Free Requiem by Celina Grace

were outside Anderton’s room, Kate turned to Olbeck.
    “Stop grinning.”
    “I’m not. I’m smirking.”
    “I know what you’re thinking , and you’re wrong.”
    “Am I?” said Olbeck, innocently. “Sure it’s not just an excuse to talk to our young pathologist friend?”
    Kate snorted and turned to march off.
    “Not everyone’s as sex-obsessed as you,” was her parting remark, flung over her shoulder.
    Olbeck said nothing else on the journey to Rawlwood Cottage but kept the same infuriating grin on his face, humming a little tune. Kate tried to ignore him. Then she asked him whether he knew if there was anything wrong with Anderton.
    The grin dropped from his face immediately.
    “Why do you ask?”
    “You know,” said Kate. “He’s not himself. There’s something bugging him —or he’s not well.”
    “I don’t know,” said Olbeck, worriedly. “He hasn’t said anything to me.”
    “Hmm.” Kate drew up outside the Duncan’s house. “Okay, we’re here. Do you want to take the lead, or shall I?”
     
    “Drugs?”
    Mr Duncan looked as if someone had just punched him in the face. He had been standing , but at the word, he sat down suddenly on the sofa behind him, as if his legs had suddenly given way.
    “I’m sorry, Mr Duncan,” said Olbeck. “I assume you weren’t aware that your daughter had a large quantity of drugs in her bedroom? That she could well have been supplying them to others?”
    Mr Duncan was shaking his head from side to side slowly, seemingly dazed.
    “I had —I had no idea,” he said. “I can’t—can’t believe it. Surely there must have been some mistake? Elodie…Elodie wasn’t like that.”
    Kate was looking keenly at Genevieve Duncan.
    “Mrs Duncan?” she prompted. The woman sat with eyes cast down, picking at the worn threads of the armchair once again. How many hours had she sat there, pulling threads from the arm in ceaseless anxiety?
    “Mrs Duncan,” said Kate again, more firmly. “Is this news to you?”
    For a moment, she thought the woman would refuse to answer. Mrs Duncan put her hand up to her face, covering her eyes in a characteristic gesture.
    “Mrs Duncan?”
    “I found something,” Mrs Duncan burst out. She lowered her shaking hand. “Just once. A plastic packet with something in it. I don’t know what it was. Some sort of white powder. I’m not stupid…I—” She pinched her trembling lips together for a moment with her fingers, and then released them. “I asked Elodie about it.”
    “You asked her?”
    “Yes. I had to, didn’t I? My own daughter…” Mrs Duncan slumped against the back of the chair, her hands falling limply to her lap.
    After a moment, Kate asked, “What happened?”
    Mrs Duncan stared into space.
    “Mrs Duncan?”
    “She got angry,” said Mrs Duncan, dully. “The way she always did. She had so much… rage inside her. I don’t know where it came from… She got angry, and then she laughed and said that I didn’t know anything. That I didn’t understand and never had.”
    “Did you ever find anything else?”
    “No. I never did. But I didn’t look. Who knows what else she had in her room, what she could have been hiding?”
    Kate knew the time was right for the second question , but she quailed a little at asking it. You needed the hide of rhinoceros to do this job, sometimes. Was that what was wrong with Anderton? Could he just not face the emotional payback any more?
    Olbeck pre-empted her. He did that sometimes, knowing almost telepathically when to take over and face the outcome, letting Kate gather her defences together once more.
    “I’m sorry to cause you both any more distress, but I have another question for you. Where you aware that Elodie was ten weeks pregnant when she died?”
    Mrs Duncan made a noise, a kind of half-grunt, half-shout. She flinched back as if Olbeck had shouted at her.
    “Oh my God,” was all she said and then the tears began again. Mr Duncan gathered her into his