Cold Kill by David Lawrence Read Free Book Online Page B

face down, get off your face and don’t forget to spend.
    The whores had hearts of gold, frankincense behind their ears and myrrh in the dinky flasks that they kept in their clutch purses next to a strip of condoms and a mobile phone. Snatch purses, they called them. At this time of night, in these temperatures, you could always get a deal: they were happy to get into anyone’s car.
    Stella drove back to Delaney’s flat, past houses that marketed at three million and stood just on the fringe of high-rise estates where the jobless, penniless and hopeless lived in their three-room hutches.
    The rich had window-bars and gated estates and direct-link alarms.
    The poor had nothing to lose.
    When she got in, Delaney was awake, sitting at his laptop, playing old-style jazz, drinking whisky, eating ice-cream. Stella stole his drink and read a couple of the notes he was making for his article.
    â€˜Have you got him?’ he asked.
    â€˜Not sure. Could be. Who are Sadie and Jamie?’
    â€˜Street-people.’
    Stella tapped him on the arm, then pointed at the window: a view of rooftops and a quarter moon in a cold sky. ‘They’re out there now.’
    â€˜Bound to be.’
    â€˜Panhandling the late-nighters, looking for a warm spot over a kitchen-grating.’
    â€˜I expect so.’
    â€˜Low-tog sleeping-bags in sub-zero temperatures.’
    He retrieved his glass and took a sip. ‘And here am I in the warm with my single malt getting a series of articles out of it. Well-paid articles. What a shit.’
    Stella got a drink of her own: vodka-rocks. Their journo/cop routine wasn’t a new thing, nor was it particularly adversarial. Well, a bit, maybe. Just a little edge to it: Hands On vs Hands Off. In life, cops needed journalists, and vice-versa. Cops wanted to manipulate journalists, and vice-versa. Cops went eyeball to eyeball with journalists, and...
    Stella and Delaney were not blind to the ironies and parallels in all this.
    â€˜Maybe you ought to be down there with them,’ she said. ‘Sleeping out, jacking up, pissing into your bag.’
    â€˜I’ve done all that,’ he told her. ‘Didn’t you notice I’d gone?’
    She drank her vodka, pushed his computer across the desk, sat on his lap and kissed him open-mouthed. She said, ‘I can’t get enough of you.’
    Sadie sacked-out over the hotspot by the back door of the Ocean Diner. Jamie was tagging along for the kitchen leftovers, but he wasn’t bedding down. He seemed to be always on the move.
    â€˜Christmas,’ he told Sadie, ‘the birth of Our Lord. The time is surely approaching when we will see Him again.’
    â€˜Yeah,’ Sadie said. ‘I’m counting on it.’
    â€˜In all His glory.’
    â€˜Absolutely.’
    â€˜Come to separate the sheep from the goats.’
    â€˜Good idea.’
    â€˜The Son of God come to send sinners to hell and the righteous to Paradise.’
    A sous-chef came out for a smoke and to catch half a minute of the frost-laden air. When he exhaled, the smoke billowed with his breath and seemed to go on for ever. He went back, then re-emerged with the remnants of unfinished meals and a two-thirds-full bottle of TÅ· Nant.
    After they had eaten, Sadie turned in her bag and pulled the flap over her head. She’d been trying half the night to make a connection, but she hadn’t raised enough money, and her regular dealer, who might have extended a credit deal, wasn’t on the street or at home.
    â€˜The Son of God,’ Jamie asserted, ‘born in a stable and risen in glory.’
    â€˜Okay,’ Sadie said. Neither spoke for a full five minutes, then Sadie added: ‘You know what, Jamie? Fuck the Son of God.’

7
    Duncan Palmer was raw-eyed and looked a little ragged round the edges. You might have put it down to jet-lag, were it not for the fact that his girlfriend had been murdered. Sue Chapman had