Stop Dead (DI Geraldine Steel)

was saying. But when Geraldine asked where Lolita was now, Rowena just shook her head without answering.

     
    ‘Rowena, it’s very important we find her,’ Geraldine insisted. ‘You have to help us. You are the only person we can find who knew her. Do you have any idea where she could be right now?’
    She paused. Rowena stared at the floor.
    ‘It will help Lolita if you tell us,’ Geraldine lied. ‘After she left here we can’t find any trace of what happened to her. She just disappeared. Do you know if she had another name?’
    Rowena nodded slowly.
    ‘Lolita wasn’t her name. It was her working name. Lolita.’
    She smiled at some recollection.
    ‘Could she be using another name now?’
    Rowena shrugged.
    ‘Did you hear her use the name Lynn Jones?’
    The other woman just shook her head. It was unclear if she couldn’t remember, or had never known.

     
    ‘Lolita wasn’t her real name,’ Rowena said after a pause. ‘She used it because it made her sound foreign. That’s what she thought, anyway. She said it sounded exotic, like it wasn’t really her. She was somewhere else. She wasn’t the woman living here. She wanted to be someone else, you see.’
    She looked around the shabby corridor.
    ‘We all do.’
    ‘Where did she come from? Rowena, it’s really important. Please try to remember.’
    Rowena nodded.
    ‘She came from –’ she paused, wrinkling her brow as she struggled to remember. ‘I can’t remember.’
    She sighed.
    ‘She was my friend.’
    It didn’t help in the search for the woman who had at least witnessed a murder, if she hadn’t wielded the bludgeon herself.

CHAPTER 59
     
    L eaving the hostel where the missing suspect had once stayed, Geraldine drove straight to the morgue. Confident in her sergeant’s tenacity, she left Sam at the station researching Lynn Jones’ whereabouts. They couldn’t afford to let that line of enquiry wait. Jones was now their main suspect and the sooner they pulled her in for questioning the better. While she remained at large, there was a possibility there would be more deaths. Calling the station, Geraldine had smiled on hearing the relief in Sam’s voice when she learned she was to give the morgue a miss for once.

     
    Geraldine’s previous sergeant, Ian, had been just the same. Over six foot tall and physically tough, he used to turn pale whenever they witnessed an autopsy. He had covered it up well, but Geraldine had worked too closely with him for him to conceal his feelings from her.
    ‘It’s the smell that gets me more than anything else,’ he had confided to her when they were out for a drink together one evening. ‘Only don’t let on to the boss, will you?’
    He shuddered.
    ‘I can’t stand the smell of the place. And the thought that it could be me one day, up there on the slab, or it could be –’
    ‘Oh my God, don’t even think about it,’ Geraldine had interrupted, laughing.
    Ian had joined in her laughter, his amusement obviously fake; he couldn’t laugh about death. Geraldine wondered if the natural way in which she was able to divorce herself from any personal engagement with the cadavers she viewed in the course of her work meant she was unfeeling, inhumane even. But her detachment certainly helped her to function efficiently at her job.

     
    Miles looked up from the body he was working on as Geraldine entered. The body found outside Gino’s Café had been identified as John Birch, a thirty-two-year-old bus driver. Miles grunted in acknowledgement of her greeting, hazel eyes meeting her gaze solemnly.
    ‘Looks like we’ve got another one for you,’ he said, pointing a gory finger at the injuries the dead man had sustained.
    Frustrated, Geraldine stared down at the battered body. The wounds appeared to match those of Henshaw, Corless and Bradshaw exactly. That made four virtually identical deaths in just over two weeks. The exact details hadn’t been made public so the murders must all have been carried out by the same person, or group of people, and apparently with an identical weapon. Meanwhile the police could only speculate about the killer’s identity. They had no real evidence.

     
    ‘Must make you sick, seeing this again,’ the pathologist said.
    He sounded a trifle surly.
    ‘That’s four of them in a row. Isn’t it time you found out who’s killing all these poor buggers, and put a stop to it? Or at the very least can’t you get him to use a bit more imagination if it’s going