Booked for Murder (10 page)

Good sense would take her feet out of there as fast as they could go, Lindsay knew. But good sense had never been her first choice when curiosity was one of the other available options. She wanted to know what had triggered Derek Knight's suspicions of her. Then she'd leave, and only then.

“I'm afraid that won't be possible,” DC Partridge said, his voice placatory. “Inspector Nicholson isn't in the station right now.”

“When will she be back? This is urgent, officer!”

She, Lindsay thought ruefully. What a time for her to be hoist on the petard of sexist assumption. The police had been “the lads” for so long, it hadn't occurred to her that the officer in charge of a murder hunt could be a woman. And everybody else had been so busy being politically correct that no one had mentioned it to her.

Lindsay was so busy mentally cursing herself that she missed the officer's reply. But she heard Derek Knight's response loud and clear. “Well, in that case, you'll just have to do. Are you familiar with the Varnavides case?”

“I'm the officer who took your statement, Mr. Knight,” Partridge said heavily.

“Fine. Well, I've got a woman in my flat impersonating a police officer. I caught her coming out of the murder scene and when I challenged her, she claimed to be with the police. She said she had some more questions for me, but I was suspicious. Then I tricked her into revealing that she thought Inspector Nicholson was a man.”

“And this person is still in your flat, sir?” Suddenly Partridge sounded alert and interested.

“Oh, yes.”

“Do you think you can keep her talking until we can get a car there?”

“No need for that, officer. I've locked her in.”

Lindsay closed her eyes and swore silently. Then she gently depressed the phone button and replaced the receiver as silently as she possibly could. She crept to the door and depressed the handle. Nothing happened. Derek Knight hadn't lied. She was locked in his living room three floors above the Islington street.

Chapter 7

W
ithin minutes, the police would be on the other side of the door. Lindsay doubted whether they could touch her for violating the crime scene since she had the tacit permission of the householder to be there. But from what she'd heard Derek Knight say, he'd be going in hard on the angle that she'd lied to convince him she was a police officer. He'd have to, she realized. She'd barely known him half an hour, yet she knew that in a tight corner, the most crucial issue for Derek Knight would always be saving face.

“This isn't the time to stand about thinking,” she muttered angrily to herself. “Shit!” She looked round the room in desperation, hoping something would inspire her to find a way out. At a pinch, she supposed, she could use the fire irons to batter the wooden door to splinters, but she didn't imagine she would have time for that. Besides, the last thing she needed was a charge of criminal damage to add to everything else. She swung round and stared at the door, willing it to open. Then she noticed the butt end of the hinges.

Probably as old as the late Georgian building, the hinges were substantial. But unlike the door, they were free of generations of paint. Lindsay stepped closer and scrutinized the polished brass. “Yes,” she said softly. She hurried over to her chair and grabbed her backpack, delving into the front pocket to emerge triumphantly with her Swiss Army knife. Then she picked up the poker from the fireplace. She crossed back to the door and pulled free one of the knife's
blades. It was a narrow spike that extended about two inches from the middle of the knife, forming a T-shape. Lindsay placed the tip of the spike against the bottom edge of the linchpin of the upper of the two hinges. It was difficult to get much of a backswing on the poker so close to the door, but she did her best. Using the heavy brass knob on the end of the poker as a hammer, she hit the back of the knife in a bid to force the pin free of the hinge. The first blow made the hinge creak, but nothing shifted. The second whack coincided with a screech from Derek Knight of “What the hell are you doing?” The third bang of poker on knife drove the spike into the centre of the hinge, thrusting the linchpin a good three inches clear of the top of the hinge. “Yes!” Lindsay exclaimed. She knew she could pull the pin clear easily now.

Turning her attention to the lower hinge, she repeated the process, ignoring Derek Knight's frantic yells. This time, she pulled the pin completely clear, then worked the top pin free. Now, only the lock held the door in place. Gripping the edge of the door with her fingertips, Lindsay inched the hinge side of the door back from the frame. The tongue of the lock creaked against its socket, but she managed to pull the door back sufficiently far to clear the jamb. Then, one hand on the handle, the other on the hinge side of the door, she slid the whole thing sideways, pulling it neatly free of the lock.

Derek Knight was standing in the hall facing her, his mouth open and his eyelids as wide as they could go without surgery. Lindsay stepped through the doorway, leaning down to pick up her backpack. “Sorry, got to go,” she said.

He lunged at her, mouthing something incomprehensible, but Lindsay sidestepped neatly and rushed for the door of the flat. She took the stairs two at a time, the blood pounding in her ears, obscuring any sounds of pursuit. She didn't even bother closing the street door behind her, sprinting down the street in the opposite direction to the tube station. At the corner, she turned left at random, cutting diagonally across the road and jinking into a mews court that ran between two parallel streets.

At the end of the mews, she stopped running. She wasn't dressed for jogging and no one on the Islington/Canonbury border ran except joggers and muggers. As she turned left into the next street, she heard
the whooping sirens of police cars nearby. On the corner was a pub. Lindsay breathed deeply to calm her thudding heart, walked straight through the doors and ordered a pint of bitter.

 

The first drink had gone down so well, Lindsay hadn't had to work hard to persuade herself that she deserved a second. She'd found an unobtrusive corner, hidden by a raucous group of youths wearing sweat pants, sports shirts and training shoes that had never seen activity more strenuous than the game of darts their owners were throwing. Lindsay kept her head down and thought about the little she'd learned from Derek Knight before she'd given herself away in so embarrassingly inappropriate a fashion.

What stuck in her mind were his comments about the doors. From the moment Sandra Bloom had revealed that Penny's death was murder, Lindsay had recognized it as a carefully planned, premeditated crime, based as it was on the plot in Penny's own book. According to Derek Knight, the flat door was ajar, but not flung wide, which tied in with that supposition. It wasn't left that way in a panic, but deliberately. It also indicated that the killer wanted the body to be found fairly quickly.

However, the mortise lock on the street door had been left undone. That suggested either that the killer didn't know the residents routinely kept it locked or that in his or her haste to get away from the scene of the crime they hadn't been able to find Penny's keys. It was confusing. On the one hand, it had been made to look like an accident; on the other hand, like murder.

Lindsay sighed and finished her second pint. It was nearly nine o'clock, and she felt like she hadn't slept properly for days. In the ladies', she splashed water over her tired eyelids, then set off on the long journey across London to Helen's. Outside the pub, to be on the safe side, she set off on a wide detour that would bring her via side streets to the top end of Highbury Fields, so she could approach the tube station from a diametrically opposite direction to Penny's flat. Better safe than sorry if the cops happened to be keeping an eye open at the station.

Her route took her down the side of the park, past tall, narrow houses that looked out across the variegated greens of trees and
grass. It was a view she knew well. There had been a time when she had regarded one of those tall houses as her home. It had belonged to her lover, Cordelia. When Lindsay had moved in with her after their relationship had pushed her into abandoning her old life in Glasgow, she had thought that love was enough and for ever. “How wrong can you get?” she muttered under her breath as she passed what had been her front door during what she looked back on as the time of the Great Illusion. Neither love nor Cordelia had proved to be what they seemed, and Lindsay still carried the scars. It had been a nice view, though, she thought fondly, wondering who lived there now and if it still belonged to Cordelia, the rent funding her permanent exile.

As the station grew nearer, caution forced nostalgia to the back of her mind. With sinking heart, Lindsay noticed there were a couple of police officers talking to a
Big Issue
vendor on the station approach. Slipping her backpack off her shoulder, she carried it by her side like a bag and walked briskly into the station, looking right nor left. As she turned to go down the stairs, she risked a quick glance back. Neither police officer was looking in her direction. Grinning to herself, Lindsay trotted down to the platform and waited for her train. The only way they were going to catch up with her now was if they still had her fingerprints on file. After all these years, she doubted that. Even paranoia had to call it a day some time.

By the time she made it back to Helen's, reaction had set in, perfect partner to her growing jet lag. Her knees felt disconnected from her legs, her hands had a tremble she couldn't be bothered trying to control and her eyes felt grittier than they did on days when the wind whipped the sand on Half Moon Bay into a hazy cloud. “Oh, God,” she groaned, closing the front door behind her and leaning against it.

A woman in faded 501s and a white T that told the world “My grannie was working class” pressed “pause” on the video remote control and looked across at her, dark blue eyes crinkling in a smile. “You'll be Lindsay,” she said. “I'm Kirsten.” She jumped to her feet and thrust her hand out.

Lindsay pushed off from the door and dragged her weary body across what felt like miles of carpet, dragging Kirsten's details up from the dim recesses of her mind. Freelance radio journalist. A few years younger than Helen, from somewhere in the West Country.
They'd met at Pride two years before, had been living together around eighteen months. Sophie and Lindsay had missed meeting her on their last trip home because she'd been off covering some obscure opera festival. “Good to meet you at last,” Lindsay said, taking Kirsten's hand and letting herself be drawn into a welcoming embrace.

“You look completely shattered,” Kirsten said sympathetically. “Come on through, have a drink, something to eat. Helen's in the kitchen.”

Lindsay was past independent thought. She let Kirsten lead as they threaded a staggering path through the chaos of the living room into the kitchen.

Helen jumped to her feet and greeted Lindsay with a huge bearhug. “Hey, Linds, it's great to see you, girl. And now you've met Kirsten in the flesh. Isn't she drop dead gorgeous?” She took one arm away from Lindsay to draw Kirsten into the cuddle.

“Behave,” Kirsten protested. “You're embarrassing me!”

“Impossible, you're a journo. And she was one for too long to believe in the possibility of another hack getting a red neck over a compliment,” Helen teased. She stepped back, looking critically at Lindsay. “Where you been till this time? You look like last orders in the dyke bar. We were going to wait to eat till you came back, but we couldn't hang on, we were starving. But there's loads left,” she added, waving a vague arm at an array of foil takeaway cartons that covered half the available worktop space. “Just load up a plate and smack it in the video cooker.”

“I'm too tired to eat,” Lindsay said, disengaging herself from Helen's arm and slumping into the nearest chair. “Thanks for letting me stay here. I really appreciate it.”

“I'm made up you're here. I'd have been really brassed off if I'd found out you were staying some place else!” Helen opened a cupboard and took out a wine goblet, picked up a bottle of red that was sitting beside the pile of papers she was working on and glugged out a glassful. “Get yourself wrapped round that and tell me what you've been up to. Oh, by the way, Soph rang earlier. I don't think you're top of her Christmas card list right now.”

Lindsay took the glass and swallowed a mouthful of something that
reminded her of a pit bull terrier—warm but with a bite that didn't let go. “She want me to call her back?”

“She said she'd ring again.” Helen glanced at her watch. “In about half an hour. So what have you been up to? What's going on? Soph said something about some friend of yours being murdered. What's the score?”

“Helen,” Kirsten protested. “Let her get her second wind.”

“It's okay, I'm used to her appalling manners,” Lindsay said.

“Only because I learned them off you!” Helen roared with laughter.

Fortified by the wine, Lindsay gave Helen a succinct outline of recent events. “I'll color in the picture when I've had a kip, okay?” she wound up.

“You just can't keep away from it, can you?” Helen said. “We're two of a kind, you and me. We can't just sit on our hands when something needs sorting.”

“Mmm,” Lindsay grunted, reaching for the bottle and pouring a second glass. “So how's the film business?” She needed to keep awake for Sophie's phone call, and listening to Helen seemed a less taxing option than doing the talking herself.

“If I'm honest, Linds, it's actually a bag of shit right now.”

“What's the problem?” Lindsay slurred through a mixture of drink and exhaustion.