Something Wicked Read Free Page B

florist that he realised what they hadn’t been able to see. From the pavement, it looked like one long alley but it was an optical illusion because a garage door at the end was painted the
same colour as the wall beyond. He doubted it was deliberate because both the wall and garage were so ramshackle, but it was certainly clever, even if it was inadvertent. Either way, it
wasn’t the sort of place you’d usually leave an almost new car. It was unlikely to be a portal to Alton Towers, either.
    Andrew continued along the path, Jenny just behind him until they reached the garage.
    ‘Is he in there?’ Andrew asked.
    ‘His car is.’
    On the left-hand side of the garage, a concrete set of steps curled their way up to a flat above the Spar. Unless he was
in
the garage, which Andrew doubted, this was the only place
Stewart Deacon could have gone.
    Andrew turned to Jenny, who was putting the tablet into her backpack. ‘Want to go up?’ he asked.
    ‘Paper, scissors, stone?’
    ‘Fine.’
    They each held out their left palms, tapping their right fists into them.
    One, two, three: rock.
    Shite.
    Rock was a total waste of time, like choosing heads in a coin toss. Tails never fails and only a cock chooses rock. He should have just ordered her to do it and yet the moment she’d said
‘paper, scissors, stone’, he’d agreed without even thinking. Like a siren luring him onto the rocks – which was probably why he’d been subliminally pressured into
going for rock in the first place. What did rock defeat anyway? Well, scissors – but who went for scissors? Only a psycho whose first thought was to come up with something sharp.
    Andrew edged his way up the stairs, fearing the worst. Who lived above a Spar? It was probably a crack den. Stewart Deacon had pretended to make his money through property, all the time dealing
crack instead. It dawned on Andrew that he had no idea what a crack den looked like. Would he knock politely, walk in and find a bunch of old dears drinking tea, only to discover it was tea laced
with crack?
    At the top of the stairs was a scruffy once-cream door with ‘1A’ scratched into the paint via a green-inked biro. Green ink? This had psycho written all over it.
    The windows on either side had the curtains pulled, which was surely the type of thing you’d do if you were dealing crack.
    Andrew glanced down towards Jenny, who shrugged in the way young people seemed to, as if language was devolving into a series of gestures. He knocked on the door gently and took a step
backwards, waiting . . .
    The door opened a sliver, a beady eye appearing in the darkened gap. Andrew barely had a moment to say anything before the door opened fully. Nobody spoke, so he stepped inside, gasping at the
toxic scent of some sort of perfume combined with something else he wasn’t sure about. Probably crack. The room was awash with crimson and pink but the lights were so dim, it was like wearing
sunglasses indoors.
    He turned to see a woman wearing a top cut so low that it almost touched her belly button. A valley of cleavage heaved forward threateningly as she turned and walked around him, her fragrance
practically weaponised.
    ‘You got an appointment, luv?’
    Her accent was thick, northern and nasally, every word sounding as if it came with a threat to smash a brick over someone’s head.
    ‘No, I . . .’
    ‘So d’ya know what yer after? Aurora’s phoned in sick but Angel’s come in instead. It’s a fifty-quid house fee for half-hour.’ She nodded towards a door.
‘There’s a shower in there if you need to sort yourself out. Money upfront and then the girls are through there.’
    She nodded towards a second door but Andrew had already turned for the exit: Stewart Deacon would indeed have a bit of explaining to do.

3
    Andrew’s life had changed six months previously when he’d inadvertently ended up investigating a teenage girl’s suicide. Before then, the private
investigating had been