Left for Dead: A Maeve Kerrigan Novella (Maeve Kerrigan Novels) by Jane Casey Read Free Book Online Page A

did, analysing what I had done and what I had said. There were a few things that made me cringe, as usual. I couldn’t stop thinking about my little run-in with Andy Styles, and what Chris had told me about him. I also, in a very different way, couldn’t stop thinking about Gary Lovell.
    But that was just stupid. And anyway, I’d been warned off, quite thoroughly, by Inspector Saunders. Chris, in his own way, had been equally discouraging.
    Gary was going to have to work very hard indeed with that kind of opposition, I assured myself as I drifted off into a fitful, unsatisfying doze instead of the deep dreamless sleep I craved.
    * * *
    There was no one from my team in the writing room when I got in, though there were five or six officers using the computers or just hanging around. It wasn’t altogether surprising that I was the only one there, since I was more than an hour early. I sat down at a computer and logged on to the system, feeling self-conscious. I didn’t know anyone else who was in there, at least not well enough to say anything more than hello. I was aware of them watching me, though, and I wondered if they had heard that I was one who’d found Sally-Ann James. She was still alive, but barely. It was the first thing I had checked when I got into work. I’d been lucky to bump into one of the few detectives I knew, Emma Yarwood. She was working on the enquiry, she told me. Sally-Ann was still unconscious. Still unable to tell us in her own words what had happened to her, although the story was written all over her body in bruises and cuts and damage so horrendous that I couldn’t bring myself to imagine it.
    I was early because I couldn’t stand being at home alone any longer and I’d done all the jobs I could think of, including clearing out the fridge. Aisling was going to be one surprised flatmate when she got home. Housework was the only thing that took my mind off the James case. If I managed to stay in touch with it as it developed, I’d have to get a cleaning job or something. There was a limit to how much hoovering one carpet could take.
    What I specifically wanted to do – the reason I had come in extra-early – was read the CRIS reports on the Croydon rapes that Superintendent Godley had mentioned. It didn’t take long, in fact, to skim through them. The two attacks had been five weeks apart, the first taking place in May, the second in June. Again, the victims were women on their way home late at night, on foot. One had got off a bus, the other a tram. One was violated with a branch,the other with a metal pipe, and no third-party DNA had been recovered from either victim. Both were beaten. Both lost items of jewellery that were not recovered – one earring and two bracelets in the first case, a ring for the second victim and her watch. Both had been left with money and valuables that a mugger might have taken – an iPod and a laptop computer. He took things of no value whatsoever. One victim lost a shoe and diligent searching had failed to find it. The only possibility was that he had taken it away with him. He’d also taken underwear and pens, a Tesco loyalty card and a tube of mascara. He was a real magpie, I thought. He just wanted things. Not even personal ones, in the case of the pen and the make-up. There was no way to know what Sally-Ann had been carrying in the bag he’d slung onto the roof in the yards, but it was a big cross-body brown leather one. Most women who carried a bag that big found plenty of things to put in it. It was frustrating, not knowing what he’d taken and what he’d left behind. And even if Sally-Ann woke up, there was no guarantee she’d remember anything useful. There was no guarantee she’d wake up at all, from what Emma had said.
    The only thing we really knew for sure about the rapist was that he hated women.
    ‘What are you up to?’
    I looked up to see Andy Styles standing beside me, looking curious. There was no reason not to tell him.
    ‘I