Cold Kill Read Online Free PDF

distracted and Stella looked at her again, more closely. Her face seemed pale amid the cloud of hair. ‘Are you all right?’
    â€˜Fine,’ Sue assured her. Then: ‘Truth to tell, I feel very slightly off.’
    Stella grimaced. She said, ‘Don’t get sick.’

5
    The sky was the colour of zinc with a livid purple underglow and you could smell snow in the air. Sadie had been out by the Notting Hill Gate arcade for two hours. She’d started by playing the three tunes she knew on the penny whistle. She had learned ‘While Shepherds Watched’ by trial and error because it was Christmas; it wasn’t a difficult tune to play, but maybe she’d made a bad choice, because it wasn’t earning her enough for a fix either. Sadie had a streak of pink in her hair and a streak of green. You might think they were reflections from the shopfront neon. She had a nose-ring and a lip-spike. She had a tattoo of a swallow on her neck, just under her left ear.
    A little later, after dark, she would move away from the shops and down to the Ocean Diner. She had staked out a patch by the alley door: it was where she bedded down when she was too tired or too cold to go on. Sometimes she would try for a hostel bed, but there was always the chance of getting busted and, anyway, she needed the money for scag. Now and then, the kitchen staff at the diner would come to the door for a smoke and maybe give her something to eat.
    Just recently, though, there had been another source of money. At first, the street-people had been wary of him: he could have been Drugs Squad, he could have been the Revenue, but he wasn’t; he was exactly who he claimed to be – a journalist writing a piece about street-people and Christmas. Tidings of comfort and joy.
    Sadie switched to ‘Lord of the Dance’. She had on everypiece of clothing she had scavenged or stolen. She would have liked to have wrapped her sleeping-bag round her shoulders, but she was sitting on it: folded three times as protection against the deep chill rising from the pavement. People went past, heads down against the wind, their hands in gloves, their money unreachable in pockets and bags.
    Come on, Sadie thought. Come on, for fuck’s sake. It’s Christmas. It’s Christmas and I need to jack up.
    She looked over to where Delaney was hunkered down and talking to a skinny, red-headed street-sleeper called Jamie. Talking, but getting little back. Jamie was lying full length, his head poking out of his bag like a turtle’s. Delaney handed the boy his business card as if he were trying to establish credentials; he also handed over some money. Jamie stowed both of them somewhere in one of his layers of clothing.
    That boy’s head is wrong, she thought. Not the look of it, but what’s inside. He’s living inside his head and things in there are a monster mess. Come and talk to me, Mr Writer-man. Give me some money, I’ll tell you whatever you think you want to know.
    From where she sat she could see the minimum-wage boys and girls in their paper hats and paper bow ties, working the queues in BurgerLand. For Christ’s sake, she thought, don’t anyone buy me a burger. People did that. It meant: if you’re hungry eat this; don’t expect money for drugs. A BMW four-track drew up right by her. The driver got out carrying a fistful of cash and thumbed most of it into a parking meter: enough to buy him ten minutes. He walked past Sadie, putting the spare cash in his pocket. The parking meter was earning more than the BurgerLand kids.
    Delaney squatted down, his rear just light of the pavement, his forearms hanging from his knees. He lookedvery uncomfortable. Sadie could see that he was holding a twenty-pound note.
    He said, ‘Hi, Sadie. We talked before, remember?’ Either Sadie had about her a faint tang of urine, or the pavement did.
    She nodded.
I remember. Give me the twenty
.
    On that earlier