Stop Dead (DI Geraldine Steel)

aside and began talking rapidly on his phone.

     
    The younger officer rejoined them, slightly red-faced, and blustering officiously as he turned to Geoff.
    ‘We’ll need to take a statement from you, sir. I appreciate this must have been a shock for you, finding a body like that, but –’
    George shook his head and interrupted impatiently. He insisted that he was fine. All he wanted to do was open up his café.
    ‘I’m losing customers. My regulars will all be going somewhere else. I might lose them altogether …’
    ‘I’m sorry sir, but there’s no question of your opening the café until we’ve established what happened here.’
    ‘What happened? I can tell you what happened. Someone kicked the bucket, that’s what happened. He took an overdose or his liver packed up, or something.’
    ‘Have you seen the victim before, sir?’

     
    Geoff was already heading for the door and the police officer scurried after him, notebook in hand.
    ‘Sir, I need to ask you a few questions.’
    Geoff turned on him.
    ‘ I’ve got a question for you .’
    But the police were unable to give any indication as to when the body might be removed.
    ‘Hang on a minute,’ Geoff sighed. ‘Don’t worry, I’ll answer your questions, but first I need to put up a closed sign.’
    Grumbling to himself, he put a note on the door: ‘Closed today, Open tomorrow as usual.’

CHAPTER 54
     
    T he post office was forwarding Geraldine’s mail. There was one such envelope on the doormat that morning, with a printed redirection label. Since her conversation with Celia, Geraldine wasn’t surprised to pull out an invitation to her father’s birthday celebration. After a moment’s hesitation, she slipped it into her bedside table, along with the single photograph of her mother. Although she was neither superstitious nor religious, she hoped and prayed the proximity of the two pieces of paper would bring her luck and her adoptive father would be able to tell her where to find her birth mother. Then she turned her attention to the serious business of the day.

     
    As she drove out of London along side roads lined with green hedges, the weather turned chilly, threatening rain. Nearing her destination she passed through a pleasant residential district before the area changed again. She followed the main road, which was a bus route; its verges were overgrown, and beyond them only waste ground was visible. From the road she turned into a lane that led to the prison complex. The women’s prison was directly opposite the entrance to the car park. The outer high metal gate was locked behind her and she was admitted through a second gate. She followed a chatty blonde prison officer through a neatly laid out garden, into a secure building where she checked in and was finally taken along a rabbit warren of corridors to the visitors’ room.

     
    Not for the first time, Geraldine wondered what it must be like to hear a key turn, knowing that door wouldn’t open again for years, decades in some cases. Did the young prisoners she passed in the corridor wake up every morning thinking, ‘Oh shit, I’m still here,’ as they gazed around at the four walls of their cells? The penalty of a lengthy incarceration was harsher for women. A man could leave prison after twenty years and start a family. Yet the recidivism rate indicated how many prisoners preferred the security of prison care to the life they faced on the outside.

     
    The blonde woman who had let Geraldine into the building handed her over to a cheerful square-jawed officer who led her outside. They walked briskly along a path bordered with small bushes that skirted the main prison block. Another jangling of keys, another door closed. Geraldine followed her guide into a large room where a prison officer stood unobtrusively by the door. She smiled and jerked her head in the direction of a solitary woman seated at a table, waiting.
    ‘There she is. Good luck trying to get anything out of her. She’s not much of a talker.’

     
    Geraldine looked at the prisoner’s grey bowed head and hesitated. Rehearsing the approaching meeting in her mind she had envisaged a terrible outcome. In a nightmare scenario Geraldine stared at the convicted murderess, like Dorian Grey gazing at an aged image of himself, knowing she was meeting her own mother for the first time.
    ‘Yes, I had two daughters,’ she imagined Linda Harrison saying. ‘One of them was about your age. I called her