Murder Club - Mark Pearson [15]
‘How late are you on?’
‘Couple of hours, then off.’
‘Home to bed?’
Laura circled her fists and shimmied her hips a little. ‘On a Friday night? You’ve got to be joking, Sergeant!’ she said. ‘Friday night is down-and-dirty night, it’s clubbing night. You better believe I’ll be seeing the dawn in.’
‘Who’s she, then? The new girlfriend?’
‘That’s funny, Dave,’ she said, deadpan. ‘You’re not a clubbing man, I take it?’
‘What, with these bunions? Why do you think they put me behind a desk so often? Too many years pounding the streets. Tough on crime – tough on feet!’
Laura laughed. ‘Rubbish! You play rugby for the Met. I bet you could still work the dance floor.’
‘I wouldn’t be putting your mortgage on it. The last disco I went to was at school when I was sixteen and copped off with the future Mrs Slimline. You couldn’t pay me to dance.’
‘You wouldn’t want to,’ said Kate Walker, laughing, as she came into the custody area holding three mugs of tea. ‘You didn’t see him at the talent contest a few months ago.’
‘This the one when Smiling Jack Delaney did his Johnny Cash impression?’
‘That’s it.’ Kate smiled herself at the memory. ‘Dave here was trying to bust some moves on the dance floor. Ended up busting the table he landed on!’
‘I was not dancing, I was being jostled by a group of overexcited WPCs! Quite a different matter.’
Laura laughed as her mobile rang. She fished it out of her pocket and answered it. ‘Laura Chilvers?’ she said and her smile vanished. ‘No! I can’t do that. Look, I’ll see you later, okay?’ She snapped the phone shut.
‘Problems?’ asked Kate.
‘Nothing I can’t sort.’
She turned and walked over to one of the police surgeons’ offices.
‘What about your tea?’ Kate called after her, but Dr Chilvers waved her hand dismissively and closed the door as she went into her room.
Kate Walker looked at Dave Matthews and raised an eyebrow.
The sergeant shrugged. ‘Wrong time of the month?’
Kate laughed. ‘If I didn’t think you were being ironic, Dave, I would tell Laura you just said that. I reckon she’d do more than jostle you!’
The sergeant held his hand up in mock-surrender. ‘No, thanks, I wouldn’t want to get on the bad side of that one!’
‘Or me,’ said Kate, throwing him a look.
‘There’s something about Dr Laura Chilvers,’ the desk sergeant continued. ‘I reckon, push comes to shove, she could handle herself pretty well.’
‘Best you don’t find out then!’
The sergeant nodded thoughtfully as Kate headed to her office. Then took a sip of his tea and looked over at Dr Chilvers’ closed door. He’d seen the look in her eyes as she took the call. And it wasn’t a kind one. There was trouble coming for someone tonight, he reckoned.
And he was right.
10.
BIBLE STEVE TOOK a look at his bottle of whisky, half-empty now.
He held it to his lips and poured himself another small glug, felt his body shiver uncontrollably once more as the rough alcohol burned his throat. He looked to his side at the young woman who was sitting next to him. She was five foot six inches tall, with long, blonde hair, a stick-thin body. Innocence in blue jeans. Her skin was stretched tight over the bones of her face with fine, translucent veins showing through. She could have been an anorexic or a supermodel.
She was neither.
She had been abused by her father, an unemployed sheet metal worker, since she was twelve years old. Her mother, an undiagnosed manic depressive self-medicating on meth amphetamine, had added physical to the sexual abuse and she did what tens of thousands of children a year did. She ran away from home.
The young woman sitting next to Bible Steve would have rather walked in front of an Intercity express train than return home. She had come to London when she was fifteen, lived rough on the streets for two days before falling into prostitution, shoplifting and petty crime. Recruited into it by a girl a year younger than her and already six months into the life. She had had two abortions from back-street clinicians and had recently been released