helpful and reassuring.’
    She sighed and gave in. ‘Come here, then.’ She led him down the path to a rack of timber boards which held the sand together loosely in the shape of steps.
    ‘It happened there …’ She pointed to the woman’s body, but now that she was much nearer to the scuffled patch of sand, her eyes followed the rumpled trail of boot prints to a second lifeless shape in the murkier shadows under the bridge. Unlike the woman, his ghostly corpse was face down between the pylons with a fishing knife still embedded in his back and one arm twisted around as if he’d died while struggling to pull it out himself.
    ‘An open and shut case,’ she declared, as the past continued to play out around her. She saw the first ghostly tour bus of the day head over the bridge to Serenity and recalled how festive that day had begun before turning to near tragedy for Ben. Then to her left, she noticed the helmet of a ghostly police officer as he pulled into the car park on a fat patrol bike, but Mira didn’t need to watch him to know that he’d soon read the rest of the crime story from the sand, just as she had.
    ‘Open and shut,’ Ben echoed. ‘I thought the same thing right before I was framed and locked away for six years.’
    ‘Hardly the same, Ben. This victim was a beach jogger with nothing worth robbing.’
    ‘And the killer?’
    ‘He’s a fisher … okay, so maybe he hung out with the trio on the tram bridge, but it hardly matters now. He’s dead too. They killed each other.’
    ‘If you didn’t see it happen, how can you tell who killed who? Or that a third person wasn’t involved like I said before?’
    ‘It’s obvious from their positions,