Devil's Demise by Lee Cockburn Read Free Book Online

with you? You look like something’s got into you?”
    Taylor just looked at him, a hard stare without uttering a word. She was taken aback with how much that little rendezvous in the corridor had made her feel. For once she cared and she had been just a little too blasé for her own good.
    “Shit,” she muttered to herself, Marcus turned to her again.
    “Do you want to get a bite to eat? I’m starving.”
    “You’re always starving, you should be the size of a house, you lucky pig,” Taylor replied, obviously still in a grump.
    “Come on, moody. There’s nothing a good old BLT won’t sort out.”
    Taylor reached for her jacket and Marcus smiled as he grabbed his coat and almost skipped alongside her, just to annoy her a little more.
    Inspector Findlay popped his unwanted head out of his office; Taylor’s stomach sunk with anticipation of the inevitable instructions that were to follow, likely more enquiries, more endless tasks that all seemed to lead nowhere.
    “DNA results are in. Surprise, surprise - no match found with anyone on the database, but there certainly wasn’t a shortage of it, he certainly wasn’t shy; oh, and they’ve found the cat. I now want you to look through all of the outstanding missing persons, I don’t think for a minute this was this bastard’s first victim.”
    Taylor nodded as they headed off for lunch. She moaned to Marcus, “That freak better not put a foot wrong; anyone who does anything these days is having their DNA taken. He better not even sneeze in the wrong direction or we’ll have him, the arrogant bastard.”

Chapter 7: Why
    Early one September morning, about a year before, Louise Brennan, the ex-wife of John Brennan, walked happily to her house; she was enjoying the autumn sun on her face. She was free at last from years of torment at the hands of her brutal husband, she never thought she’d ever see that day. She now walked with a permanent limp caused by one of her husband’s assaults; he had stamped down on her thigh as she lay at the bottom of the stairs, snapping her femur in two places, causing one leg to be shorter than the other after the repair. Her face had numerous old scars, each telling its own silent story, her bones deformed in many places with enlarged areas where they had calcified on their repair. None of the assaults was ever reported to the police due to her fear of even more violent reprisals.
    The house they had owned had been sold months ago; John had received his share of the money and more. Louise had tied up all of the loose ends and intended heading off to France to live in peace and start afresh. She had a year’s lease for a quaint holding there, all paid for in advance, with the keys waiting for her under the mat on her arrival.
    Her mother had died two months ago leaving her a small fortune, none of which she had to give to John because the divorce had been finalised the month before. John was raging about this, but he was always raging about every tiny little thing.
Good riddance,
she thought to herself as she turned the key in the lock. She stepped inside and everything was just as she had left it, the furniture all to be left as part of the lease. She toyed with whether to spend her last night in a hotel or not but thought it would be easier just to stay where she now called home.
    They hadn’t been able to have children, another thing John had blamed her for, never considering for a moment that the problem could have been on his side. Louise longed for children but became glad in a way that they didn’t have any because of John’s temper; what would he have been like with the children?
    She could barely contain her shudder as she thought about that. She walked through to the kitchen, the paperwork for the house and the information regarding the final arrangements still lying on the counter where she had left them. Everything was signed over and all that was left to do was leave the keys and the letting agent would collect them