Waywalkers: Number 1 in Series Read Free

can’t think.’ He had to stop himself from pointing out how often they’d now asked him this.

    ‘Was she given to paranoia?’

    ‘Definitely not!’

    The older man opened his mouth to ask a question, and seemed to think better of it. Finally he stood up. ‘I’m sorry to have troubled you, sir. If anything comes back to you, please contact us.’

    Sam gratefully rose with him. In his relief he found it hard not to gabble. ‘I’m sorry about Freya,’ he said, as much to himself as them. He remembered to add, ‘I don’t suppose you know who’s arranging the funeral?’

    ‘Family, sir.’

    Family. Great.
 

    As the police were leaving, the senior man turned in the doorway. ‘Just one small thing, sir.’

    ‘Yes?’

    ‘Where were you the night before last?’

    Faced with such a grotesque implication, somehow Sam managed to restrain himself nonetheless. In angry, clipped tones, he replied, ‘At my university.’

    It showed how well the coppers had done their research that the man didn’t ask ‘which university?’ He merely smiled, rapped off a cheerful ‘goodnight, sir’, and led the way down the stairs. Behind them Sam slammed the door, harder than necessary.

    Only when the sound of their footsteps had retreated from the house did he lean on the door and close his eyes against involuntary tears.

THREE
    Damage Control
    T hough he’d mastered himself and calmed down, Sam didn’t go straight to bed even though the night would soon be growing old. Having opened the windows to let in the cold February air he sat for a long time motionless at the kitchen table. His face would have been expressionless, but that his reddened eyes were narrowed against the glare of bright memories.

    Freya had been killed with a dragon-bone knife. Dragon bone meant someone who knew what Freya was, and was strong enough to approach her and do the act. Before she’d died she tried to arrange a meeting with him. Was that connected to her death?

    But who would want to kill Freya? She had no enemies. Not now. In the past, yes, but the war is over
…

    The involvement of the police was a new kind of problem. Whenever there’d been something like this before – and, yes, things like this had happened – the body was tidied away by relatives or friends well before the police could get stock of the situation. By the time officialdom woke up to any of what had happened, every record of the dead person’s life had been erased.

    But not now. This time, family hadn’t responded to the disaster. Because of the… corruption reported by Freya just before her death? Even the old hammer is corrupted, she’d said. Sam felt his guts churn. The old hammer and he were not famous for being friends. It seemed there’d be little help there, in finding out what had happened.

    Besides, how to do so without the police knowing? He was certain his performance hadn’t been good enough to shake them off. Murder was murder, and he must be almost the only lead.
For that matter, maybe the only suspect
.

    Rising, he padded into his bedroom. He knelt down beside the bed, pushed a frayed red carpet to one side, and laid his hand on a floorboard. There was a flash below it, as of a spark rising from a fuse. When the light had faded he pulled back the board and extracted several items, including a long slim object and a shorter narrow one, each wrapped in well-oiled leather, and a shoebox fastened with string.

    From this last he produced a wad of fifty-pound notes still in its banker’s slip, and five well-thumbed passports: American, British, German, Swiss and Canadian. Each was stamped with place names from Greenland to Egypt, Nigeria to Tibet. Two, the Canadian and the Swiss, were issued to Luc Satise. The face that stared out from these with traditional passport-photo stoniness was Sam’s own, albeit unusually hard and expressionless. It was remarkable, he mused, how passports made everyone look like a crook. The German one was issued