Throwaways Read Free Page A

thing I needed was the ever diligent DetectiveInspector Waddell on my case; the man was as tenacious as a terrier down a rabbit hole. He already suspected I’d been up to no good, which was hardly surprising when one of the men who murdered my parents and raped me, ended up tied to a bed, in his manky boxers, with the word “RAPIST” carved into his stomach Lisbeth Salander style. Not that I’d been a complete psycho. I’d shown him some mercy and had drugged him first. He and his mate had shown me no such mercy when they’d raped me again and again, before abandoning me to die alone in a puddle of my own blood.
    Tommy outlined his plan. “We tell them we’re relatives of one of the missing girls and we want to find out what happened to her and the others. That way the families of the other women might talk to us.”
    “That might work,” I said. At least they’d be sympathetic and less likely to chase us from their doors.
    So, that’s what we agreed to do. But first we had to learn as much about the missing women as we could before we spoke to anyone.
    Whilst I headed off to the Mitchell reference library where they kept newspapers on microfiche, Tommy went off to speak to his police contact. Between us, we’d get what we needed.

Chapter 3
    “Let’s look at what we do know.”
    We’d turned Tommy’s once orderly apartment into investigation central. We had a large whiteboard like the one we’d seen on police shows. On the board we’d pinned a picture cut out of a newspaper of the once stunning Suzy Henderson, the former law student who’d once been a model. The photo was a shot the newspaper had got from a modelling agency of Suzy pouting as the wind machine blew her black curly hair, making it look like it was full of volume. A year after the photo was taken she was working as an escort to pay off her student loans and cover the cost of a new modelling portfolio. By the age of 21, she had a cocaine habit (she’d starting snorting coke when she’d been a model to keep her weight down), had been kicked out of college and was told she was “too old” for modelling.
    Next to Suzy, we’d pinned a picture of Sheena Andrews, a smiling teenager in a slinky party dress at her 16th birthday party. It was hard to believe that seven months later, the fresh faced teen had been picked up by the police for soliciting in Glasgow’s red light district. Like Suzy, her fall from grace had been pretty spectacular. Straight A student at a fee paying school so prestigious that there was a waiting list for the pleasure of forking out 12 grand a year on school fees, to 20-quid-a-time streetwalker. Unlike Suzy Henderson who was currently languishing in a mortuary drawer, Sheena’s fate was less certain. She’d been alive when her finger had been bitten off. The teeth marks matched Suzy’s dental records. Try as I might, I couldn’t imagine how Sheena’s finger came to be bitten off.
    Tommy had no idea either and he’d seen some terrible things in Iraq. Things he only hinted at because he wasn’t that big on talking about his past.
    “Could he have forced Suzy to do it? To bite off Sheena’sfinger? Say at gunpoint?”
    Tommy was pinning a picture of Tanya Baker, the third woman to go missing on our board, and turned round. “Nah. The pathologist told the cops he was pretty certain the finger had been bitten off as Suzy was in her death throes, in one go. He said if she’d been ordered by her captor to bite it off there’d be hesitation bites. Not one clean bite, although they’d have to see Sheena’s hand to be sure.”
    I’d been concentrating hard on the picture of Sheena, hoping that by looking at her we’d somehow become connected and I’d have a moment of blinding insight and understand what had happened to her.
    Instead, I asked Tommy if he thought there was any chance she was still alive.
    He didn’t blink. “I think she’s dead. If you were involved in something like that, if some mad bastard