Stop Dead (DI Geraldine Steel)

keep her balance, and by the time she found her feet he would have vanished. It was that simple. He hung on. Instead of letting go, the woman spun round. He caught a glimpse of her eyes, staring maniacally as she raised her arm above her head. He was so startled that for a fraction of a second he didn’t realise what she was doing. In the nick of time he dodged back and the hammer she was wielding hit him only a glancing blow on the side of his head. The pain was excruciating. If he hadn’t darted back out of reach, she would have killed him.

     
    For a second he was dazed. He was vaguely aware that his back was pressed against the wall. His legs were too weak to support him and he was sliding slowly down the wall to the ground. A movement alerted him to his assailant, still there in the alley. With difficulty he opened his eyes. Her arm was raised, her face a mask of loathing. He tried to stammer an apology, but his mouth wouldn’t work. All at once she stopped, her arm above her head, turned and fled. As he slumped to the ground, he became aware of voices echoing along the alley.

     
    A moment later two women hurried past. He thought they hadn’t noticed him lying against the wall, but as they scurried by he heard them muttering. One of them said something about a tramp, and how it shouldn’t be allowed. Her voice floated back to him, sour and disapproving.
    ‘There must be places for them to go.’
    He didn’t care what they were saying. Those women had probably saved his life.

     
    He heard hoarse moaning and realised the noise was coming from his own throat. He pressed his lips together and sat up. Feeling the side of his head gingerly, his fingers slid in wetness. He was bleeding. With a groan he staggered to his feet, blinking. Everything looked strangely fuzzy and he felt dizzy. Without warning he threw up. Sitting on the ground, stinking of sick and bleeding, he began to cry. Regularly mugged by other boys, he hadn’t even managed to mug a lone woman.

     
    Thankfully the house was empty when he finally staggered home. In the bathroom he studied his face in the cloudy mirror. A layer of skin had been scraped off the side of his face, the deep graze bordered down one side by a nasty bruise. He touched the surface of his damaged skin and winced. With trembling fingers he stroked his hair sideways across his temple to cover the bruise as well as he could, resolving to tell no one how a woman had bettered him in a fight. It was lucky his straggly hair was so overgrown. He would tell his mother he had fallen over, scraping the side of his head. At school he would have to spin a yarn about how he had fought off three muggers, all by himself. He could just imagine what his classmates would say if they found out he had been beaten up by a woman. He smiled grimly at his reflection and flinched when the movement made the side of his head smart.

CHAPTER 63
     
    G eraldine sat down at her desk with a takeaway and logged on. She hadn’t gone to the canteen for lunch because she wanted to be alone to check through all the files stored on the internal data system. Details of everyone interviewed or questioned in connection with the victims had been entered and there were a lot of documents to look at. It promised to be a tedious job. What made it even more time-consuming was that she didn’t yet know what she was looking for. All she could do was hope she might stumble upon some piece of information that would point her in the right direction. It was going to take her days to read through everything again, and would probably prove pointless in the end, but she had to do something. Every time she closed her eyes she saw Mrs Birch’s scrawny figure sitting alone in her untidy front room.

     
    Picking at her lunch, she left most of it to grow cold while she scanned through all the earlier suspects’ statements, starting with Amy. As she read, she remembered the widow’s expensive clothes and immaculate hair, and wondered what she was doing right now. Not grieving over her dead husband, that was for sure. She turned her attention to Guy. Since Amy and her lover had first been suspects, the case had become far more complex. There was no way they could be responsible for all four murders that had taken place.

     
    It seemed like months since they had started the investigation and there were still many unanswered questions, like Stella’s role in Henshaw’s life, but beyond curiosity there was no reason to