Secrets Read Online Free

forearm, on the inside. Long and rather jagged, like it had needed stitching but hadn’t been according to the doc.’ She shrugged. ‘That’s about it.’
    Alec sipped at his tea. He was a little surprised at the detail they had surrendered to him. Usually investigators were a little chary of talking so openly, even if the other party did happen to be an ex-policeman. The tone of the conversation chimed with the odd tone he had noted from Molly’s earlier.
    â€˜So,’ he said. ‘What’s really bothering you then? Apart from the obvious violent death.’
    He saw the exchange of glances, but knew they’d made up their mind to tell him even before he’d entered the room.
    â€˜Did Mrs Chambers give any indication that she might have known the man?’
    Alec looked from one to the other. ‘What makes you think that? Did she say so?’
    â€˜Not exactly,’ DI Barnes told him, ‘but there is this.’
    He reached for a digital recorder that Alec had noticed lying on the desk and pressed play. Alec listened to what he realized must have been Molly’s call to the police. ‘There’s a man with a gun standing in my garden,’ Molly said.
    Alec listened as the call unfolded, the initial disbelief of the call controller and Molly’s calm voice, edged with impatience that she wasn’t being listened to. The controller calling her name as Molly must have lowered the receiver, a sound of something being said on Molly’s end of the phone and then a bang, followed by silence.
    The call seemed to end after that, with only the controller’s voice on the line.
    â€˜She hung up?’ Alec asked, puzzled.
    â€˜She says she dropped the phone, then kicked it under the bed as she panicked and ran down the stairs. The first officer attending found it broken on the floor,’ DI Barnes told him.
    â€˜We’ve had the latter part of the call cleaned up,’ Delia said. ‘And Molly’s voice isolated.’
    Barnes pressed the play button again. At first all Alec could hear was the controller’s voice trying to get her back on the line and then he heard Molly, not clearly but nevertheless unmistakably.
    â€˜Oh,’ Molly said. ‘It’s you.’
    â€˜It’s you,’ Delia repeated, just in case Alec had missed the point. ‘She recognizes him.’
    Alec sat back and frowned at the little recording device. ‘You’ve asked her what she meant?’
    â€˜And she told us she just thought she recognized him for a moment. That he looked like someone she had known when she was young and that she was shaken and scared and she got mixed up.’
    â€˜And that could be the case,’ Alec said.
    â€˜Yes it could,’ DI Barnes agreed. ‘I can understand a moment of confusion when someone points a gun at you. But—’ He shrugged.
    Alec nodded. Molly had sounded so calm. Surprised, yes, but suddenly unafraid as though she’d been expecting something terrible to happen and was abruptly relieved. Molly had known the young man who had broken into her house and killed himself in such dramatic fashion. Alec was certain of that.
    So why wouldn’t she say who he was? Why the prevarication? Molly was direct to the point of bluntness; sometimes painfully honest. Why would she lie?
    He was aware of the other two watching him carefully.
    â€˜She’s withholding evidence,’ DI Barnes said.
    Alec was momentarily nonplussed. ‘Maybe so, but this is a suicide. He killed himself, so—’
    â€˜So he killed himself. But it occurred to us that men with guns rarely just appear in someone’s garden. They usually have history and so we looked for that history. The weapon had been used before. Twice – and those two incidents are definitely not suicides. There are two open murder enquiries, Alec, both linked to the same weapon so possibly to the same man. If he was the killer