Stop Dead (DI Geraldine Steel)

remained fixed on his. Her expression didn’t alter, but he knew that she was conscious he was watching her. He looked away. As he did so he shifted sideways until his leg was touching hers. She moved away and he wriggled further across his seat so their legs remained in contact. It was a long time since he had enjoyed any physical contact with another person. As she stepped off the bus, she glanced back and saw that he was following her. She turned away, and he hobbled after her.

CHAPTER 40
     
    G eraldine passed a restless night. She had gone to bed early, resolving to make a fresh start on Amy and her young lover’s files in the morning, but whenever she closed her eyes she saw George, a heavy figure seated in a dimly lit office, dark eyes staring at her from beneath unruly eyebrows. It irritated her that his image haunted her in this way. After all, she spent her life dealing with murder cases. There was no reason why this particular victim should trouble her so deeply. In his sixties, George was bordering on clinically obese, a heavy drinker and smoker who no doubt suffered from stress with his wife, his mistress, his business dealings and his mounting gambling debts. But the spectre of his living figure dogged her thoughts as she tried to sleep.

     
    She tried to focus her thoughts on the case as a whole, but everything took her back to George. It seemed unlikely that Amy or her young lover would have inflicted such horrific injuries on him. It wasn’t the nature of the attack that Geraldine found disturbing. She had worked on cases with far more distressing victims: kids not yet out of their teens, frail elderly women, helpless infants. Nevertheless, every time she tried to sleep, George appeared in her mind, knocking back a tumbler of whisky while his other plump hand rested comfortably on his well-rounded stomach as he puffed on a cigarette, gesturing and smiling towards his young girlfriend, relishing the sensual pleasures in life. She hadn’t experienced this disturbance before, never having questioned other victims before they were killed. Such a clear image of him while he was alive seemed to turn his brutal death into something worse than murder. It was the end of a world.

     
    She couldn’t sleep so she pulled on her dressing gown and went to the kitchen to brew a pot of tea, deciding that she might as well do some work as she was unable to sleep. But once her laptop was switched on she couldn’t focus on either Guy or Amy, both obviously in the frame for the first murder. If they did turn out to be responsible for George’s death as well, it would presumably be for financial motives, in which case it was hard to believe either of them capable of inflicting such vicious injuries. It was possible this had been a calculated attempt to show that both murders had been carried out by the same person. But that made no sense.

     
    It was clear both murders had been committed by the same person, whether alone or with an accomplice. To begin with, the details of the attack on Henshaw hadn’t been shared with anyone outside the investigation. For that reason alone it was hard to see how Corless could have been the victim of a copycat killer. But that suggested the killer was one person who had known both the victims, and hated both of them enough to carry out such a gruesome assault. Geraldine went back to bed and tried to relax but felt restless and got up once again. Feeling peckish, she wandered back to the kitchen and opened a packet of biscuits she had bought for her niece’s next visit. Crunching miserably through the packet, she ate until she began to feel queasy. Finally she dragged herself back to bed where she lay, exhausted but irritatingly alert. There was something amiss with the whole investigation but she just couldn’t put her finger on what was wrong.

     
    She woke up late the next morning with a pounding headache that felt like a hangover, only she hadn’t been out the previous evening drinking and partying, she had been at home on her own stuffing herself with biscuits she didn’t even particularly like. Her excess made her feel sluggish and slow. Thoroughly wretched, she pulled on a shirt and an old pair of trousers and didn’t bother to apply any make-up before hurrying off to the office, not even stopping to brew coffee. Once she got stuck into work, she would feel better.

     
    Her first line of enquiry was to search for anything suggesting Amy might have had a personal