Nine Lives by Anita Waller (best english books to read .txt) 📗

linked to that car by actually being in it, and presumably she won’t be in it before she takes some food to Adam. Do you think he would be amenable to having an alarm he can press to tell us she’s left him? We can have surveillance outside on the street that can move in when she gets to her own garage. He can press the alarm to notify us the second she leaves him.’

‘Maybe. We can ask him. I don’t think he’ll be busking today, it’s too wet, so we can pop down and see him. You don’t want to interview him?’

‘One day, but let’s get her first. He’s a nice lad?’

‘Seems to be. Around sixteen or seventeen, that’s all, plays the guitar and earns a few quid by busking until he’s moved on. He didn’t bother telling anybody he was leaving, his mother’s boyfriend, Wanker as he calls him, beat him up so he left the next morning with a few clothes, a guitar his granddad bought him, and twenty quid from his mother’s purse. He looked terrified when we first opened up his door,’ Mike said.

‘I’m glad you did. And well done, you two, for looking after him. He doesn’t want to go into a hostel?’

‘No. I got the impression he was scared he could be tracked down there. He’s okay in this garage, but it’s bloody cold.’

‘And has Adam only been having contact with this woman since this spree started. Two weeks or so?’

‘No, that’s the strange thing. She appeared on the first night he went to the garage. It was a hot night in July, and he left the bottom of the door open slightly, She pulled it up and saw him. She’s been regularly ever since. Getting the car in safe working order? It would hardly make a speedy getaway vehicle if it broke down, would it. I think she’s been working on it so it didn’t let her down, and now she only has to go and change the number plates and she’s good to go.’

Erica sighed. ‘And the nightmare is, when does she feel she’s good to go again?’

33

Flick ordered a coffee and chose the table with the best view of The Coffee Pot’s front door. It was busier this morning, and tables seemed to have two at each one, rather than the solitary aspect presented the previous day.

She took her phone out of its case and stood it on a small stand she had borrowed from her younger brother, who seemed to have every gadget ever invented by man. She focused it on the door, and hoped it wouldn’t be obvious that she was taking photographs of anybody who entered the café.

Her first job was to send a quick email to Erica explaining where she was – she hadn’t wanted to intrude on the meeting that had been happening with Sam and Mike, in Erica’s office, but hoped that they had something helpful to the case to pass on.

The door opened and she clicked her phone. Tonight she would put all the pictures from both days on a sheet, then hand them around at the next briefing. She looked up as the waitress approached with her coffee.

‘I can take a break in ten minutes,’ she said, ‘before the eleven o’clock rush starts. Have you time to talk to me? My name’s Georgia Knight, by the way.’

‘Flick, easier to say than Felicity,’ Flick said with a smile. ‘I’m here for a few hours, so any time is good with me.’

The door opened and Flick felt mildly panicked because it was a woman and she daren’t press her phone with Georgia standing by her side, but fortunately Georgia moved back to the servery in time for Flick to swivel the phone slightly and capture the image. She moved it back to position and opened up the document she had spent the previous day composing.

Her evening after work had been spent online mixing with various authors on book clubs accessed through Facebook. She had read through their many humorous anecdotes about an author’s life: missed deadlines, earning little but knowing they had to do it because they had to do it, and she listened to authors such as Stephen King who had made YouTube videos of their working lives. It had been an exercise that had surprised her.

She had imagined, without really giving any thought to it, that you had an idea for a story, you made a few notes and you sat down and wrote it. It seemed that wasn’t the case, and Georgia was about to sit down with her and ask questions about writing that Flick had only discovered the previous evening. She felt nervous. She wasn’t particularly good at this undercover stuff, and realised belatedly that she should have picked a different persona for her first stab at infiltration of the ungodly. She stifled a giggle. It was nerves.

She didn’t need to be nervous. Georgia brought a coffee with her and sat down beside her. She looked into Flick’s face, holding her gaze.

‘Is it part of your research for this book that you’re taking photographs,’ she asked quietly, ‘or are you not really a writer?’

Flick had only seconds to think about her answer, and she carefully pulled out her warrant card. She showed it to Georgia who nodded.

‘Okay,’ the waitress said. ‘We’ll keep our voices low. I actually thought yesterday you looked like a policewoman, but I gave you the benefit of the doubt. Why are you here? The dead river women?’

The dead river women. Flick hadn’t heard them referred to in that way before, and she wondered if that was how the population of Sheffield thought of them. To anybody who wasn’t directly involved with the deaths, she supposed it was natural to lump them all together. Or was it how this particular waitress thought of them? She would have known them all, or at least the first four…

Flick gave a small nod. ‘Yes. We have several leads