The Score by Howard Marks Read Free Book Online Page B

provided. Their user name is a jumble of letters and numbers that might be a product description of a circuit-board for all she knows. It tells her nothing
.
    Is the new follower someone from school? Is she about to be bullied again?
    She feels nervous as she looks at her Mentions. She has a new one. A Tweet from the latest follower. She feels elated as she reads it, vindicated
.
    @purevoice94: Saw your YouTube film. You have REAL talent
.
    From the TV downstairs she can hear the sound of studio applause. As her hands move across the keyboard, she begins to feel revived
.

 
    4
    THERE WERE NO police lights, but Cat could tell that this was the place by the occasional flash of torchlight that appeared between the trees around the abandoned pithead as the SOCO team battled the rain and the dusk.
    The ground was too muddy to use the Laverda’s stand so she leaned the heavy bike against a tree. Ducking under the police tape, she flipped her warrant card open in the face of the PC who had been smoking outside the station. She was waved through.
    The path petered out into bushes. Cat pushed her way through them, drawing in her breath sharply as she turned her foot on the uneven ground. There was a bust-up old wooden door across the entrance to the pithead tunnel. She swung it open. The air inside was still, stifling. She took a deep breath as she entered, saw the blue and white of the police tent erected inside the tunnel which led on to the mine shaft. A few police lights were placed on the floor here and there. Thomas’s familiar outline was a few yards further down.
    ‘It’s Nia Hopkins, isn’t it?’
    Thomas straightened up, winced as he flattened a hand along the small of his back and rubbed at his spine. He could only just stand up straight beneath the low, bowed roof.
    ‘Yes. Just now got positive ID from the friend who found the body.’
    ‘Martin Tilkian’s daughter’s gone. Four days ago.’
    Cat looked around, saw something beyond Thomas on the floor. A luminous glow, growing brighter as her eyes adapted to the dark. She stepped forward, bent closer. The glow lit up some areas of glitter that formed a rough oval. It was a helium balloon, somewhat deflated. Next to the balloon was a bright mauve sleeping bag, glistening with damp, and a row of empty superstore vodka bottles lined up against the wall. A pair of black pumps were splayed next to a plastic bag half-filled with socks, a Griff Morgan T-shirt, a heavy black jumper.
    Thomas stooped over to Cat, stood next to her by the balloon. ‘There.’ He pointed further along the tunnel. ‘Down the shaft.’
    ‘She fell?’
    ‘Looks that way.’
    If she’d fallen, then that meant that there was no killer; if Nia had fallen then Esyllt was safer. Thomas nudged the sleeping bag with the toe of his shoe. ‘Looks like she’d been here alone for a while. The friend said she’d been depressed, agitated.’
    ‘How do you know she’d been here alone?’
    Thomas pointed at the busted door Cat had just come in through. ‘Locked from the inside.’
    ‘So how did her friend find her?’
    Thomas moved a little deeper into the tunnel, pointed to an opening close to the roof. A crude gap formed a skylight. It had been plugged with industrial glass, cobwebs restricting the light still further. ‘The friend looked down, saw the sleeping bag, recognised it as Nia’s.’
    Cat walked further into the tunnel. Thomas pointed upwards. He’d clearly asked himself the same thing that she was. ‘You seen those cobwebs, Price? Thick as a bloody curtain. Nobody’s been down that way in years.’
    ‘Are there other entrances?’
    She could just about make out Thomas shaking his head. ‘Been closed up for years. It’s a huge system, stretches for miles underground. They’ve been mining here since Roman times, so there’s bound to be another way in somewhere, but this one’s been nobbled by Health and Safety. Too close to civilisation for comfort, apparently.’
    Further