MURDER BRIEF Read Online Free

all?
I’d be embarrassed to tell the client that; $400 an hour, plus GST,
and you’re onboard."
    "You’ve twisted my arm."
    "Good, I’ll send you the
brief."
    "Thanks."
    An hour later, a courier
delivered three lever-arch folders from his office. She immediately
dropped the first onto her desk and opened it.
    Clipped inside the front cover
was a publicity still of Rex Markham which she studied closely.
    Her clients were usually young
male recidivists from the Western Suburbs with scars, tattoos,
missing teeth, long criminal records and limited vocabularies. They
started their lives at the bottom of the pile and finished there.
In between, they popped in and out of prison.
    But Markham was in his late
forties, with strawberry blond hair, sharp features and alert blue
eyes. Hard to believe he would murder anyone: too normal with too
much to lose.
    Robyn had read several of his
thrillers. The main characters were usually ordinary people
struggling to survive sinister forces while a hot-button
geo-political issue - like terrorism, the clash of civilizations,
religious extremism, ethnic warfare or famine - throbbed away in
the background.
    In the latest, Jihad, an
Australian doctor doing humanitarian work in Afghanistan falls in
love with an Afghan woman. Taliban insurgents kidnap them and force
him to save the life of a brutal Taliban leader. After the doctor
discovers the Taliban leader is really working for the CIA, the
couple must flee to Pakistan. The pace was quick and the dialogue
snappy, but the book had enough keen insights into politics and
human nature to give it some weight.
    Robyn slowly read through the
ten pages of "observations" her instructing solicitor had prepared
and the "prosecution brief" which included police witness
statements, forensic reports, crime scene photographs and police
notebooks.
    She pieced together that Rex and
Alice Markham were married for six years - no kids - and Alice
worked at a literary agency. They lived in a large terrace in
Paddington and owned a beach-house near Nowra, a few hours south of
Sydney, where Rex often retreated to write his novels.
    Six days before the murder, he
drove down to the beach-house to finishing off his latest one.
Alice stayed in Sydney.
    They never saw each other again.
On Saturday night, at around nine o’clock, someone broke into their
terrace and stabbed Alice to death in the kitchen. The terrace was
ransacked and some jewelry stolen.
    When Homicide detectives visited
Rex, at the beach-house, he claimed he spent the whole weekend
there, except for a short shopping trip to Nowra. He went nowhere
near Sydney. The detectives started to suspect that a burglar
committed the crime: a druggie whose conscience was erased by
addiction.
    Then Rex’s story unravelled.
    First, the detectives discovered
the Markhams had a rocky marriage. Indeed, about six weeks before
the murder, they quarrelled so loudly a neighbour called the
police. Two patrol officers arrived and found Alice with a large
cut on her head. They took her to a hospital. But she claimed she
tripped and fell. No charges were laid.
    Soon afterwards, she confided to
some girlfriends that she and Rex had agreed to divorce and just
had to sort out the financial details.
    But Rex’s credibility took a
real hammer blow when the detectives checked his credit card
transactions and discovered that, a couple of hours before his wife
died, he purchased petrol at a service station in Redfern, a few
suburbs from Paddington. His claim that, on that weekend, he went
nowhere near Sydney was obviously a total lie.
    Markham was now the prime
suspect. The detectives confronted him with the credit card
evidence and, not surprisingly, he changed his story. Yes, he drove
up to Sydney that evening. But he went nowhere near his terrace.
Instead, he visited his literary agent, Hugh Grimble, at Watson’s
Bay. After dining with Grimble, he drove back to Nowra.
    Asked why he’d previously lied
to the detectives, he said he