Never Look Back by Clare Donoghue Read Free Book Online

hands tucked in between her knees, head down, her hair covering her face. She was rocking back and forth. He stared at her, willing her to look up, to face him. He wrapped his fingers around the bars of the fence, his knuckles white, but when she finally raised her head he loosened his grip on the cold metal. He saw her wipe away a tear from her cheek. He wanted to kill whoever was responsible for the agony he could see on her face.

8
     
    24 January – Friday
     
    Lockyer sat back in his chair and stared at Debbie’s file, relaxing his eyes until the words blurred on the scattered pages. He had been stuck in his office, reading and re-reading the post-mortem report, since 7.30 this morning. He pushed the section containing the photographic record of the procedure further to the back of the file. There wasn’t one part of his brain that needed to see those images again. The first-hand experience had been enough.
    He let his head hang forward and closed his eyes. Despite speaking to Megan and seeing her for a takeaway last night, he still felt odd, shaky. The smallest, seemingly inconsequential details about Debbie’s case kept catching him off guard, liquefying his stomach, sending him running to the men’s room. It didn’t make sense. Her resemblance to his daughter was understandably unsettling but it hardly warranted this intense physical reaction. The only time he could remember feeling this emotionally drained and tense was when Megan was born. He had spent the first month of her life in a state of perpetual panic. The slightest thing had him convinced he was going to lose her. Even the memory made the muscles in his neck knot. But now, this case, this murdered teenager. Why couldn’t he focus? Why couldn’t he control his own body, for God’s sake? He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand as bile pooled beneath his tongue.
    It was no good. The more he tried to push Megan out of his thoughts and concentrate on Debbie, the more his daughter’s face appeared in his mind. To top it off, there were no hits for the partial fingerprint or the DNA. That could change but he would have to be patient. And his calls to the organized crime unit hadn’t turned up anything on the drugs. No missing prescriptions or stolen drug batches to chase up. Doors were closing faster than they were opening.
    He picked up the transcripts of Jane’s interviews with Debbie’s family, work colleagues and friends. There was practically nothing to go on. Deborah Stevens had been an ordinary girl with a normal job, living with her mother and stepfather in a nondescript council house on a suburban street in Nunhead. They were separated from the darker, poorer streets of Peckham by Nunhead Cemetery and Dulwich proper – the posh part, by the Rye: a piece of parkland better described as a modest patch of grass. The family had been checked and ruled out, everyone but Debbie’s real father, who hadn’t been located, as yet. Wherever he was, he wasn’t voting and he wasn’t paying tax. Lockyer would have to call in some favours at MPS to see if they couldn’t track Mr Stevens down using the missing persons’ database. Mind you, if the CSA hadn’t found him for child support, Lockyer doubted the MPS would fare much better.
    Debbie had worked for Foster Advertising for six months but none of her colleagues knew her well. In fact few seemed to know what her actual job entailed. Her manager, William Hodgson, spoke highly of her. He said she had been a hard worker; always on time, thorough and cheerful. Lockyer sat forward and looked again at the section on Debbie’s aborted pregnancy. There was no mention in any of the interviews about a man, a boyfriend. Her mother was adamant there was no boyfriend. ‘Debbie wasn’t interested in boys,’ the transcript read. ‘She wanted to make something of herself.’ Jane had told him that the mother’s voice had been brimming with animosity. Not towards Debbie, of course, but towards the