Ramsay 04 - Killjoy Read Free Page A

old bat was causing now. She smiled.
    ‘Sorry to disturb you, Gus,’ she said lightly. ‘I’m here for the programme. I was hoping to work on it at home, this evening.’
    He jumped to his feet, all tension and nervous energy. He was rattled, Prue thought. Mrs Wood sat with her gloved hands clasped in her lap and smiled.
    ‘Yeah,’ Gus said. ‘Right. Of course. Look, the draft’s still in my car. In a file in the boot. Why don’t you help yourself?’ He took keys from the pocket of a jacket which was hanging on a coatstand by the window, and tossed them to her. ‘Leave them with Joe at reception,’ he said. ‘Save you coming all the way up the stairs again.’
    Mrs Wood watched his agitation with amusement. She stood up, offered one of her hands to Prue and said: ‘Miss Bennett! How nice to meet you again.’
    Resisting the urge to curtsy Prue left the room and returned to Anna.
    When they walked into the car park the Christ Church clock was striking 9.30. Usually the place was brightly lit with security floodlights but they had been smashed by vandals the weekend before and still not replaced. After the warmth and light of the house the car park was chill and uninviting. The only light came from the orange street lamps beyond the trees and from the uncurtained windows of the cafeteria. From the mouth of the river came the distant, muffled sound of a foghorn and the smell of mud. The car park was almost empty. The teachers and solicitors who came to the Grace Darling Centre to sing and write enjoyed its facilities but were nervous about its location. One heard such dreadful stories. At the end of each meeting they were relieved to find their cars still there intact, and drove back with relief to the civilization of Tynemouth and Martin’s Dene.
    Gus had his own space in the car park. He had insisted that Joe Fenwick should paint DIRECTOR in big white letters on the concrete. The blue Volvo was parked at an angle between the parallel white lines as if he had arrived in a hurry. Prue fitted a key into the lock of the door. As she lifted it a bulb inside lit automatically, and she had no difficulty in seeing the contents. There, on top of the file containing the programme for The Adventures of Abigail Keene , lay Gabby Paston, curled on her side like a child at sleep. But her eyes were open and bulging. Gabriella Paston was dead.

Chapter Two
    Inspector Ramsay was loaned to the North Tyneside division of Northumbria Police to work on the Gabriella Paston murder because it was desperately under-staffed. The area had seen an epidemic of what was known in the anodyne jargon of the sociologist as auto-related crime. Young people had always stolen cars and driven them dangerously. The offence was so common in the North Tyneside courts that it was hardly taken seriously. But recently the thefts had become more organized. There was a suspicion that they were being co-ordinated by more sophisticated criminals. The situation was complicated too by gangs of ram raiders who drove high-performance cars through shop windows to steal the expensive goods inside, and by the circus-like exhibition of the racing of stolen cars around the district’s council estates in the middle of the night.
    Nightly street disturbances followed the police’s attempts to control these demonstrations of male bravado and there were tragedies: the death of a seven-year-old child as a stolen car chased by the police swung out of control at a school crossing, and the stabbing of an eighty-year-old man who was rumoured to have given information to the police. In the quiet period before Christmas there was little other domestic news and the broadcasters and newspaper reporters gathered in the area in their hundreds, inflaming the locals’ bitterness with their cameras and their questions. There was talk of riot and constant criticism of the policing of the area; the Northumbria Police sweated it out defensively, waiting for the situation to calm of its