The House Sitter by Peter Lovesey Read Free Book Online Page A

people may have seen something. We didn’t. We’re minor players. They don’t want the likes of us wasting their precious time.”
    “Do you think so?” The force of his words was starting to tell on Olga.
    “I know it. Listen, do you want a police car outside the house and all our nosy neighbours having a field day? That’s what’s going to happen if you call them.”
    “I don’t care what the neighbours think. This poor woman was murdered.”
    “Right. And what can we expect if we call the police? They’ll tear us to shreds. They won’t believe we sat on the beach all afternoon and saw sod all. The woman was murdered a few yards away from us. How come we didn’t notice? We’ll look a prize pair of idiots.”
    Olga hesitated. She hadn’t thought of this.
    “And that’s not all,” Mike hammered the point home. “If the case ever goes to court, we’ll be called as witnesses for the defence . Think about that for a moment. You and I will be the dimwits who failed to spot the killer. How do you fancy being cross-examined by the prosecution about your memories of that afternoon just to save some pervert from justice?”
    “But if it’s true that we didn’t see anything . . .”
    “They’ll make a laughing stock of us. We’ll be filmed going into the court and coming out of it. People will think we’re on the killer’s side. You know what I think?” he said, letting his voice sink to a lower, more reasonable note. “I think she was killed while we were swimming.”
    Olga was relieved. “That’s what I was thinking, too.”
    “We could have been a million miles away. We saw nothing.”
    “When we came back from our swim, and Haley was missing, I thought the woman was asleep,” Olga recalled, picturing the scene. “She was very still. She could have been dead already.”
    “Must have been.”
    “I wouldn’t put it quite so strongly as that. When Haley went missing, you went off to look for her and I was in no state to notice anything. The woman could have been strangled while I was standing there, looking along the beach. What a ghastly thought!”
    “Unlikely.”
    “And when the lifeguard brought her back, I ran up the beach towards them. It could have happened then.”
    “Does it matter?” Mike said. “The whole point is that we don’t know because we saw nothing.”
    “You were the first to find her dead.”
    “Someone was going to find her. I’m keeping out of this, Olga. Our life is heavy enough. We can do without this.”
    He’d talked her round. She was uneasy, but she didn’t want another argument. There had been too many in their marriage in recent days.
    “What’s she like—Dr Wilkinson?”
    Stella had targeted the receptionist she reckoned would say most if encouraged, the smiling woman in her fifties with carefully made-up eyes that gleamed through dark-framed oval rims. Mrs Bassington would have you believe she ran the entire health centre without interference from doctors, nurses or her fellow receptionists. She had shown Stella straight into Shiena Wilkinson’s consulting room, a stark place with little in it suggestive of the doctor’s personality except a Vermeer print on the wall behind the desk. There was a box of tissues on the desk. No family photos.
    “What’s she like?” Mrs Bassington repeated. “A sweet doctor, very popular with the patients.”
    “I meant in appearance.”
    “Oh. Rather pretty in an intelligent way, if you understand me. She’s slim and about your height. Lovely hair with a reddish tinge to it. Natural, I’m sure. You can tell, can’t you?”
    “Reddish?”
    “Chestnut, I’d call it.”
    Would chestnut pass for copper, the description everyone seemed to agree on? Stella wondered. She thought of copper as more red than brown. She was too experienced to put words in the witness’s mouth. “What length?”
    “That I couldn’t tell you. She always wears it up, fastened across the back with a large wooden clasp like a geisha.