Devil's Game Read Free Page B

no one had heard her in the forest. She could hear her attacker breathing heavily now, as if in the grip of some overpowering emotion. And she simply began to moan, a high, keening sound, equally muffled, but she was by then beyond rational thought, the hard ground beneath her cold and wet, with sharp stones which tore at her half-naked body.
    ‘Please, please, let me go,’ she said, sobbing in despair. ‘Please, please don’t hurt me.’
    But as if he needed to hear her beg, her pleas seemed to act as some sort of trigger and her attacker pulled off the suffocating hood and stood over her, his face still barely visible behind his scarf and a hat pulled low over his eyes.
    ‘Now, you little cow,’ he said. ‘You still seem to be gagging for some more fun and games. And I can’t bloody wait.’
    It was then that the pain began, and there was nothing left for Karen to hear except her own gasping, panicking breath and then her desperate screams as the uncaring sun rose faintly and looked down from a pale, misty sky and she begged him in the end to kill her quickly.

CHAPTER TWO
    Laura Ackroyd picked at a piece of toast at the breakfast table and watched Michael Thackeray pour himself coffee. He looked tired, she thought, and she knew that he was still occasionally sleeping badly, the residual pain of his gunshot wound keeping him awake. But she was sure that there was more to it than that. What she wanted to discuss – and perhaps soon must – would not help at this time of day, she decided, spooning marmalade onto her plate. Given his present mood, she would leave it until later.
    ‘You’re not in a hurry this morning?’ he asked, sipping hot coffee and pulling on his jacket.
    ‘I’m going straight up to the Heights to talk to Joyce,’ Laura said. ‘Part work, part social.’
    Laura’s grandmother Joyce Ackroyd still lived resolutely on her own on the housing estate she had helped to create in her political heyday in the Sixties and Seventies, unwilling to accept her increasing physical frailty and showing no sign of diminishing mental energy as she pursued one cause or another close to her very old socialist heart.
    ‘What’s she up to now?’ Thackeray asked with a smile. He approved of Joyce in spite of Laura’s anxieties about her obstinately independent lifestyle, in the teeth of encroaching arthritis and the reduction of her neighbourhood to a building site.
    ‘I want to know what she knows about David Murgatroyd, or Sir David, apparently. He was knighted in the last honours list for services to education. He’s the one who wants to turn Sutton Park into an academy, but he’s an elusive fellow. I know he was born in Yorkshire and has one of his homes here. That’s on top of others in London and Monaco and the Caribbean, no less. But when you try to track him down or find out how he made his millions, or maybe billions for all I know, it’s like hitting a brick wall. I know Joyce has got herself involved with the Sutton Park governors who don’t want to be taken over, so I thought she might have gleaned a bit more info than I’ve been able to so far. Ted is very keen on a profile but I could write it on the back of a postage stamp so far.’
    ‘I thought you could find out anything about anyone on the Internet these days,’ Thackeray said.
    ‘Not this lad,’ Laura said. ‘Date of birth, the names of his companies – all private equity jobs so almost no details – and a few cuttings on the six academies he’s sponsored so far. That explains the recent knighthood, of course. That’s about as much as I gleaned yesterday. Another couple of academies and he’ll get a peerage, no doubt.’
    ‘Such cynicism in one so young,’ Thackeray mocked, pulling on his coat and kissing the top of Laura’s copper curls by way of farewell.
    ‘Michael, will you be home reasonably early tonight?’ she asked quietly. ‘We need to talk.’
    He looked at her for a moment, the light draining from his