Cambridge Blue - Alison Bruce [20]
Lorna’s heart was beating so loudly that she barely heard the words spoken to her, the words that were merely intended to add to her suffering. Then the bag was pulled over her face and she felt the string being knotted at her throat.
Inside her head she was screaming out, Oh, God help me. She breathed in and the bag was sucked into her mouth, then out again as she exhaled. I’m sorry. On her second breath, she knew the supply of air was already used up. Her chest rose and fell, burning with the effort. Please no more. Her heart beat louder. Please, please. Then, eventually, it stopped.
NINE
Goodhew woke at 5.25 a.m. and hoped that the early bird really would catch the worm. He had no desire to spend more time than necessary trailing around the back streets and squats of Cambridge, hunting for the elusive Ratty.
He was pissed off with Marks, and too familiar with Ratty’s activities to believe that the mission he’d been sent on was any more useful than being sent to stores for the clerk’s long stand.
Ratty was about five-five in height and somewhere between twenty-five and forty – Goodhew guessed nearer twenty-five, despite the pock-marked skin, receding hair and sunken eyes that argued older. Ratty had once boasted that he’d been on the stage as a child, and then attempted to prove the point by belting out the first lines of ‘Unchained Melody’. It wasn’t a bad performance, but his liquorice-stump remnants of teeth hadn’t done him any favours; in the end he’d merely been cautioned for disturbing the peace.
From time to time, he vanished completely, and on the first few occasions his acquaintances had assumed he lay rotting somewhere after a fix too far. But he’d always reappear and, assuming the role of an oracle for the city’s nightlife, he would proclaim to have witnessed virtually every major event that appeared on the police station’s radar. Often his information was remarkably accurate, but Goodhew guessed that Ratty was no more than a top-class eavesdropper, sucking up drunken gossip the way some of his down-and-out cronies hoarded newspapers or carrier bags.
OK, so in this case it was the rape victim who had identified someone resembling Ratty, but with the DNA match and the victim’s statement, Ratty – if found and if cooperative – would still be pretty redundant; he just wasn’t the kind of witness that juries trusted.
Goodhew’s face tingled in the cold air; clear spring nights sucked the warmth from the flat open streets and left early-morning Cambridge encased in a frosty shell. He wiggled his nose, trying to restore the circulation there, hoping it would stop running. It didn’t, so he dabbed at it with the only square of clean tissue he could find in his jacket pocket.
The 6 a.m. sun stretched gradually over the rooftops and touched the second storeys of the locked shops and cafés. At ground level, however, there was still no hint of dawn as he walked down the grey slab passageway of Bradwell’s Court towards the coach station: the master bedroom for the city’s down-and-outs.
He kept to the centre of the pedestrian walkway, equidistant from the doorways on either side. Only the newsagent at the far end would reveal any official activity this early; all other signs of life came from the homeless.
No one occupied the blankets heaped at the entrance to East Anglia Pet Supplies on his left this morning, but on his right, a blue nylon sleeping bag in the portico of the discount book store stirred and groaned. The black-and-tan terrier curled beside it scratched, turned over, then resettled itself against its master’s stomach. Even with the occupant’s head buried under the covers, Goodhew knew it wasn’t Ratty. Too tall for a start. The man and his dog were the only ones camped out in Bradwell’s Court itself.
Goodhew came out the other side to find the bus bays empty, apart from the end space, where the first London coach of the day still waited for non-existent passengers, its engine idling.
Logically, Goodhew should have turned right, past the first bus, and walked a circuit back to the shopping