Cold Kill Read Online Free PDF Page A

through the haze of old tobacco mingled with nervous sweat and last night’s booze, but there was none of that today. His feet echoed against the long tiled corridor cast in yellow lighting with interview rooms to one side. It was almost deserted, apart from three people waiting, staring into space. He glanced at the clock. It was just after eleven. It seemed too early to have cleared the morning list.
    It should have been busier. He’d been attracted to crime reporting by the mayhem, the excitement he’d felt for the stories of bad men doing wicked things. It had always been crime that had interested him, from the television thrillers of his childhood to the Johnny Cash prison concerts that his father played constantly. His father had been a policeman, and Jack remembered the pride he’d felt when his father left each morning, his trousers dark and pressed, his boots shined, ready to take on the bad guys. Jack grew more distant from his father as he grew older, when they both retreated into themselves after the death of Jack’s mother, but when he was smaller, his father felt like his own private superhero.
    He looked back at the security guards by the entrance, old men in crisp white shirts, security wands in their hands. They were already counting the minutes until lunch. So this was it? Jack Garrett, hotshot reporter. He sighed. A quiet court meant nothing to report.
    The duty solicitor room – a small square room designed for client interviews usually filled with bored lawyers moaning about how they couldn’t make a fortune anymore – was slightly busier.
    He put his head in to ask if anyone had a case worth writing up. There was a general shake of the head and then it went quiet. They spoke to him when they wanted publicity or an audience for their wit, but Jack would never be part of the lawyer-clique, he knew that. His old denims and long blue shirt didn’t fit in with the dark pinstripes. Some were doing crosswords, photocopies from the national papers that got passed around at court. Sam Nixon was there, one of the main players, who practised from a small office over a copy shop, where tattered sofas and plastic plants served as a reception waiting area.
    ‘Nothing at all for you, Sam?’
    He shook his head. ‘Times are lean, Jack.’
    ‘I’ve just been up to a murder scene,’ Jack said. ‘They’ve found another girl.’ Everyone looked up at that. ‘Maybe you’ll get a slice of that when they catch the killer?’
    ‘You see, us lawyers are not that bad,’ Sam said, waving his hand at the others in the room. ‘We want the killer to be caught, not stay free.’
    ‘That bad?’
    Sam smiled. ‘It might keep me in business for another few months.’
    ‘You’re all heart,’ Jack said, and then nodded at the prosecutor, who was playing with a touchscreen phone. ‘And it might generate some excitement from him.’
    ‘I doubt it. I had to blow the dust from him before,’ Sam said.
    The prosecutor looked up and raised his eyebrows, just greying on the fringes, to match the silver streaks along his temples. ‘My activity is all deep,’ he said, grinning. ‘That’s the trouble with defence lawyers: they’re all show and no substance.’ Then he pointed towards the door as the sound of bold footsteps clicking rhythmically on the tiles got louder and louder. ‘Just to prove my point.’
    Jack put his head back out of the door and knew who it was before he even saw him: David Hoyle.
    He was different from the rest of the defence lawyers. Most of the lawyers in Blackley were sons of old names, the firms passed through the generations, sometimes split up and married off to other firms. Hoyle was an outsider. He had been sent to Blackley to head up the new branch of Freshwaters, a Manchester firm trying to establish a foothold away from the big city. No one had expected it, and Hoyle had just arrived at court one day, in a suit with broad pinstripes and a swagger that no one seemed to think he had