Gold Digger Read Online Free PDF Page B

at the mere mentionof Quig and the way he knew Monica thought about him. Jones walked faster, scratching his head, wondering if it was really his hair that irritated, or if it was Di, or the word ‘sacked’. Monica thought she knew everything, and she fucking didn’t. They competed for information like a couple of spies.
    Sacked, my eye
: it was only halfway true and yet it rankled. He may have been disgraced for the many infringements that led to his suspension and early retirement, but Jones alone knew that he was still regarded by his police peers as an invaluable source of information. So what if his loyalty to the town and its inhabitants had conflicted with his loyalty to his masters; so what if he tipped off local suspects before others had the chance to arrest them? So what if he enabled his favourite pubs to flout licensing laws? So what if he spiked the odd dawn raid, failed to report the whereabouts of certain persons who came from the same streets as himself? Jones could turn a blinder eye than Nelson and sometimes a sharper one, but he was crooked in the right way and still trusted. Jones had never taken money for favours and the place needed a dedicated fisherman to watch over it and turn out to help if things got busy. There were difficulties enough in controlling this subversive, under-policed town from afar without relying on Jones. News was a phone call away and information was two-way traffic. Jones knew where the reputations were bogus on both sides of the fence and was the unofficial outpost of law and order, and long would it last. The chip on his shoulder was a mile high, but he loved the place and fretted about it – particularly about the people he liked and with a special soft spot for the kids; the ones who never had a chance, like Di Quigly. Also the old ones, including Thomas Porteous, for his quiet courtesy and his love ofthe sea and the fact that he walked on the pier, drawn to it on a daily basis. Jones thought of Di’s father by way of contrast. Di’s fucking Dad, aka Quig. One of the few Jones had actually wanted to put away and never managed it. He was rehearsing in his mind a memo he had once written about Quig for his superiors, trying to make light of it.
    Quigly.B. Ex army, traumatised and altered by combat somewhere. Country boy, shit for brains, but plenty of cunning. Devoted to and abusive of wife and daughter. Addicted to violence; dirty fighter, found release by specialising in pest control. Cleared gardens of pigeons and squirrels, barns of rats, attics of bats and farms of vermin, before moving on to larger specimens. (Cheaper to get Quig to shoot and bury the old dog or cow than it was to call the vet.) Beloved by farmers for solving problems caused by inconvenient corpses. Moved on to the more lucrative business of disposal of humans, of which breed he never killed, but he always knew how to get rid of bodies afterwards: dead baby, granny or gangster, made no difference. Out to sea or into landfill; Quig could find a way, wherever he was. Quig’s in the business of concealing human carrion, worldwide: also blackmail. He can’t come home now, can he?
    A nd yet he does, sometimes.
You’re making that up, right?
No one had believed him. Quig had been gone for years. Bequeathed his only daughter to a gang of thieves, stood by and watched. Quig, who would always be homesick and afraid of his daughter for what she knew about him. Sounded like a good story. If only Quig really never came back, but he did; Jones knew he did. He snuck back when he could; he was there on the night of the storm, and he would be back again and Monica just might give him shelter. If only Di wasnot his daughter with such a genetic inheritance, and if only she was not working for gentle Thomas Porteous, that enigmatic man, rumoured to be a pervert. The man whose wife, Christina, had kept coming back to haunt him until she fell off a cross-channel ferry and drowned, according to records Jones had