Booked for Murder (31 page)

“You're going to be all right,” she said gently. “I love you too. Even if you are a complete headbanger.”

“Alive,” Lindsay croaked.

“Yeah, you're right. Better a live headbanger than a dead sensible head. Don't talk now, darling, save your strength. You'll need it if we're going to get out of here before the execution squad arrive.” Sophie wiped the sweat from Lindsay's face with a crumpled tissue, then stood up. “I'm going to see if I can find a trolley or something that I can wheel you out of here on,” she said.

“No,” Lindsay grunted, forcing herself on to one elbow. “Not time. For that. I can. Walk. If you just. Help me.”

Sighing in exasperation at her partner's refusal to accept defeat, Sophie crouched beside her and pushed her into a sitting position. Then she slung Lindsay's good arm round her shoulder, held on to her wrist with both hands and tried to straighten up. It was a backbreaking job which Sophie would never have managed if the lie she'd told Danny about her back had been the truth. Lindsay's feet scrabbled uselessly under her as Sophie dragged her upright. Finally, they stood together in the middle of the room, Lindsay listing into Sophie, swaying slightly, but managing to keep her feet. The door seemed a very long way away.

“Okay,” Sophie said. “One step at a time.” They managed a jerky movement in the right direction, then a stumble, a stuttering correction and, after what seemed an eternity, a few coordinated steps.

They had almost reached the door when the constipated quacking of a man's voice coming through a loudhailer split the quiet of the mews. “Armed police. The building is surrounded. Come to the front door and throw out your weapons. I repeat, armed police. Come to the front door and throw out your weapons.”

The voice stopped them in their tracks. “Oh, shit,” Lindsay mumbled.

“At least it's better than King's thugs,” Sophie said. “Come on, let's get you through into the secretary's office.” She edged sideways through the door, supporting Lindsay as she staggered through behind her. “Sit down a minute,” Sophie said, easing Lindsay on to the chaise. “I'm going to call for an ambulance. I don't know if they'll have one, and you need to get to hospital as soon as possible.”

“Fine,” Lindsay groaned weakly as she slumped against the back rest. The initial physical blow to her system was deepening into a more profound state of shock, her mind a place where thought was as much of an effort as movement was for her body. Things were starting to look fuzzy round the edges of her vision. The focus of her world had narrowed till all she was aware of was the growing shriek of pain in her shoulder battling with the almost overwhelming desire to slide into sleep. Dimly, she heard Sophie speak. But the urgency in her voice was lost to Lindsay, as were her words. “Soph . . .” she mumbled, her voice tailing off as unconsciousness absolved her from the necessity of decision or action.

“Oh, shit,” Sophie cursed, watching helplessly as Lindsay crumpled before her eyes. “Ambulance? I'm a doctor. Two injured at . . . you've got the location? Fine. One just gone unconscious, GSW to the left shoulder, considerable blood loss. One unconscious, single blow to the head. How soon?” She compressed her lips at the estimate of seven to ten minutes, then realized it would probably take her that long to get Lindsay downstairs.

She replaced the phone and hoisted Lindsay over her shoulder in a fireman's lift. It wasn't the most sensible way to carry someone with a gunshot wound to the shoulder, but Sophie didn't have a lot of choice. There was no way she was leaving Lindsay upstairs with Danny King, unconscious or not. Besides, she knew how important first impressions were to the police, and she wanted a clear separation in their minds right from the start between the two of them and King. It was going to be hard enough to convince them she and Lindsay were telling the truth, given the flimsiness of their evidence and the undoubted weight a corrupt system would place on the word of a rich and successful businessman. “And he probably supports the Tory Party,” Sophie complained to her unconscious burden as she staggered down the stairs one at a time.

At the bottom, she paused for breath. The loudhailer invaded her ears again. “Armed police. You are surrounded. Give up your weapons and nobody will get hurt. Throw your weapons out of the front door and show yourselves. I repeat, you are surrounded.”

“Yeah, fine, we get the message,” Sophie panted, bracing herself and heading across the open-plan office, grateful for the blinds that hid her from the police marksmen she had no doubt would be in place, fingers on triggers, nerves strung tight as a fishing line with a shark on the other end. She prayed nobody would be too eager tonight.

After what felt like half a lifetime, Sophie was across the office and into the reception area. The muscles in her thighs were trembling, but she wasn't going to open the door until she knew the ambulance was there. Legs apart, free arm straight against the wall, she stood sweating for a full minute that stretched her patience near breaking point. Then she heard the swoop of an ambulance siren, growing closer, then abruptly silenced, like someone clamping a hand over a child's mouth.

Dry-mouthed with apprehension, Sophie cracked the door open a couple of inches. “Don't shoot!” she yelled, reaching behind her to pull the gun free. She tossed it out underarm, giving it a flick of the wrist to carry it well away from her. The gun clattered on the road, then there was silence.

“I'm coming out,” she yelled. “We're the victims here, understand? I've got a wounded woman here. We're the victims!”

“Come out slowly, with your hands raised,” the megaphone voice quacked.

Sophie curled her free arm under Lindsay's legs and let her slide down from her shoulder until she carried her in both arms across the front of her body. Then she slowly staggered out into the street, blinking the tears from her eyes. “Get the paramedics,” she shouted. “Somebody get the paramedics.”

Epilogue

T
he light in the seat-belt sign died with an electronic bong. Lindsay waggled her fingers at the window and said, “Goodbye and good riddance.”

“You didn't enjoy your holiday?” Sophie asked.

“Two trips to hospital? Scarred for life in two separate places? Temperatures higher than California and not a room that has air conditioning from London to Loch Fyne? All the guns in America and I have to come to London to get shot?” Lindsay demanded, her voice rising to a squeak.

“We had a nice time in Scotland,” Sophie reminded her.

“You had a nice time in Scotland,” Lindsay said darkly, shifting in her seat to make her bandaged shoulder more comfortable. “I had my mother acting like I'd been brought home to die and my father taking the piss out of me every night. And then when we did get up to Torridon, you wouldn't let me up any decent hills in case I wasn't recovered enough.”

Sophie shook her head, grinning. “I don't think I was unreasonable to put my foot down about a Munro that involved an eight-mile hike just to get to the bottom of the mountain, followed by a 3000-foot climb and another eight-mile hike back to the car.”

“Well,” Lindsay grumbled. “I've never done Maol Chean Dearg. And now I probably never will.”

“Maybe we could have a trip up there when the taxpayers pay for us to come back and testify against Danny King.”

Lindsay brightened up at the thought. It was the least she felt they deserved after the long hours—in her case, excruciatingly painful hours—of police interviews and making statements. After all that, King still hadn't been charged with Penny's murder. As a holding measure, they'd kept him in on attempted murder against Lindsay, conspiracy to murder and illegal possession of firearms. It was fortunate that the police had arrived when they did, alerted by a supermarket security guard who'd heard gunshots, still a rare enough occurrence in London to bring the police within minutes. Any later and King's sidekicks would have got in to destroy the evidence.

Lindsay had hit it off with the officer in charge of the murder inquiry, who had instinctively recognized a kindred pig-headed spirit. Privately, she had told them that they were never going to have more than a purely circumstantial case against King on Penny's murder and that it was up to the Crown Prosecution Service to decide whether they should go for it.

“Spineless tossers,” she'd confided over a cup of tea in the police canteen. “I've tried to argue that the attempt on you only makes sense if you allow the previous murder, but they want more. They always bloody want more. Even against a toerag like Danny King. Trouble is, you put a toerag in an Armani suit and he looks like the frigging lawyers. It's the same as hostages starting to identify with their kidnappers. Suddenly all the briefs forget they're supposed to be on the side of the scruffy coppers and they come out in sympathy with the scrote in the suit.”

She'd sounded a lot more cheerful a few days later when she'd tracked them down by phone at Lindsay's parents' house. “Your friend's neighbor. I think you met him? A Mr. Knight?”

Lindsay cleared her throat. “Might have done,” she said cautiously.

“I thought, what about putting Danny Boy in a line-up? Last resort, you know? His brief starts screaming, which makes us think it's definitely going to be a good idea. So we bring in Mr. Knight and bugger me if he doesn't pick him out straight away. He remembers him because of his car. A Mercedes convertible. He noticed it because
the arrogant little shit had parked it right outside our Mr. Knight's house and he was just pulling away when our witness arrived home from work. Can you believe the conceit of the man? He thinks he's come so far from the East End that he's invincible. And our Mr. Knight never thought to mention it because he didn't look like he was in a hurry and he didn't have any blood on him that he could see. Well, of course he didn't, did he? He's a professional. He knew he was going there to take part in a very bloody murder—he'd either have stripped or worn disposable overalls.

“Then our prize witness says, well, we can't blame him, can we? I mean, murderers don't drive around in top of the range Mercs like hospital consultants, do they?

“Soon as Danny Boy realizes he's been fingered, he starts shitting it. He knows he's in the frame for murder. So he decides it's time to get out from under. He does nothing more than give us his sidekick, the thug who actually did the killing. King was just there to get him in and give the instructions about the stage setting. Can you believe it?

“Once he started talking, we couldn't get him to stop. His brief was practically in tears. We even found out you had a second lucky escape. You was attacked the night before, wasn't you? It wasn't some accidental trip over a wall that sliced your face up, was it? It was one of Danny King's little thugs, hired to scare you off.”

Lindsay couldn't prevent a dry laugh spilling down the line. “Is that what he told you? Somebody's been winding him up. Yes, somebody tried to put my lights out with a baseball bat, but he didn't connect, so I legged it. That's when I really did trip over a wall. So if Danny got told I'd been cut, somebody ripped him off.”

“Couldn't happen to a nicer bloke,” the policewoman had said. “Arrogant, vain, stupid as well. He doesn't even realize that he still gets charged with murder even though it wasn't him who did the actual killing. Joint enterprise, it's called. We've got him, nailed down at all four corners. Not even the CPS can walk away from it now.”

They'd celebrated that night, a double celebration since Helen had also called to announce that Guy and Stella would be facing charges of fraud and false accounting. “I owe you,” she'd said. “You gave me my professional life back.”

“You mean that?” Lindsay said.

“Of course I mean it. Why? What do you want?” Instant nervousness at the other end of the phone.

Lindsay let her stew for a few moments, then said, “I can't think of anything off the top of my head . . .” Helen had exploded with laughter. It was a sound that cheered Lindsay even more than putting Penny's murderer behind bars. She wondered if she'd ever hear Meredith laugh like that again.

Meredith had left for San Francisco a few days before, her life in pieces. If it had been hard to contemplate life without Penny as a lover, it was impossible to imagine it without her very existence. Losing her job had been the final blow, a knockback whose impact had only really hit in the days since King's arrest, when the imperative of finding Penny's killer had been answered. The night before she'd left, she'd told Lindsay she wasn't going to make any decisions about her life for at least six months, displaying a strength and good sense that Lindsay envied.

The cabin steward's inquiry about drinks roused Lindsay from her preoccupation. “To hell with sensible,” she said. “I'll have a Scotch.”

When she'd taken her first sip, Sophie said gingerly, “There's something we need to talk about.”

Lindsay turned her head and stared, a worm of worried fear stirring in her gut. Had she finally pushed Sophie too far? Was this the kind of trouble that altered lives beyond recognition? “No more murders? That's not a problem, I promise.”

Recognising her apprehension, Sophie reached out and squeezed her hand. “That would be nice, but that's not it. After we came back to London, while you were giving the cops the statement about your attack, I had coffee with somebody I used to work with in Glasgow. She's doing similar work to what I've been doing in San Francisco, and their consultant is leaving in the New Year to go to Australia. She's been asked to sound me out to see if I'd consider applying. What do you think?”