Angel of Death by Charlotte Lamb Read Free Book Online Page B

absorbed that she didn’t hear a car turn the corner, drive up behind her, until too late.
    Only when a horn blared did she look over her shoulder. A black car, a foreign make, she thought, was very close; only a few feet away, coming fast. She lunged forward, sideways to the left, to get out of its path, but at the same instant, the car swung left, too, as if the driver was, in turn, trying to avoid her.
    The car’s bonnet hit her in her right side. Miranda wasn’t even conscious of the impact. Fear and pain oddly muted her sensations. She did not know that she flew up into the air, arms flung wide, legs limp, body twisting in flight.
    She did not know that she landed against the metal wing and was thrown off again instantly, fell on to the tarmac of the road and just lay there, arms and legs sprawled.
    She had already lost consciousness.
    She came back to awareness to see a ring of faces staring down at her. Miranda focused on the cold, remote, dark eyes, not surprised to see him there.
    ‘Am I dead, or dying?’ she asked him, and heard the others in the crowd take a sharp, indrawn breath of shock.
    He didn’t reply, just stared down at her. Pain beat through her, she found it hard to concentrate through the agony.
    She couldn’t be dead, or she wouldn’t be in such pain, surely? Did dying hurt?
    ‘Hello there,’ a bald man in a green paramedic uniform said, smiling down as he knelt on the road, very close to her. ‘I’m Derek. What’s your name?’
    Her lips fumbled sound which didn’t really emerge. She was too tired to struggle to speak; the words she tried to say bubbled silently on her lips.
    Living took too much energy – was it even worth it? Had she been happy for an instant since Tom died? She had tried to get over his death, but a day had not passed without her missing him, grieving for him. Maybe she had been meant to die with him? Was that why the angel of death kept haunting her?
    ‘Haunting me, night and day,’ she thought aloud.
    ‘What’s that, darling?’ the paramedic asked, bending closer. ‘Can you tell me your name? Then we can let your family know what’s happened to you.’
    She opened her mouth to speak but pain held her; she made a groaning sound instead. It hurts, it hurts, she tried to say, staring fixedly at the man’s face. He had a big nose, rough skin like lemon peel, kind eyes. She felt him willing her to speak again and she wanted to, but she couldn’t; she gave up and sank back instead into the well of pain.
    The news of her accident reached Sergeant Neil Maddrell the following morning. It was handed to him by his inspector, a comfortably padded woman with startling ginger eyebrows. Neil read the faxed report several times, frowning.
    ‘What do you think? Is it coincidence? Or what?’ Inspector Burbage asked him in her deep, gravelly voice.
    ‘Or what, I’d say,’ Neil shrugged. ‘I don’t believe in coincidences this big. But I’d better interview the traffic guy who got there first, then I’ll talk to the witnesses he took evidence from. At least one of them seems to suspect the hit and run was deliberate.’
    ‘Depends whether the guy is paranoid, some people always suspect accidents are part of a plot. Anyway, there’s something else you ought to see.’ Inspector Burbage handed him another fax, a missing person report from an East End police station.
    Neil half rose as he read, his face suddenly excited. ‘I must talk to this girl at once. If she’s the girl from the Finnigan case it changes everything.’
    He began tidying up his desk, locking papers away in a top drawer.
    ‘Let me know how you get on, don’t forget the paperwork,’ the inspector said, waddling away like a ginger duck.
    Neil took some time to get through the clotted traffic on the main road through the East End, the Mile End road, but eventually turned into a narrow lane running down to the river and the long-abandoned dockland warehouses. He parked and went up in a