Web of Deceit by Katherine Howell Read Free Book Online

behind a slope-shouldered grey-shirted security officer and watched CCTV footage.
    First there was the dead man, Marko Meixner, pushing through the crowd. Three seconds behind him came a second man with a cap pulled low over his face. Ella saw the moment when he came past NeilFurst, recognisable by his suit, then the man kept on, leaving Furst standing still.
    Showing on the next screen was Sally-Anne Petrie, also recognisable in the crowd by her clothes. She stood on the platform, looking bored. They’d seen her glance around forty seconds before, and now she turned as smoke started to billow up between people. The CCTV had no sound, but Ella could imagine theshouts as commuters rushed away from the smoke and panic ran through the crowd in a wave.
    Earlier, after letting the witnesses go, they’d talked with the firefighters and looked at the smoke bomb, a short plastic pipe with holes punched in the sides and in the duct tape over the ends. Crime Scene had taken photos and were hopeful of lifting fingerprints from the pipe’s surface. Ella wasn’tso sure.
    ‘Bombs like that aren’t hard to make,’ the fire officer in charge had said. ‘Instructions are everywhere online, and there’s nothing too complicated about the ingredients either. Kids are doing it all the bloody time.’
    Ella focused on the next screen, where footage from a third camera was playing. This showed part of the stairs that Neil Furst had been forced up, and the narrowsection of platform where Marko Meixner had gone in front of the train. She watched people rush up the stairs, some falling and disappearing from view under the crush.
    ‘Lucky nobody else was killed,’ the security officer said.
    Other people fled along the narrow section beside the stairs, and Ella looked for a cap on a head or Meixner himself.
    In the upper corner, the train appearedand in the next split second a body fell from the platform into its path.
    ‘Go back,’ she said.
    The security officer clicked buttons and she saw again the commuters bolting along the narrow section.
    ‘Slow it down just before the train appears.’
    The people ran in slow motion. Women in dresses and suits and singlet tops, men in suits and T-shirts, a few people pulling childrenwith them, then she spotted the slender figure of Marko Meixner moving as slowly as the rest. Nobody was wearing a cap, but it could have easily been removed. In the top corner, the train appeared again. She stared at Meixner and the people around him. The people rushed, and Meixner fell.
    She let out the breath she’d been holding. ‘You just can’t see.’
    ‘Replay it,’ Murray said.
    They watched it again, and again. Ella leaned closer but couldn’t make out any more detail. She straightened and looked at Murray. He frowned.
    *
    Jane tapped twice on the glass pane by the doorbell. Footsteps. Door unlocked. Laird. That smile, and those arms.
    The house smelled of dinner kept warm for hours and her stomach rumbled, but she led him upstairs first. In the glowof the lamps she studied his eyes, watched his clavicles rise as he breathed, the movement of his throat when he swallowed.
    ‘What?’ he said.
    ‘Your ears are pink in the light.’
    ‘Okay, weirdo.’
    ‘It’s good,’ she said. ‘It means you’re alive.’
    He took her hand and kissed it.
    ‘I know these things,’ she said.
    ‘I believe you.’
    The pulse beat in his neck.She laid her hand on his warm chest. His heart thudded under her palm and she could hear the air move in and out of his lungs. She blinked back tears.
    He pulled her into his arms. She pressed her face into his neck and breathed in his fresh soap smell.
    ‘Are you okay?’ he said.
    She kissed him, hard, and felt the build-up begin. She used to think people were lying when they saidsex helped them after a bad day, but that was before she met this man. She felt now that they embraced in the face of death, pitting their life and energy against stillness and darkness, and the