Good Girls Don't Die Read Online Free PDF Page B

acknowledged with a sigh. ‘Still, maybe Hilary will make sure the local paper gets the edge. I know she’s really hot on networking, helping women give the old-boy clubs a run for their money.’
    ‘Yes,’ Grace agreed, glad that Roxanne wasn’t going to push too hard. ‘It’s thanks to her that I landed up here. She used to work in corporate PR with my stepmum.’
    ‘So you’re alongside Lance Cooper?’ Roxanne asked with a sly grin.
    ‘I am.’
    ‘Hot, isn’t he?’
    Grace laughed and held up her hands. ‘I am not even going to go there!’
    ‘I forgot, love and work don’t mix.’
    ‘No.’
    ‘Shame! But you must’ve found out whether he’s spoken for?’
    ‘I only got here on Monday!’
    ‘Huh, call yourself a detective! Will you find out and let me know?’ Roxanne finished her drink and signalled to the bartender. ‘Shall we get a bottle this time?’ she asked.
    ‘Yeah, why not?’ Grace had been afraid Roxanne would hold the necessity for professional discretion against her, but her friend seemed to understand that it wasn’t personal. She began to relax, and heard a Black-Eyed Peas track start to play. Recognising the music of their years at uni together, she felt whisked back to a time when she’d still been carefree and confident that life would go her way.
    ‘It really is good to see you again,’ Roxanne voiced Grace’s own thoughts with unexpected sincerity. ‘The local reporter may know everyone in town, but I haven’t actually made many friends here. So if you’d like to meet up and do stuff, whatever, just give me a shout.’
    ‘I will! I was rather dreading the weekends myself, not knowing a soul.’
    ‘Good. Look, shall we grab a table and get something to eat? The tapas here isn’t too bad.’
    ‘Great.’
    The Blue Bar was beginning to fill up, raising the noise level to a din. Grace and Roxanne were older than most of the crowd. Even the barman, Grace recalled from his statement, was a student doing part-time work. As they movedto a table, she looked again around the high-ceilinged chamber; on the night she disappeared, Polly, bare-legged, had worn a short pale blue dress, blue high-heeled shoes and a small green bag with an across-the-body strap. The last signal transmitted by her mobile had been close by at about one o’clock in the morning. Then the phone, like Polly herself, had simply vanished. There had been no sightings, her parents had her passport, and she’d not used bank, credit or travel cards, nor accessed any of her digital networks.
    From everything they now knew about her, it seemed unlikely that she’d chosen to cut herself off from friends and family. Even when she’d gone to Australia and Thailand on her gap year, and had gone hiking, ridden elephants and got a tattoo, she’d kept in constant touch and complained if her mum failed to send regular news bulletins from home, asking specially for photos of the family dog, a golden retriever. Now that she had been missing for nearly five days, the chances that Polly would be found safe and well were diminishing rapidly.
    Was whoever was responsible for her fate here tonight, Grace asked herself. Was the perpetrator – if there was one – amongst these loud, red-faced, excited young men? They were little more than teenagers. Would one of them be capable of abduction, rape or perhaps even murder? Was one of them some kind of obsessive stalker who had Polly locked away somewhere? But if so, where?
    The day before, she and Lance had gone to take a look at Pawel Zawodny’s yard, pretending it was a casualcourtesy to call on him, not to waste his time, and found it kept in good order on a busy industrial park with security monitored by CCTV. If he’d taken Polly by force, he’d hardly imprison her there.
    They’d also checked into Matt Beeston’s background: second son of two barristers, he’d gone to a private north London day school, had no criminal record, and the university had no record of any