Running Scared by Ann Granger Read Free Book Online

between the shoulder blades which told me someone was following me. Not walking behind me, following me.
     
    I wheeled round. People were surging along, faces set and purposeful, on many the strain of the approaching festive season already showing. I wondered which one it was. None of them looked a likely candidate. Perhaps my nerves were overstretched, firing my imagination. Or perhaps the tracker had been quicker than me and, a split second before I turned, had nipped into a doorway or wheeled round and started back away from me. I moved on, thoughtful.
     
     
    The rain had packed in during the previous night and a fitful sun had shone all morning, drying up the pavements and streets. Despite that, a puddle had formed in the road outside my flat. Water doesn’t usually collect there but the rains had been heavy. I didn’t pay it too much attention.
     
    I hadn’t seen anything of Daphne since our chat over the bottle of wine. As far as I knew the brothers Knowles hadn’t returned, but I was keeping an eye open. Daphne wasn’t the only person on my mind. There was Tig. I should let that situation alone; it wasn’t my business. But I decided to give it a try. The day was fairly bright, but it wouldn’t last long. By four darkness would’ve drawn in again. If I wanted to find Tig, I had to set out now. I had a quick cup of tea and went in search of her.
     
    I returned to the entrance near to the supermarket where I’d found her, but she wasn’t there. I widened out my hunt in slowly increasing circles because I thought it likely she and her partner were working this area. But they appeared to have moved on. Maybe they’d been warned off, either by the law or because they’d trespassed on someone else’s turf. At any rate, neither Tig nor the man in the plaid jacket were to be seen.
     
    I decided to give up and for something to do in the remaining short space of daylight, set off for Camden High Street.
     
    Trotting down the Chalk Farm Road, I felt my spirits rise. I like this patch. To my mind, it’s the nearest thing to Dickensian London, alive and kicking in all its variety and vulgarity. So, it’s getting a tad gentrified with middle-class stores and antiques shops setting up, but it is still reassuringly eccentric and clinging to its pleb roots.
     
    The recent rains had washed it clean. The black horses with glaring red eyes which leaped out from the façade of the Round House gleamed as if some infernal groom had buffed them up. I was lured by the promises of the Circus of Horrors and the Terrordome, but they were closed at the moment. So I went on, revelling in the used-car outlets, cheap clothes shops, the fast food dispensaries and street pedlars. I smiled up at the huge painted figures decorating the upper floor façades of the shops, the giant wooden boots, camouflaged tank, leather-jacketed rocker, silver skull and, why oh why, above the tattoo parlour, a sea of scarlet flames?
     
    I knew that the Stables and the canalside markets wouldn’t be open now, but remnants of Inverness Street market could still be in progress and I might pick up something cheap and cheerful there. As stallholders closed up, they were often happy to let you have something virtually at cost. But before I ever got there, I glimpsed a plaid jacket ahead of me and there he was, Tig’s boyfriend. I was just in time. Seconds later, he turned into The Man in The Moon pub.
     
    He wasn’t likely to be out in a hurry. Tig wasn’t with him, but ten to one, she wasn’t far away. I guessed they’d staked out a pitch and he’d left her begging while he spent the money on lager. I hunted in earnest now, casting about below the railway bridge and in the environs of the big drive-by supermarket which lay behind the main road, round by the bridge over the canal and at last ran her to earth in the entrance to Camden Town tube station.
     
    She wasn’t pleased to see me. ‘You again!’ she exclaimed, and her pinched face