Free The Darkest Hour by Katherine Howell Page A

first.’
    Lauren finished the case sheet by writing that Kennedy had given her information about his assailant, which she’d passed on to police. She signed the form and left the hospital copy on the nurses’ desk. It would work its way through the system to meet up somewhere with Kennedy’s file, which she guessed was on its way with him to the hospital morgue.
    Outside in the ambulance bay Joe was resting his folded arms on the truck’s bonnet, talking with a couple of paras from Headquarters. Lauren knew the detectives had spoken briefly to him too. She stayed at the rear of the vehicle, leaning against the back door. She wished she’d had a moment in the resus room to hold Kennedy’s hand one more time, to silently say goodbye and promise to give his wife his message. No doubt the police would do so when they went to tell her the bad news, but she thought she would too. If she was in Mrs Kennedy’s shoes, she knew she’d want to speak to whoever talked to her husband last.
    Oh, who was she kidding? She sank down onto the step. The real reason she had to see Mrs Kennedy was that Kennedy’s death was her fault. If she hadn’t been fooled by Thomas’s playing dead and let him tackle her and get away so quickly, maybe the cops would’ve seen him. He’d be locked up somewhere nasty, and Kennedy would be alive, not cooling in a drawer in the hospital morgue. She owed Kennedy something now. Facing his widow was the least she could do.
    And look where she herself stood. Tomorrow she had to give a formal statement, so before then she had to decide whether to confess that she knew a Thomas Werner right up front, or tell them later, or just keep her mouth shut and hope the police never found her out. She squeezed her eyes shut, trying to think it through. Thomas’s name wasn’t on Felise’s birth certificate, Kristi having left that part of the form blank as part of her put-the-past-well-behind strategy. Lauren wondered about that terrible bedsit they’d rented, whose name the lease had been in, whether the police could link Thomas and Kristi that way. She was certain Thomas had never been arrested while he’d been here, so he shouldn’t appear in their records. What else could there be? She didn’t know.
    She felt bad about hiding what she knew from the police. The services worked together, helped each other, had done so forever, and keeping her mouth shut ate away at the foundations of those relationships. But what choice did she have?
    Besides, there was surely more than one Thomas Werner in the world. Lauren tried to imagine an Australian one, washing blood out of his clothes in some suburban Sydney laundry right that moment. One who hadn’t threatened her, who didn’t know her and wouldn’t know how to find where she lived.
    She was such an idiot.
    She fought tears, tilting her head back when they threatened to spill over, while above her the moths burned themselves on the floodlights.
    When Ella and Murray pulled up in Edgecliff Road, crime scene officers were examining the location, taking photos of the bloodstained concrete, digging into rubbish bins and climbing into drains. Four witnesses stood on the footpath some distance away, kept silent and apart by a uniformed officer. Ella wasn’t expecting a whole lot from them. Someone falls over in the street, the first thing you look at is them on the ground, not the person walking casually away.
    ‘I’ll take the men, you take the women?’ Murray said, already heading for his chosen victims.
    Ella took the two women to stand by the well-lit shop windows so she could see their faces. She didn’t expect much, but you never could tell. While it meant something that these people had hung around to tell the uniformed officers what they’d seen, Ella often found witnesses’ enthusiasm lessened as time went by and they considered the ramifications of what they were doing. A man who’d so cold-bloodedly stabbed another in the street was not one they