Someone Else's Skin Read Online Free PDF Page B

shouldn’t be driving, too many points on his licence apart from anything else, but how was he supposed to get around?
    The police’d love to pick him up. He knew that.
    He parked two streets away, the engine running, wipers slicking rain so he could keep watch for them leaving, red tail lights telling him the coast was clear. He didn’t need much. Just a chance. Maybe twenty minutes, maybe less.
    Street lights were coming on, too early as usual. London trying too hard, thinking it could throw up a new building and no one would notice the shit on every street corner, the beggars and hen parties, puddles of puke, and whores everywhere.
    He’d watched TV the other night, some crap with a bent politician who’d punched a bloke into a coma and couldn’t stop crying about it, standing round in the rain, snot running down his face. The camera kept filming London from the air, trying to make it look like LA, with skyscrapers and fancy helipads, what a fucking joke. London never looked like that, not from down here, where life was lived.
    He waited ten minutes, then drove around the block, back to within eyeshot of the refuge. Rain had made a river of the driveway, washing off the roof in a filthy waterfall.
    The unmarked Mondeo was still there, and the two police cars, but they hadn’t been for him, or her. It was just a coincidence.
    People didn’t believe in coincidences; they looked the other way. That was what he needed right now. Just ten minutes, or twenty, when everyone was looking the other way and he could do it . . .
    Do her.
    The refuge didn’t look too safe, not much of a hiding place. Silly bitch, thinking he couldn’t get to her in there. Failing all else, there was a fucking great hole in the roof.
    He didn’t need a lot of time. He’d have liked the luxury of taking his time, but those days were gone, he knew that; no more slow dances, seeing her squirm.
    This time it’d be hard and fast – and over with. She wouldn’t be running and hiding when he was done with her.
    He reckoned he needed twenty minutes, tops.

9
     
    You fucking evil bitch your dead. You think your safe. Think again cunt.
    Blue biro had scratched the words on to a sheet of lined paper, torn roughly from a notepad. The ink had clotted in places, thinned in others. The author had gone back over some of the words, where his pen had failed.
    Marnie Rome held the page to the hospital’s overhead light, studying the clots and scratches, the scarred surface of the sheet.
    You could tell a lot about a person from his handwriting. From what he wrote, the pen and paper he chose. You could tell the surface he wrote on, whether he was drunk or ill. It was all in the indents and impressions. Even if you didn’t have the original, if all you had was the pad he used. Indents went deep, and you could create a vacuum on the blank page – run an electric bar over it, glass beads with carbon powder that stuck to the indents and revealed words like magic. Marnie had worked with a police documents examiner. She knew all about the tricks, the science involved.
    You think your safe. Think again cunt. Not much magic needed here. No secret messages. Just three lines of hate-fuelled threat.
    Marnie had found the letter in Hope Proctor’s bag, unsigned.
    She had no immediate way of knowing whether Leo Proctor had written it. She’d looked through his wallet, but the signature strips on his bank cards were worn to smudges; it was all chip-and-pin these days. She took out her phone and called Noah Jake. ‘I need an example of Leo’s handwriting.’
    ‘Okay,’ Noah said. ‘What’ve you found?’
    ‘Not much.’ She turned the sheet of paper in her hand. ‘Just a little light reading, courtesy of an illiterate . . . Where are you?’
    ‘At the station, getting a change of clothes. How’s Leo?’
    ‘Alive, the last I heard. Try to get me a sample of his handwriting. Maybe there’s something in Hope’s things at the refuge. And see if you can