Dead Man's Footsteps

less fortunate women paid thousands of pounds to plastic surgeons to try to achieve. He knew that because Ari had shown him an article on nose jobs once, and he had looked for signs of surgery on women’s noses ever since.
    But the young woman’s most striking feature was her eyes. They were emerald green, mesmerizing, feline eyes. Even with her wretched expression, they still sparkled.
    And she knew how to dress. In designer jeans, ankle-length boots – admittedly scuffed and dusty – a belted, black, knitted polo neck beneath a long, expensive-looking fleece-lined jacket, she was pure class. A few inches taller and she could have stepped off a catwalk.
    Branson was about to start the interview when the young woman raised a hand. ‘It’s actually not my real name that I gave you. I think I ought to clarify. It’s Abby Dawson.’
    ‘Why were you using a different name?’ Bella asked gently.
    ‘Look, my mother’s dying. She’s in terrible danger. Could we just – just—’ She put her hands over her face. ‘I mean, do we need to go through all this? Can’t we just – just do that later?’
    ‘I’m afraid we do need to get all the facts, Abby,’ Bella said. ‘Why the name?’
    ‘Because…’ She shrugged. ‘I came here, back to England, to try to escape from my boyfriend. I thought it would make it harder for him to find me with a different name.’ She shrugged again and gave a sad smile. ‘I was wrong.’
    ‘OK, Abby ,’ Glenn said, ‘would you like to tell us exactly what has happened? Everything we need to know about yourself, your mother and the man you say has kidnapped her.’
    Abby pulled a tissue out of her brown suede handbag and dabbed her eyes. Glenn wondered what was in the plastic groceries bag that lay on the floor beside it.
    ‘I was left a collection of stamps. I didn’t know anything about them – but by coincidence I was going out with – dating – this guy Ricky Skeggs in Melbourne, who was in the rare stamp and coin business in quite a big way.’
    ‘Is he connected to Chad Skeggs?’ Branson asked.
    ‘It’s the same person.’
    ‘ Chad and Ricky are both derivatives of Richard ,’ Bella said to Glenn.
    ‘I didn’t know that.’
    ‘I asked Ricky to take a look at them and tell me if they were worth anything,’ Abby continued. ‘He took them away, then gave them back to me a couple of days later. He said there were a few individual stamps that were worth something, but most of them were replicas of rare stamps, collectable, but not valuable. He said he could probably get a couple of thousand Australian dollars for the lot.’
    ‘OK,’ Glenn said. Her eyes made him uneasy, they were all over the place. He felt he was getting a rehearsed performance, not something from the heart. ‘Did you believe him?’
    ‘I didn’t have any reason not to,’ Abby replied. ‘Except I’ve never been a very trusting person.’ She shrugged again. ‘It’s not in my nature. So I’d made photocopies of all the stamps before I gave them to him. When I checked with the ones he gave me back, they all looked the same, butthere were subtle differences. I confronted him and he told me I was being delusional.’
    ‘That was smart that you made the copies,’ Bella commented.
    Abby looked at her watch anxiously, then sipped some coffee. ‘Anyhow, I was glancing through one of the specialist magazines in Ricky’s flat a day or so later, and read an article about a rare stamp auction in London. It was about a Plate 77 Penny Red that went for a record price of one hundred and sixty thousand pounds. And I recognized it as looking similar to the plate of Penny Reds I had. I checked the newspaper photo against my own stamps and to my relief I could see they were very similar but not absolutely identical, so it wasn’t mine he had sold. But I then panicked that Ricky was going to try to sell them.’
    ‘Why did you think that?’ Bella probed.
    ‘There was something about the way he acted over the stamps that made me very uncomfortable. I just knew he was lying to me.’ She shrugged. ‘Anyhow, a couple of days later he was blasted out of his skull on cocaine – he snorted it all the time – and then early in the morning he crashed out into a deep sleep. I went on to his computer – he’d left it logged on – and I found several emails to dealers around the world, offering stamps that were clearly mine for sale. He was very clever. He’d broken them down into individual