Sympathy for the Devil Read Online Free PDF Page A

fucked.’
    She stepped back, feeling confused, slightly faint now.
    ‘But I thought you always carried a vial of clean.’
    ‘I forgot it that day.’
    For the first time that night he was looking straight into her eyes.
    ‘It’s simple. If I stay, you’ll always be under a cloud. You could go down with me. But if I leave, you’ve still got a chance.’
    ‘I don’t care.’
    ‘You will, Cat. Area has got you marked down for great things. Don’t let this screw it up for you.’
    She reached around his waist and grasped at his belt, trying to pull him back. She could feel how loose the belt was on his hips as she drew him closer. He was pushing her away.
    ‘But you’re still a good officer. You took down Angel Jones, Angel of Darkness Jones.’ She heard the desperation in her voice. ‘That has to count for something.’
    She gripped his belt harder. But he turned away.
    ‘Oh, that.’ He seemed hardly to be listening, as if she was talking about something someone else had done, not the man standing in front of her.
    She saw he was no longer trying to find her eyes in the dimness.
    ‘That counts for nothing any more.’ He was backing away from her towards the entrance to the shelter. ‘A Drugs officer with a habit, they need that like a hole in the head.’ She saw he was looking again towards the lane.
    ‘So this is where the bitch in the Benz fits in, is it? A sugar mummy for when you’re out of the job? She’s playing you, and you can’t even see it.’ She was crying now, damn it. Such a fucking girl.
    ‘No, you’ve got that wrong.’ She saw he looked pained now, he could never bear to see her cry. ‘She has connections. She can help someone like me.’
    He’d let her pull him back against the railings. But he was straining against her grip. Something small and white had fallen from his pocket to the ground.
    ‘Look at me, Cat,’ he said. He moved her hand down so she could feel how thin he was, pushing her fingers over the ridges of his chest. ‘I can hardly look after myself.’
    As she pulled her hand away, he broke from her, moved out onto the leaf-strewn grass. She went after him, ran ahead, blocked his way. ‘Rhys?’
    ‘Please,’ he said, ‘for your own good, never try to follow me. Never contact me again.’
    He walked away, the dead leaves swirling behind him. This time she let him go, crouching with her back against the damp railings. She picked up what had fallen.
    In her fingers there was a paper bird, half torn, an origami figure with a long bent beak. It was a raven, a good likeness of one.
    She watched as Rhys made his way through the trees to where the lights of the passing cars merged with the glare of the night sky.
    Then she sank, very slowly, to her knees and started punching the railings. She did it methodically, right left, right left, till her knuckles were bleeding and her blows started to skid and slide off the surface and then, only then, did she stop.

PART ONE
    2010

1
    It was a dry cold January evening. DS Catrin Price was looking out of the window of the Future Inn lobby towards what had once been the docks.
    The motel hadn’t been there when she’d left all those years before. Nor had much of what she could see over by the water. The glittering copper dome of the Millennium Centre opera house, the glass and steel structure that housed the Welsh Assembly, the lights of new hotels and waterfront apartments. ‘Cardiff Bay’ everyone called it now. No doubt she’d get the hang of it soon enough.
    She glanced down into the street. A man was getting out of a grey Audi, which he’d parked at the entrance of the brightly lit drive-thru pizza opposite. That hadn’t been there in the old days either. But the man walking towards her from the car, he’d been there. DS Jack Thomas. Obvious copper even in his smart casuals. Fortysomething, clean cut, a little grey around the temples, a self-satisfied grin. He’d been tasked with showing her the ropes her first week