The Score Read Online Free PDF

to school with the guy for a while. Nothing on our systems. Google tells me he used to be a games designer. That’s it. Google’s also where I got his daughter’s age.’
    ‘From here, is he?’
    ‘No. Whitchurch, Cardiff. Father worked for the council. I think his mum used to be a receptionist for the local doctor. Very respectable.’
    Thomas looked up at the wall. There was a picture of the Preseli Hills. Low green moorland, a standing stone circle, captioned
Bedd Arthur
. Arthur’s Grave. The picture was faded from too much sunlight.
    ‘Tilkian, Tilkian, Tilkian …’ he muttered, as though something danced tantalisingly out of his reach.
    ‘Come on, don’t play games with me.’
    ‘I don’t know shit about him.’
    The PC outside had been joined by a young female colleague. Her blonde hair had been fashioned into an elaborate French knot. She was hatless, in shirtsleeves despite the wet. She stood close to the PC, so close it would have been difficult to slide a piece of paper between them. Then she must have felt Cat’s gaze on her. She looked round, through the window into Thomas’s office, moved away quickly.
    ‘Must be difficult to keep anything private in a place like this,’ Cat said.
    Thomas lowered his head, gave her a knowing look, held it a while. For a moment she wondered if there was something specific he expected her to recall.
    ‘Like I said, I don’t know anything about him.’ He leaned forward, opened one of his drawers, pulled out a newspaper, slapped it onto the desk. ‘But I think I know why this Martin’s called you over.’
    Apart from the masthead and a few small adverts for local businesses, the front page had been entirely dedicated to the disappearance of a local seventeen-year-old called Nia Hopkins. The picture showed a girl with dyed black hair and a black T-shirt; her face was powdered white.
    Despite all the social networking media that had come the way of teenagers since Cat had grown up, some of the kids still looked more or less the same. They called themselves emos now, whereas Cat and Martin had called themselves goths, but the look had the same feel to it, and seemed to say the same thing: I am dark and in earnest and I reject your shallow, trivial world.
    She looked more carefully at the girl. Dark eyes, darker surrounds, the classic dusky Welsh look. Not a hundred miles from herself. The hole left inside her by the absence of the tranks seemed suddenly to expand. She sweated although she wasn’t hot, and her head throbbed.
    ‘You want some water, Price? You’re looking a bit peaky.’
    ‘No … Thank you.’
    ‘Something stronger, maybe?’ Thomas slid his bottom desk drawer open and there was the chinking of a bottle rolling against glasses.
    She wanted some, of course, but she shook her head. What was the point coming off tranks only to fall again? It was a classic error.
    ‘No.’ She forced herself to concentrate. Looking back at the paper, she noticed that it was dated two days earlier and that the girl had been missing over a week. She scanned the report. ‘You’ve got a list of friends, I assume?’
    ‘Friends? Shit, Price, I never thought of that. You think I should ask Nia Hopkins’s relatives for a list of her friends, in order that I could conduct interviews with the aim of identifying information that might point to the cause and circumstances of her disappearance?’
    Cat rolled her eyes. Thomas’s act was getting tiresome. ‘Well?’ she persisted.
    ‘Apparently Nia Hopkins didn’t have any friends. She might well have known Tilkian’s kid – small town like this, same age – but I’ve got nothing to suggest a close connection.’
    Cat nodded. Thomas’s phrasing was telling. Having no information about something was not the same as being sure that something did not exist. A connection, or a friendship, or some link of cause and effect.
    The silence in the room continued for a few moments.
    ‘You weren’t planning on coming here