Hell Is Always Today by Jack Higgins Read Free Book Online

chief technician shook his head. “I don’t know if you noticed, but all the lads keep their lockers padlocked. That was on advice from one of your blokes after we had a lot of pinching last year. Too easy for people to get in through the side door.”
    Miller thanked him and they went back along the corridor, and stood on the steps looking out at the driving rain.
    “You’re thinking he just walked out as he was?” Brady suggested.
    Miller shrugged. “He didn’t have much time remember. One thing’s certain—he couldn’t afford to hang about.”
    Brady shook his head. “He wouldn’t last long in his bare feet on a night like this. Bound to be spotted by someone sooner or later.”
    “As I see it he has three possible choices,” Miller said. “He can try to steal a car, but that’s messy because he’s got to nose his way round till he finds one that some idiot’s forgotten to lock and in that rig-out of his, he’s certain to be noticed.”
    “He could always hang around some alley and wait his chance to mug the first bloke who went by.”
    Miller nodded. “My second choice, but it’s still messy and there aren’t many people around the back streets on a night like this. He could get pneumonia waiting. My own hunch is that he’s making for somewhere definite. Somewhere not too far away perhaps. Who were his friends?”
    “Come off it, he didn’t have any.” Brady chuckled. “Except for the female variety. The original sexual athlete, the Gunner. Never happy unless he had three or four birds on the go at once.”
    “What about Mona Freeman?” Miller said. “He was going to marry her.”
    “She was a mug if she believed him.” Brady shook his head. “She’s still in Holloway. Conspiracy to defraud last year.”
    “All right then,” Miller said. “Get out the street directory and let’s take a look at the map. Something might click while you’re looking at it.”
    Brady had grown old on the streets of the city and had developed an extraordinary memory for places and faces, the minutiae of city life. Now he unfolded the map at the back of his pocket directory and examined the area around the infirmary. He gave a sudden grunt. “Doreen Monaghan.”
    “I remember her,” Miller said. “Little Irish girl of seventeen just over from the bogs. She thought the sun shone out of the Gunner’s backside.”
    “Well, she isn’t seventeen any longer,” Brady said. “Has a flat in a house in Jubilee Terrace less than a quarter of a mile from here. Been on the game just over a year now.”
    “Let’s go then.” Miller grinned. “And don’t forget that right of his whatever happens. He’s only got to connect once and you won’t wake up till next Friday.”

5
    When the Gunner hurried across the courtyard and turned into the side street at the rear of the infirmary, he hadn’t the slightest idea what he was going to do next. Certainly he had no particular destination in mind although the icy coldness of the wet flags beneath his bare feet told him that he’d better find one quickly.
    The rain was hammering down now which at least kept the streets clear and he paused on a corner to consider his next move. The sign above his head read Jubilee Street and triggered off a memory process that finally brought him to Doreen Monaghan who at one time had worshipped the ground he walked on. She’d written regularly during the first six months of his sentence when he was at Pentonville, but then the letters had tailed off and gradually faded away. The important thing was that she lived at 15, Jubilee Terrace and might still be there.
    He kept to the back streets to avoid company and arrived at his destination ten minutes later, a tall, decaying Victorian town house in a twilight area where a flat was high living and most families managed on one room.
    The fence had long since disappeared and the garden was a wilderness of weeds and brambles, the privet hedge so tall that the weight of the heavy rain