Force Of Habit v5 Read Free Page A

on her hands. I’ve been sent round there more often than I have here. She’s always calling in with complaints about this and that, you know what it’s like round here, and she generally made the 999 calls when it was going off in here. She probably saved the woman’s life last year. She says that she saw Rawlins leaving the flat, that he seemed to be in a bit of a state, barged her out of the way hurrying down the stairs, so she decided to check in here.’
    ‘Best I take a look at her while it’s all still fresh in her melon then, eh?’
    Deacon shook her head, exasperated.
    He stepped back into the rain. The four storey wall opposite was lit up, curtain twitching being too subtle for round here. If they had them they were flung wide. Faces peered towards him. He was back on the stage and had no intention of being an understudy. It felt good, even though he knew that the lights and faces would quickly become part of the night if he was seen to be moving in their direction.
     

THREE
    ‘It must have been quite a shock. Are you sure that you are alright?’ The old dear sure seemed alright. He couldn’t detect any signs of shock. She was one tough old bird. ‘Is there someone you’d like to be with you? Someone we can call?’
    She returned from the kitchen with a laden tea-tray.
    ‘You want to be a bit more careful, Inspector. You’ll be getting the police force a good name,’ she chuckled and the tray rattled as she lowered it onto the coffee table between them. ‘At the risk of sounding like an old cliché, I was in the war, you know,’ she smiled. ‘I was a nurse in London during the blitz, Inspector. I’d probably seen as much as you ever have by my seventeenth birthday. I then worked for the best part of fifty years in hospitals up here.’ She smiled at his furrowing brow as the grey matter behind it did the mental arithmetic.
    ‘Eighty-four, Inspector.’
    Now North was in shock.
    ‘I know, I don’t look a day over seventy-five,’ she laughed, ‘you smooth operator, you.’ She winked at him and started pouring. She was enjoying the company.
    ‘I do apologise Inspector,’ the old lady pulled a teaspoon from one cup and waved it in the direction of his feet before using it to stir the other, ‘but Tommy and Tuppence are the only ones allowed inside with their outdoor shoes on,’ she giggled. North glanced at the pair of Rottweiler’s at her side. They glared back and growled.
    He looked down at the big toe protruding from his right sock and the tattered nail that had cut its way through. North shifted in the armchair. He hoped she couldn’t smell them too. He had no idea how many days he’d had them on.
    She handed him his tea. The cup and saucer looked like part of a child’s tea set in his hand. ‘It is okay, Inspector, my Charlie would have been just as bad left to his own devices,’ she said, staring at his wedding ring. She clearly had an eye for gossip and a tongue for rooting it out.
    North got back to business.
    ‘The constable says that you saw someone running away, into the stairwell? And when you got to Miss Lumsden’s the door was open?’
    She nodded, ‘It was him.’
    ‘Him?’
    She nodded again. ‘That brute of a so called man,’ she lifted the local paper from under the table. ‘They aught to make these judges live around here for a spell so they can see what life is really like for the people they are dealing with every day. Maybe they wouldn’t be so free and easy with people’s lives. These judges and politicians come from rich parents, go to posh schools and live in big houses miles from anywhere. They’re as guilty as the scum they set loose to do these things. It isn’t right, Inspector.’
    North scanned the story next to a photo of Deacon’s weasel. The article was scathing. Despite previous convictions for more of the same spanning twenty years Terry Rawlins had been taken from prison to court that morning, having spent a year on remand, and had been