Rope Enough (The Romney and Marsh Files Book 1) Read Free Page B

the barrel of middle age, he hadn’t ever expected to make such a connection again. In fact, he had sworn to himself that he wouldn’t, but, as he had cause to reflect often in his chequered personal past, men are men and there was little he could do about it except enjoy it while it lasted. It was a philosophy that seemed to be having positive repercussions in his private life even if they might prove to be short-lived.
    Julie Carpenter lived alone in a new development of starter homes on the outskirts of the town high up on what used to be known as ‘the roughs’ before the green belt of Dover was loosened to encompass the town’s spreading development plan. In truth, the homes were little more than prefabricated hutches huddled together. Wafer thin dividing walls and with no room for the children of residents to play other than the street. Every bit of greenery sacrificed, it seemed, in order to squeeze another couple in. Someone should have made the planners move in for a few years, see how they liked it.
    It was there, at her home, that Romney had been enjoying a comfortable evening: good food, a bottle of wine, a film and the promise of another of the kind of nights he didn’t think at forty-two he’d ever see again. He checked the time. It was late. Very late.
    His mobile signalled a waiting message. He checked it as he drove and his spirits dampened when he read that she had gone to bed in preparation for a busy day. He cursed and at the fork in the road that could have either taken him up the steep climb to her home or in the opposite direction to the rambling old renovation project he’d saddled himself with, he turned for home.
     
    *
     
    Detective Sergeant Marsh sensed an opportunity to make up some ground on the investigation quickly and earn some credit into the bargain. Having overseen the final processes of the initial police investigation; seen the SOCOs and the last officer off the site, and handed back control of the building to an anxious and fidgety manager, she decided to drive the fifteen miles up the motorway to the William Harvey Hospital. With the clear run that she would have at that hour, she reasoned, it shouldn’t take her twenty minutes each way. Factor in another thirty minutes at the hospital and she could still be in bed for threeish. She’d managed later nights with earlier starts.
    Balking at having to pay two pounds to park in an empty car park and seeing no one in the attendant’s kiosk, she ignored the pay and display machine and the warning signs, braved the inclement weather and crossed the deserted expanse of tarmac towards the hospital entrance. The doors were locked. Spying the A&E unit she went along and, showing her ID, discovered that Claire Stamp had been taken up to a secluded room.
    She was shown through to the bowels of the hospital and given directions to the wing where she would find the rape victim.
    The hospital was eerily quiet being bereft of the usual populace and activity that made every hospital in the country a mirror image of itself: the flower sellers, the ‘friends’ volunteers, the bewildered relatives, the uniformed medical staff, the sick-but-mobile shuffling about in their pyjamas dragging wheeled contraptions dispensing essential fluids or collecting them, sometimes both. The smell was the same though: stewed root vegetables, disinfectant, urine and death.
    Marsh navigated her way using the strangely and at times confusingly positioned directional notices, eventually stumbling upon the suite of rooms she was looking for. In the small ante-room a uniformed woman police constable sat leafing through a glossy. Not recognising her, Marsh showed her identification.
    ‘Don’t bother,’ she said, as the PC began to stand and become more formal. She slumped gratefully back into the seat. ‘You ride in with her?’
    ‘Yes, Sarge.’
    ‘How was it? She say anything?’
    ‘Nothing much. She was pretty hysterical from the moment we found