Taunting the Dead Read Online Free PDF Page B

the knife he’d used – possibly the middle size of a set of five missing from a kitchen drawer – to inflict the fatal wound hadn’t been found. Neither had his clothes, or his shoes, which would be splattered with her blood. As much as she knew Maddison was a crack head, Allie didn’t think he had it in him to use a knife on the woman he loved.
    A lorry rumbled by and she looked to number fourteen again after it had passed. For all intents and purposes it was as if nothing had happened there now. Not even the back door had been forced to gain entry. She switched the car engine on and blasted the heater for a moment, rubbing her hands together. No doubt Terry Ryder would have another tenant in there soon, causing them more problems as they flitted from property to property playing the numbers game.
    Although he liked to stay under the radar, doing the numbers was Terry Ryder’s thing. It was part of a bigger plan so that the authorities didn’t know who was living where. Apart from Phil Kennedy at number two, each hand-picked tenant flitted from house to house at Terry’s say-so. The police knew it was part of a larger benefit scam – money laundering at its best. To the outside world there might appear to be three tenants claiming income support, but they would be using false names and identities.
    And they didn’t just stay in one property. Only one could be staying in each. The other two could be living with someone else, most of the time under their legal names, or living with partners but claiming single benefits of their own.
    Allie sat forward and glanced upwards at the roofing. For once, she wished she was a super hero with x-ray vision. The row shared a communal loft space. Well, technically speaking it didn’t, but the old-style terraced housing had only one layer of bricks between each property. In the lower edge of each triangle at the back, some of the bricks had been taken out to form a rat run from number two right through to number forty-four. Another way they scammed as to who was living where. It was usual for a tenant to be living at number twenty but never to be seen coming out of that front door.
    Things like that had messed up the paperwork for a while but the fraud investigation team had cottoned on. It would take years for something to stick if they were to take Ryder to court, and this was only a small part of what the joint investigation was looking into; but it was a start. One of the many ways they were keeping an eye on Ryder and his crew. So until then, Allie could do nothing more than sit on her hands and watch that handsome-bastard lowlife get away with everything.
    She let her mind wander to the first time she’d encountered Terry Ryder. She’d met him quite early on in the job when she was a police constable, about a year after Karen’s attack. She’d pulled him over when one of his rear lights had been out on his car. Allie remembered it because at the time it was a top-of-the-range Porsche, black with sexy chrome work. A few smiles and charm personified and Allie had let him off with a caution. But she’d never forgotten him. Terence Steven Ryder, born locally in 1969. From the age of nine, he’d been raised in a children’s home after watching his father beat his mother to death and then shoot a bullet through his own head. Through his years in care, he’d been in and out of trouble – petty theft, breaking and entering, stealing cars – but nothing major. At sixteen, he’d been saved by a local builder, Maurice Sterling, as whose apprentice he’d learned the trade that would make him his money. He’d married his childhood sweetheart, Stephanie Miller, and they’d had a daughter a couple of years later.
    Six years after he’d started working for Sterling, Sterling’s head had been splattered across concrete when he’d lost his footing on scaffolding thirty feet high. It had been early one morning. His hard hat had never been located. Terry Ryder had been