Splinter the Silence by Val McDermid Read Free Book Online

intelligence. If she couldn’t be a cop any more, there had to be something else she could do that would stretch her and challenge her in the same way. But maybe with slightly lower stakes. Stakes that didn’t push her back towards the bottle.

With a sigh, he turned to his notes and started to compose the pre-sentence report on a serial rapist who had tried to convince the court that he was driven to attack women by the voices in his head. Tony thought not. He reckoned he was dealing with a high-functioning psychopath who was aiming for a secure mental hospital as a preferable alternative to the sex offenders’ wing of a prison.

By the time he’d finished, it was past noon. He stood up and stretched, then went through to the barn where Carol was nailing battens to the rough stone walls with six-inch nails. ‘Do you want me to throw something together for lunch?’ he asked.

She stopped hammering and turned round, pushing her damp hair back from her forehead with her bent wrist. Her plaid shirt clung to the contours of her body and her jeans were tight, revealing sculpted muscle. She was grimy and sweaty, and he knew it was a cliché, but he couldn’t help but feel his blood stirring at the sight. ‘There’s bread and cheese and pâté and tomatoes,’ she said. ‘I usually have that with some fruit.’

He nodded. ‘I’ll make some sandwiches.’

‘OK.’ She turned back to the work. ‘I won’t be long, but I want to finish this section before I break for lunch.’

Back in the kitchen, he assembled clumsy sandwiches with cheap supermarket cheddar and tomatoes that would taste of cotton wool and water. Carol might drink for the taste, but he suspected she was only eating for the fuel. There was a bowl of apples and pears on the side and he moved them to the table beside the plate of sandwiches. It wasn’t exactly a feast, but it would do. He poured two glasses of water and set two places opposite each other. There was nothing more he could do to make it look appealing so he went back to his laptop to pass the time till she joined him.

Tony didn’t want to start work on the second report only to have to pause. Instead, he navigated to a news site and checked out Jasmine Burton to see if there was any more information on her death. He sifted through several reports but nothing fresh seemed to have emerged. ‘Stones in your coat,’ he muttered under his breath. The detail bothered him but he couldn’t pin down the echo that was resonating in the back of his mind.

‘What did you say?’

He’d been so absorbed in what he was reading that he hadn’t heard her come in.

‘Nothing important. Just something that’s niggling in the corner of my brain.’

She leaned over him to check out what he was looking at. He could smell clean sweat. It would have been erotic, he thought, if not for the slightly rancid edge to her breath. The drink working its way out of her system, he guessed. Even if they’d been at a point in their relationship where they might have kissed – and there had been moments of that intensity – her breath would have given him pause.

‘Why are you so interested in a suicide in Devon?’ Carol asked.

‘I’m not sure. I was round at Paula and Elinor’s last night and Torin brought it up. We got talking about cyber-bullying and trolls and how it looks like that’s what drove Jasmine Burton to kill herself. But there was something about it…’ His voice tailed off.

Carol scanned the story in the top window. ‘The media does love a good stick to beat the internet with,’ she sighed. ‘I know why this has caught your attention and got you puzzling.’

‘You do? That’s a relief.’ He looked up at her expectantly. There was a familiar teasing half-smile on her lips. ‘So are you going to tell me?’

‘You can’t help yourself, can you? Your subconscious is always building patterns.’

‘So what’s the pattern? What are you seeing that I’m not?’

The smile