Evil in Return Read Free Page A

it’s working.’ He had lost count of the number of times they had been let down by a vital camera being out of action, or there being no tape in an old-fashioned, non-digital recorder.
    Jamieson shook her head. ‘It’s working, alright. That’s not the problem. It’s one of those fish-eye things. Pretty ancient piece of kit. Looks a bit like a smoke alarm. Anyway, it’s up on the wall of the South Lodge, about fifteen feet off the ground. Covers the whole gate and path inside.’
    ‘And . . . ?’ Tartaglia prompted.
    ‘Well, I thought it looked a bit odd. So I sent one of the lads up to check. You can barely see from below, but the lens has been totally covered. Someone’s sprayed it with black paint.’

2
    Tartaglia parked the Ducati by the railings above the canal and dismounted. As he took off his helmet, he felt the warm evening breeze on his face. He wiped the sweat off his forehead, ruffled his flattened hair with his fingers and gazed momentarily down over the still water. The sun was slowly sinking over Browning’s Pool, the light washing the neo-classical villas on either side of the canal and reflecting off the windows of the little café perched on top of the next bridge. The ribbon of tree-lined water stretched out straight in front of him, disappearing into the dark hole of the Maida Hill Tunnel. He found himself thinking back to just over six months before, remembering the murdered young girl whose body had been pulled out of the water only a few steps away from where he was standing. Today was the first time he had been back to that stretch of the canal and he felt a pang of sadness, sharp as a blade. How quickly life moved on.
    He chained his helmet to the motorbike and walked along the railings towards the gate that led down to the towpath. The address on Joseph Logan’s driving licence was nearly two years out of date. He had moved several times since and it had taken the whole afternoon to establish that he had been living for the past two months on a narrow-boat on the Regent’s Canal, near Little Venice. A wide area of road, pavement and towpath around the berth of Logan’s narrow-boat had been cordoned off to enable a thorough search of his living-quarters. Members of Tartaglia’s team, helped by uniformed officers from the local station, were also busy knocking on doors of other boats and of houses in the vicinity. Apart from valuable background information on Logan, the priority was to establish when he had last been seen and if he had had any visitors in the past couple of days.
    Ignoring the various locals who had gathered to watch proceedings on either side of the tape and at the railings on the opposite bank, Tartaglia was signed in by the uniformed gatekeeper and made his way along the towpath to Logan’s boat. It was moored in front of a large Victorian church that faced the canal, in the middle of a line of other narrow-boats of varying sizes, styles and colours. Logan’s was about sixty feet long, painted in dull, blistered panels of black and maroon, with a series of decorative lines and swirls in faded gold encircling the name Dragonfly . He had never understood the appeal of narrow-boats. This stretch of the Maida Canal was probably one of the most sought-after moorings in the city, yet he would hate to live parked on a dirty, smelly strip of brown water, his windows overlooked from the streets on both sides as well as the boats moored opposite. He valued his privacy more than most things. He wondered what Logan had been doing there and what had made him move from his previous address in the country.
    The entrance was at the stern, via a small deck that was cluttered with pot plants and a couple of ancient-looking folding metal chairs and a table. As Tartaglia bent down to climb in through the open doors, he saw DC Jane Downes at the bottom of the cabin steps, peering up at him short-sightedly through thick-lensed, owlish blue glasses. Short, naturally blonde hair with a