Stop Dead (DI Geraldine Steel)

would be even more embarrassing than if he just talked to her. He would get rid of her as quickly as he could and then wing it with his workmates; he would never live it down if they discovered the truth. He was rehearsing what he was going to say when Amy rushed at him, tears in her eyes. His fleeting sympathy was choked by anger that she had tracked him down to confront him in front of his mates.

     
    She looked a sight, her eyes puffy, her hair a mess; even her lipstick looked ugly. She seemed to have aged in the few days since he had seen her. He couldn’t believe he had once been so infatuated with her.
    ‘Guy!’
    She made no attempt to speak quietly so he seized her by the elbow and propelled her back through the open doorway into the hotel foyer where he led her into a shadowy corner, away from public scrunity.
    ‘What the hell are you doing here?’
    ‘I came to see you –’
    Her voice wavered.
    ‘Keep it down, will you? No one else needs to hear this.’
    Through the open door, Guy thought he heard his mates laughing and felt his temper rise. She was lucky they were in public or he would have been tempted to teach her a lesson for showing him up like this.

     
    At first Amy refused to believe he didn’t want anything more to do with her.
    ‘It’ll die down,’ she protested. ‘All this fuss with the police. They can’t keep hassling us forever. It’ll be alright. You’ll see. You’re not even a suspect any more. We can go back to how we were …’
    ‘No,’ he assured her, speaking as firmly as he could in a low undertone. ‘Things will never go back to how they were. It’s over, Amy.’
    ‘You can’t mean that.’
    He replied in a furious whisper.
    ‘Leave me alone, will you? Don’t you get it, I’m sick of you, sick of the whole damn business.’

     
    ‘But you and me, we’re –’
    She reached out and put her hand on his arm. Guy stepped back but she clung on, her long nails clutching at his sleeve. He looked at the bright red varnish that had once seemed so glamorous, and felt sick.
    ‘There is no you and me,’ he hissed. ‘What the hell are you thinking?’
    He glanced over his shoulder to check no one was watching.
    ‘You told the police I was responsible for what happened to your old man,’ he reminded her. ‘How the hell could there be anything between us after that? I can’t trust you any more. I can’t stand the sight of you, not after what you put me through. Just get lost will you, I don’t want to see you again.’

     
    Amy gave a low whimper, like a small dog. He pulled away from her, vexed that she was making such a fool of herself. All he wanted to do was forget the whole horrible affair.
    ‘I don’t want to see you again,’ he repeated.
    He turned and marched off without a backward glance.

CHAPTER 46
     
    M aurice Bradford had never married. His only sibling had emigrated to Australia over thirty years earlier. A relative was traced living in South London, the grandson of a cousin who had moved to Scotland. The local force sent an officer round to notify him, and the young man reluctantly agreed to identify the body. Geraldine decided to go along and question him, hoping to discover a connection between Maurice and at least one of the other victims, other than the identical manner in which they had been killed. But she didn’t feel very optimistic about the outcome. Maurice clearly couldn’t afford to patronise a restaurant like Mireille, and there was no evidence of gambling in his meagre financial arrangements.

     
    Maurice’s distant relative, Edgar Hilton, turned out to be a young man in his twenties, sharply dressed in a pin-striped suit, brilliant white shirt and no tie. His shoes, which were highly polished, beat out a loud rhythm on the floor as he followed close on Geraldine’s heels to where the old man’s small body lay almost hidden. Only a tiny head with a peaked nose showed above the covering, his face ashen, as though carved in marble. The young man glanced down for a second before turning away with a perfunctory nod, his face twisted in a grimace.
    ‘Yes, that’s him alright. That’s Uncle Maurice.’

     
    A gold ring glittered on his little finger as he ran a hand through his cropped dark hair.
    ‘Jesus, I hardly recognised him. He looks well weird. What the hell happened to him?’
    ‘He was found in the canal.’
    ‘He drowned?’
    ‘Something like that.’
    Leaving the viewing room, Geraldine steered the young