Page 9 of Child's Play

‘You can ignore that call and explain what you’re doing in my sister’s home,’ the woman said with steel in both her voice and expression.

‘Yeah, I’m probably not going to do that,’ Kim said, turning away. Even Woody didn’t speak to her like that, but right now she had to force herself to remember that this person was about to find out they’d lost a family member.

‘Stace,’ she answered.

‘Next of kin, boss, is sixty-five-year-old Veronica Evans, lives at—’

‘Thanks, Stace, I’ll get back to you,’ she said, ending the call and wishing it had been just two minutes earlier.

‘Miss Evans, I think you should take a seat,’ Kim said, pointing back towards the lounge.

The woman ignored her advice.

‘Is she dead?’

‘Miss Evans,’ Bryant said, stepping in to take over the sensitivity portion of their job description.

‘If you could just step into…’

‘I’ll take that as a yes, then?’ she said, looking from Kim to her colleague.

Okay, so it appeared that Bryant could put his kid gloves away for the time being.

‘Yes, Miss Evans, I’m afraid—’

‘Veronica, please, or we’ll all get confused. How did it happen? In that fast car of hers, I suppose. Ridiculous how she drove it. I’ve been telling her for months that she needed to act her age, but—’

Bryant stepped forward. ‘Miss… Veronica, I really think you should come into the lounge and…’

The woman speared Bryant with a look. ‘Officer, will my sitting down make my sister any less dead?’

‘Absolutely not,’ Kim answered for her colleague who was nonplussed by the woman’s manner.

Kim had seen it before. Sometimes relatives remained stoic for days, weeks, months and then broke down because of something trivial or a certain memory. Whatever the reason Kim was going to make the most of it.

‘No, Veronica, your sister will be no less dead but the situation is more complicated than you suspect and would be better discussed sitting down.’

‘Complicated, how?’

Kim took matters into her own hands and walked past the woman into the lounge. She stood in front of the sofa thereby directing the woman to the single seat.

After all his efforts to make Veronica sit, Bryant remained standing in the doorway.

‘Veronica, I’m sorry to tell you that your sister was murdered.’

Kim waited for an emotion to cross her face. Any emotion would do but she wasn’t expecting the one she saw.

Annoyance.

Kim couldn’t work out if it was annoyance that her sister had died or because her demise was not in the manner that Veronica had prophesised.

‘No, I’m sorry but you must be mistaken. It’s either an error of her identity or the way she died but there’s no way Belinda—’

‘There’s no mistake,’ Kim said. ‘Your sister was murdered at Haden Hill Park by a single stab wound to the heart.’

Veronica’s hand went to her throat as though she’d just been told there was a fly in her soup.

The lack of emotion caused Kim to wonder how close the sisters had been. It appeared that Veronica lived close by due to the time in the morning she’d just happened along for a visit. They had uncannily similar interests in clothes and jewellery and both still went by their maiden names.