Stop Dead (DI Geraldine Steel)

her when she was mentally exhausted, immersed in a case that was going nowhere, as though she found inspiration in despair. They suspected the killer was a woman, but that didn’t narrow the search down very much. She forced herself to keep her eyes open, fixed on the screen, but her concentration kept wavering.

     
    She must have dozed off. Suddenly she opened her eyes, wide awake, and reopened Desiree’s file with fingers that fumbled at the keyboard in her hurry. After rereading the document, she fished in her bag to retrieve her notebook and flicked through the pages to check her original record of the meeting.
    ‘Desiree met GC while she was singing at restaurant – he offered a lift home.’
    Setting the book down on the desk beside her half eaten takeaway she leaned back in her chair, frowning. Desiree was a singer. She met George Corless at the restaurant. He had given her a lift home. That was how they had met. The words revolved in her head, forming a possible new scenario which she examined from different angles. Whichever way she considered it the story made sense, apart from one glaring problem.

     
    A singer called Ingrid had performed at Mireille on the evening of Henshaw’s murder. The records kept by the restaurant were incomplete, but the same singer could have been there on the evening Corless was killed. The two men might both have offered her a lift home, as Corless had done at least once, with Desiree. If the cleaner was to be believed, Henshaw had ‘an eye for the girls.’ Geraldine looked up what Ginny had said. ‘He was the one wanted those girl singers, and he’d have had them do more than sing, I daresay –’ Ignoring the conundrum of Linda Harrison’s DNA in the car, she speculated about a violent encounter in the car with a singer who had accepted a lift home, an encounter that ended with a brutal murder. Sam had spoken to Ingrid in Shepherds Bush. Was it possible that the singer was the killer? Sam had described her as slight and unprepossessing. At the time she hadn’t aroused their interest. Now Geraldine wanted to know more.

     
    Sam hadn’t recorded Ingrid’s surname, which was irritating, but Geraldine understood that pressing someone for information could backfire. According to Sam’s notes, it had been hard to wheedle anything out of Ingrid. It didn’t matter. In a few seconds, Geraldine would be able to find out all she needed to know. The manager at Mireille hadn’t been able to help her but the information was available at the click of a ‘live music’ icon on the website of the café in Shepherds Bush. It couldn’t have been easier to find. With trembling fingers she looked up the singer who was listed only as ‘Ingrid’ and found a link to her website. Geraldine held her breath. Another click of a button revealed that the website was ‘under construction’. She was still no closer to finding the singer, but if Ingrid really was the killer, Geraldine couldn’t afford to wait nearly a week to find her singing in Shepherds Bush.

CHAPTER 64
     
    F or once, Charlie didn’t oversleep. His night had been restless, disturbed by a pounding headache. When he had managed to doze off, his dreams had been troubled by images of a mad woman charging at him wielding a variety of weapons: an old-style police truncheon, a long gleaming sword, a snake that hissed by his ear before snapping crocodile jaws at the side of his head, hacking off chunks of flesh until his head had all but disappeared down its gullet. The snake withdrew and Charlie saw his own face staring back at him. He wondered how he could still see when his own eyes were gazing at him from the serpent head. The snake lunged forward. He tried to run but couldn’t see where he was going. In the darkness he tripped and woke with a jolt, muzzy and fretful from pain and lack of sleep.

     
    By the time his mother banged on his bedroom door, bawling at him to get up, he was already awake and staring in dismay at his blood stained pillow. His head wound had bled onto his school jacket, the discolouration barely visible on the dark fabric. He could sling it over his arm when he left the house, after which he would conveniently ‘lose’ it, just to be on the safe side. He hardly ever wore it anyway. It was best not to take any chances where his mother was concerned. Once her suspicions were aroused he would never hear the end of it. He could hide his wound without too much trouble, concealing it beneath