[PS & GV #6] Death on Demand Read Online Free PDF Page B

misted with what must have been Ruby Bright’s last breath.

FOUR
    P PC Jan Clay clung to the safety rail on the cherry picker as it rose in a series of heart-stopping judders towards the high telegraph wire. She’d been nominated for this role because, stupidly, she’d revealed a lingering anxiety over heights. As an aspect of the police force, this constant, laddish humour was beginning to wear her down. Not that she couldn’t cope; she’d been a policeman’s wife for twenty-one years, and played that secondary, supporting role, with aplomb. The police force was institutionally sexist, but she’d always seen that vice as a reflection of wider society. It wasn’t an excuse, but it was an explanation. Faced with prejudice, she’d fight back, but she was no whistle-blowing mole. Instead she’d developed a memory capable of coolly filing away slights and – especially – the patronizing tone of the middle-aged man. When the time came, she’d be happy to take a timely revenge. She was slightly disappointed, however, to find that DS Chalker, in charge of the shoe squad, was her principal protagonist.
    ‘Come on now, PPC Clay. Let’s see a smile on that pretty face.’
    Chalker, thirty feet below her, beamed.
    The hoist engine whirred, operated by a council workman in a Day-Glo jacket, who seemed to find the sight of an airborne woman police officer fabulously amusing.
    Jan was in the narrow, enclosed ‘basket’ of the cherry picker. So far that morning the shoe quad had retrieved six pairs of shoes/trainers/boots from various locations across the North End, the network of terraced streets once home to the town’s fishing community, including the dock road leading down to the Fisher Fleet. None of the trainers were actually shop new, but several were high quality designer shoes which could have been resold, or passed on to new owners. There was one pair of boots, Army issue, according to PC Goldsmith, who was in the Territorials. All had been expertly lobbed over so-called telegraph wires, mostly phone company cables, and a few power lines. So far they didn’t have a single witness to the actual act itself, what DS Chalker, who had a way with words, referred to as ‘galosha tossing’, but which Jan knew the kids called ‘flying kicks’. The town had a network of CCTV cameras, but so far the budget allocated to the shoe squad did not stretch to having the tapes retrieved, or an officer detached to watch several hundred hours of tedious, indistinct footage.

    This particular pair of trainers, now six feet from Jan’s grasp, had not been on their original list, but their location had been phoned in by a squad car. This pair was unique; in that the shoes weren’t hanging from telegraph wires, but from a power line slung through a road tunnel, which had once lit a series of overhead lights. The ‘tunnel’ itself ran under a railway bridge, was no longer than fifty yards, and was now largely disused, as it had been dug through a high embankment to provide access to Parkwood Springs – a Victorian suburb, now in various stages of dereliction. A skip, full of building waste, stood to one side in the shadows.
    Jan’s grandmother, Iris, had been born and raised on what everyone called the Springs . An old manor house had once stood on the site, she’d told Jan many times, but all that was left was an old iron water-pump, the origin of the name. The old estate had found itself cut off from the town by the railway, the new Alexandra Dock and the muddy silted creek of the Crab Fleet. A Victorian speculator called Lister bought the land for thirty shillings (Iris’ version stipulated the precise amount, which Jan suspected was a fiction, designed to equate the hated entrepreneur with Judas Iscariot). Issuing shares in a private company, he raised the capital needed to tunnel through the great embankment and liberate the lucrative real estate beyond. A picture of the work in progress had hung in Iris’ front room: