The Third Sin Read Online Free Page A

miming.
    ‘Eleanor,’ she said, patting her chest, then ‘Your name?’ pointing. When there was no response, she pointed to the bruise, now spreading in vivid glory. ‘Accident?’
    It seemed more as if the girl was disconnected than as if she didn’t understand. As Eleanor made tea, she kept up her attempts to communicate, but without success. The most she got was a shake of the head at a plate of biscuits, but the girl drank the brandy and the mug of tea. It was only when Eleanor turned back from making a hot-water bottle that she realised she had begun to cry silently.
    There was no point in asking her questions. ‘It’s time you were in bed,’ she said briskly. ‘Come on.’
    The girl got up and followed her. She had a canvas rucksack that had been set down at her feet; it was still soaking wet but when Eleanor suggested she left it by the range to dry she shook her head violently, clutching it to her and holding on grimly.
    ‘Fine, if you want to keep it with you. But you’d better empty it and spread out your things to dry – it’s soaked through.’ Feeling ruffled – did the girl think she was going to steal something? – Eleanor took her upstairs, pointed out the bathroom, the pyjamas, the bedroom, put the hottie in the bed then left her and went back downstairs.
    She’d have to try again in the morning to find out what this was all about, once the girl’s shock had worn off a bit and she wasn’t so tired herself. There really was something very strange about her and she remembered her own fanciful reaction: that here was a mermaid come ashore.
    It was only as Eleanor was dropping at last into an exhausted sleep that she remembered the fairy tale: the mermaid was dumb. In exchange for her human legs, she had given her voice.
     
    It was a beautiful morning after the storm, though wrack thrown up into the narrow garden below Sea House bore witness to its power. Eleanor got up with the burden of her unwanted guest hanging over her: she really must find out where the girl had come from – and where she would be going to, as well. She’d done her duty in succouring the distressed but she certainly wasn’t issuing an open-ended invitation to stay. It was still early, though, so she got dressed as quietly as she could. After what had clearly been an ordeal last night the girl needed all the rest she could get.
    But when she came out of her bedroom the door to the spare room was standing ajar. The curtains were open, the room was empty and the bed was tidy, with the flannelette pyjamas neatly folded on top. There was no sign of her visitor.
    Eleanor sat down heavily on the bed, her knees suddenly weak. Would she go downstairs to find her credit cards and her car gone and the house ransacked? The saying ‘Sooner or later, one must pay for every good deed’ was ringing in her ears as she hurried downstairs as quickly as her creaking joints would let her.
    But downstairs everything was in its usual place. It was as if her unexpected guest had been a figment of her imagination – or perhaps, she thought with a nod to fantasy, had merely vanished into sea foam. That a mermaid in legend was famously an ill omen she put firmly out of her mind.
     
    The onrushing tide that had played with the car as if it were a dinky toy, tumbling it over and over as it swept it far up the Firth, retreated slowly. The car settled on its side, then with the next tide, less violent, rolled on to its roof. At last, abandoned on the sandy flats, it settled into the soft silt.
    Inside it the man’s battered body, unrestrained within the car, settled too, settled and stiffened.

CHAPTER THREE
    May 2014
    Was there anything, anything at all, more enjoyable than sitting in a pavement cafe on the Rive Gauche on a sunny Saturday morning in spring, people-watching through the thin blue haze of smoke from a Gitane with a knock-your-socks-off espresso on the little zinc table in front of you? If there was, Louise Hepburn couldn’t