Cold Kill Read Online Free PDF Page B

occasion she had told him that she had come to London from Scotland looking for work, waited tables, had some bad luck with bosses who wanted a side-order of sex, lost the jobs, started drinking, got in with a bad crew, experimented with drugs, moved from flat-share to squat to streets. She had told him that she was clean now, and was hoping to find a hostel bed for the night; maybe a job; then maybe a way back into the real world, wherever that was. None of it was true of her, but some of it was true of people she knew and it made a good story, the kind of story that his readers would enjoy. She particularly liked the phrase ‘experimented with drugs’. Her experiments made Glaxo look small time.
    Delaney told her he was just touching base and she nodded again, smiling at the note in his hand.
    He asked her where she was sleeping and she told him about the kitchen door of the Ocean Diner and the kindness of the sous-chefs.
    He asked her whether she’d had a good day, meaning money, and she told him that the citizens of Notting Hill Gate seemed not to be overburdened with Yuletide cheer or a seasonal spirit of generosity.
    He mentioned the weather and they agreed that it was cold.
    He wondered where she might be spending Christmas and she let him know that she hadn’t completely made up her mind on that one.
    He gave her the twenty pounds.
    She asked him what Jamie had said, and he told her that Jamie was expecting Christ to celebrate his birthday by descending to earth trailing clouds of glory and that this event would be clearly visible from the Portobello Road.
    It wasn’t an opinion Delaney had come across before, though he’d heard Sadie’s story several times and didn’t believe a word of it. It was street-people stock-in-trade.
    â€˜Anything you give them, anything anyone gives them,’ Stella informed him, ‘they use to buy drugs.’
    Delaney was cooking. There were half a dozen things he could make and he was making one of them: grilled chicken and salad. He found cooking slightly irritating – its smug conventions, its plans and maps, its arrogant insistence that you could knock together ingredients costing fifty pence and ask twenty pounds. He paused to sip his seven o’clock whisky. Seven o’clock was when he stopped work for the day.
    He said, ‘I know that.’
    â€˜They live on the fly.’
    â€˜I know that too.’
    â€˜Outside the law.’
    â€˜I like outlaws.’ He smiled. ‘So do you.’
    She was sitting at the circular table, hunched over reports and case notes, a drink of her own to hand. Since George had left, since Delaney had become a permanent part of her life, her secret drinking had almost stopped. At one time, she would hole up in the pub after work, glad to be on her own, a ritual vodka-rocks on the bar. She used to like it poured into a shot glass, one cube of ice only, and she would flirt with it for a few moments before taking the first hit, getting that first lift. She was never a drunk, but she’dhad a clear view of what that would be like. Now, she had made a deal with herself: if she was with Delaney she drank only moderately.
    Of course, she wasn’t always with Delaney; that was the deal-breaker.
    He wandered across and looked over her shoulder. The note from ‘Robert’ lay on top of the pile. Stella was staring at it like a code-breaker whose decipherment system has just gone belly-up.
    â€˜It’s privileged,’ she advised him.
    â€˜I’ve stopped hacking for the day.’ He continued to read, then asked, ‘Did he do it?’ When she didn’t reply, he said, ‘It’s a loony letter, right?’
    â€˜You’d think so.’
    â€˜Which means it’s not.’
    â€˜It looks as if he knows things he shouldn’t know.’
    â€˜What?’
    â€˜The hair and the clothes.’
    â€˜It’s not in the same class as a birthmark in the shape