Shatter by Michael Robotham Read Free Book Online

thieves.
    The Indian woman has slender legs. She should wear short skirts and make the most of them instead of covering them up. I can only see her ankles when she crosses her legs at her desk. She does it often. I think she knows I’m watching her.
    My coffee has arrived. The milk should be hotter. I will not send it back. The waitress with the almost-pretty face would be disappointed. I will tell her next time.
    The list is almost finished. There are names down the left-hand column. Contacts. People of interest. I will cross each of them off as I find them.
    Leaving coins on the table, I dress in my coat, my hat and my scarf. The waitress doesn’t see me leave. I should have handed her the money. She would have had to look at me then.
    I can’t walk quickly with the shopping bags. Rain leaks into my eyes and gurgles in the downpipes. I am here now, at the end of Bourne Lane, outside a gated forecourt, fenced off and topped with barbed wire. It was once a panel-beaters or some sort of workshop with a house attached.
    The door has three deadlocks— a Chubb Detector, a five pin Weiser and a Lips 8362C. I start at the bottom, listening to the steel pins retracting in their cylinders.
    I step over the morning mail. There are no lights in the hallway. I removed the bulbs. Two floors of the house are empty. Closed off. The radiators are cold. When I signed the lease, the landlord Mr Swingler asked if I had a big family.
    ‘No.’
    ‘Why do you need such a big house?’
    ‘I have big dreams,’ I said.
    Mr Swingler is Jewish but looks like a skinhead. He also owns a boarding house in Truro and a block of flats in St Pauls, not far from here. He asked me for references. I didn’t have any.
    ‘Do you have a job?’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘No drugs. No parties. No orgies.’
    He might have said ‘corgis’, I couldn’t understand his accent, but I paid three months rent in advance, which shut him up.
    Taking a torch from on top of the fridge, I return to the hall and collect the mail: a gas bill, a pizza menu, and a large white envelope with a school crest in the top left corner.
    I take the envelope to the kitchen and leave it sitting on the table while I pack away the shopping and open a can of beer. Then I sit and slide my finger beneath the flap, tearing a ragged line.
    The envelope contains a glossy magazine and a letter from the admissions secretary of Oldfield Girls School in Bath.

    Dear Mrs Tyler,
    In reference to your request for addresses, I’m afraid that we don’t keep on-going records of our past students but there is an Old Girls website. You will need to contact the convenor Diane Gillespie to get a username, pin and password to access the secure section of the site containing the contact details of old girls.
    I am enclosing a copy of the school yearbook for 1988 and hope it will bring back some memories.
    Good luck with your search.
    Yours sincerely,
    Belinda Casson

    The front page of the yearbook has a photograph of three smiling girls, in uniform, walking through the school gates. The school crest has a Latin quotation: ‘Lux et veritas’ (Light and Truth).
    There are more photographs inside. I turn the pages, running my fingers over the images. Some of them are class photographs on a tiered stage. Girls at the front are seated with knees together and hands clasped on their laps. The middle row girls are standing and those at the back must be perched on an unseen bench. I study the captions, the names, the class, the year.
    There she is— my beloved— the whore’s whore. Second row. Fourth from the right. She had a brown bob. A round face. A half-smile. You were eighteen years old. I was still ten years away. Ten years. How many Sundays is that?

    I tuck the school yearbook under my arm and get a second can of beer. Upstairs a computer hums on my desk. I type in the password and call up an online telephone directory.
    The screen refreshes. There were forty-eight girls in the leaving year of 1988.