A Need To Kill (DI Matt Barnes) by Michael Kerr Read Free Book Online Page A

calls, or following her?”
    Sylvia shook her head.  “She did not confide in me over her personal life. But she never gave the impression that she had any problems.  As I said, her father and I did not see a great deal of her.  And she would not have been so thoughtless to worry us unduly.  She was a very independent, self-reliant person.”
    “ Is Mr. Freeman at home?” Errol asked.
    “ No, I’m afraid not.  Hugh was in Hong Kong on business when I got the news.  He’s flying home.”
    Pete made a note:  Hugh Freeman/father/Hong Kong?
    If it checked out that Marsha ’s dad had been abroad on business when she was slain, then he could be eliminated as a suspect.  The scenario of a father finding out that his daughter was a whore and subsequently losing the plot was not without precedent.
    They left soon after, and Pete’s mobile came to life as he and Errol climbed back into the car.
    “ Deakin,” he said.
    “ What’s your location?” Matt asked.
    “ Outside the Freeman household.”
    “ Anything?”
    “ No.  I think the mother knew that Marsha was on the game.  And the father is supposedly out of the country on business.  I’ll check his movements.”
    “ Okay.  I want you and Errol to get over to Marsha’s apartment.  Looks like she took video of all the trade that passed through.”
    “ We looked everywhere, boss.”
    “ No, we didn’t.  I think she will have kept the flash drives and disks close at hand, but hidden the videos.  If you can’t find them, then get a team in to rip the place apart.  It might be a long shot, but we could have the killer posing for us.”

     

CHAPTER SIX
     
    She appeared to be dead.  Only the thin, glistening string of drool hanging from the side of her mouth and an almost imperceptible trembling of her hands gave away the presence of life.  She was curled up; a shaven-headed bag of bones with sunken and dull eyes staring at nothing, looking inward and praying for it to be over with once and for all.  Life had long since lost its appeal for Janice Clayton.  She eagerly awaited release from the torment, and could hardly recall a former life without pain and humiliation.  She had lost everything; her free will, dignity and all human rights.  She had been reduced to being little more than an object; a possession of the depraved creature who had stripped her of all hope and aspirations. Time had become elastic.  She might have been his captive for a lifetime.  And he had only spoken to her once, to condemn her while he worked the glowing cigarette ends into her flesh.
    At first, she had attempted to talk to him, to bond on some level and remain a person in his eyes and not become just an object.  It had not worked.  It was as though he were a deaf mute.  She might have been the insentient plaything of a child, to be taken out of a toy box and abused before being returned to the darkness, to wait until she was once more withdrawn and manipulated in any way that gave him some infernal pleasure.
    At nineteen, Janice was fast approaching the end of her short life.  The attractive and well-proportioned young woman of only three months ago was now a six-stone shadow of her former self.  He had stopped feeding her, and her body now subsisted wholly on water.  Sores had appeared on her face and body, and her organs were beginning the process of shutting down.  Her only remaining ambition was to escape him by slipping into a coma, to be finally liberated and no longer suffering.
    Janice mentally retreated from where she lay on a bright red lilo on the boarded floor of the loft. The hissing of the water tank next to her became indistinct, and in her ensuing dream she reinvented it as the gurgling sound of fast-flowing water over the rocks of a stream. She was twelve again and on holiday in the New Forest with her parents.  She could feel the prickly heat of the sun on her face and bare arms, and watched occasional cotton wool clouds drift by high