Page 1

chapter one

Bastard incoming.

That’s what Gabriella’s colleague and friend Liz called what was about to happen.

Gabriella had to admit, it was a perfect description.

She wrote out the ticket on Kings Road in Chelsea, listening to the sound of shouting and swearing drawing closer.

She refused to scrawl and run, which every nerve in her body was urging her to do, as a man moved toward her like a storm, spewing thunder and lightning. Instead, she held her ground, carefully filling in the details as he got louder and closer.

When he was a few car-lengths away, she could finally make out what he was screaming.

“Hands off my car!” He slammed a fist into a parked vehicle he passed as he moved toward her, and she heard the meaty smack of it and tried not to flinch.

She slipped the fixed penalty notice into its plastic sleeve and had just begun to tape it to the windscreen of the Land Rover when Shouty Man arrived.

“Give that to me.” He ripped the plastic sleeve off the window, and tried to tear it, but the plastic was too robust and he struggled with it for a few moments, his face red, his massive hands twisting as he tried to rend it down the middle.

Eventually, humiliated, he worked out he had to pull the ticket out, and he did, throwing it on the ground and jumping up and down on it a few times.

Gabriella had taken a step back, and as she watched the tantrum, a well of laughter bubbled up inside her. Nerves, she admitted, but also, it was funny to see a middle-aged man act like a baby.

Passersby began to stop and look and he seemed to come to himself, aware that he had a growing audience. He raised his arm and shook his fist. “What are you staring at?”

“A grown man acting like a toddler,” a woman with the clear, crystal-cut accent of the upper west end, opined, lifted her nose and walked off, her little dog trotting by her side.

“Bitch,” the man muttered under his breath, but her comment seemed to have taken the wind out of his sails.

Gabriella saw he was dressed in rough trousers and jacket, and the smell of cow manure coming from the tires that she had caught a few whiffs of while she had filled out the penalty notice suddenly made sense.

She had herself a farmer, on a foray into the Big Smoke.

“Jumping up and down on it won’t help,” she said, keeping her tone crisp and even. “If you can’t afford to pay, you can contact the city and work out a payment plan.” She gave a nod and hitched her satchel up on her shoulder as she began to walk her route again.

“Can’t afford . . .” The farmer spluttered. “I’ll have you know, girlie, I have twenty trucks coming into the city every market day. And every single one of them seems to have a fine by the end of the day. It’s daylight robbery!”

Gabriella shook her head and kept walking, not willing to engage any further.

The thunder of boots behind her made her heart leap in her chest as a heavy hand came down on her shoulder, and she was spun around.

“Now see here . . .” His face was right up in hers, skin flushed, mustache quivering. The stink of stale tobacco wafted off him.

“Sir.” She tried to shrug his hand off. “I don’t make the rules. My job is to follow the law. If you have a problem with it, take it up with the lawmakers.” She wanted to knock his arm away with her own, but she was afraid to provoke him any more than he was already provoked.

“You need some help there, miss?” One of the men who had been watching the incident from the start, having just gotten out of his Plymouth a few parking spots down, asked.

“Do I need some help, sir?” Gabriella asked him.

The farmer looked at his hand, lifted it, and took a step back. Shook his head, and stomped off, muttering under his breath.

Gabriella gave the Plymouth driver a nod of thanks, and swung back to her route.

There wasn’t a day that went by without some excitement, but this one pushed the limits.

She turned down a smaller street, just to have a bit of time to get herself back together, and saw three boys up ahead.

From their furtive behavior, they looked up to no good. Her stomach sank, because she did not feel like another argument, but rather than run away, they ran toward her, faces a little pale under the dirt and smudges on their cheeks.

“Miss, miss!” The one in front’s eyes went to her uniform. “Youse the police?”

“Traffic warden,” Gabriella said. “But I can get the police. What’s wrong?”

“We found a body, miss.” The second boy nearly ran into the back of his friend. “In the rubble.”

“In the rubble,” the third boy echoed, pointing back the way they’d come.

Gabriella knew which rubble they meant. One of the final half blocks destroyed during the war that had yet to be cleared and rebuilt.

Something to do with an argument over who owned it, she’d heard.

“What kind of body?” she asked. She didn’t think they were lying, they looked too shocked, but she didn’t want to call the police and then find it was a cat or something.

“Maybe a lady?” the first boy said. “The shoe is a lady’s shoe.”

“Can you tell me where?” Gabriella asked, walking in the direction they’d come. “You don’t have to show me.”

“Protecting evidence,” Boy Two said, sagely, but she thought she caught an undercurrent of relief in his voice.

“That’s right,” she agreed.

“Where’d you learn that, Billie?” Boy Three asked.

“Me bruvver’s detective magazines. Gets ’em from America, he does.”

They had reached the rubble, and Billie pointed to the top of the pile. “Up there, miss, over the top of the bricks. Just out of sight over the other side.”

Hidden from the street, Gabriella thought. “Thank you, boys. You wait here, I’ll just do a quick check.”

She was wearing her sturdy shoes, but still the going was treacherous. Some of the bricks had been crushed into small, sharp pieces, others balanced on each other precariously. By the time she reached the top of the pile she was sweating, despite the cool autumn weather. She had begun to smell the decomposition long before then, though.

She had to breathe through her mouth to stop herself from retching by the time she could see over the side.

A woman lay, half-buried under debris, one stockinged foot outstretched, the shoe a little distance away. A hand reached out to the side, with a delicate watch on the wrist, although her skin was purpling and swollen with decomposition. Her jacket was a neat houndstooth.

Gabriella carefully reversed as the ground shifted beneath her feet. She was relieved to have something to focus on that wasn’t the death and desecration behind her.

When she reached the road again, the boys were still there.

“It’s real, isn’t it?” Boy One asked.

They had been hoping she would tell them they were wrong, she realized.

She gave a grim nod. “It’s real.”

She looked around, saw there were no shops down this road, only a few narrow entrances that she guessed were to the flats in the low buildings that lined the road.

This was a pricey area, but the flats opposite would be affordable housing while a pile of rubble lay across from them as the only view.

She headed back toward the Kings Road, where there would be a telephone box, or perhaps a friendly shopkeeper.

“Where ya going?” Billie asked, as he and his two friends followed behind her.

“To find a phone.” She reached the Kings Road, and then, to her deep relief, saw a bobby walking along on the other side of the road.

She knew him. His beat was the same as her own, and they crossed paths regularly.

“Constable Evans!” She gave a wave, and he turned to her in surprise. “I need help.”

He was young. Maybe even younger than she was, but he had a ponderous, deliberate way about him.

He more than hit the height requirement for the police force, standing at least six foot four, and she wondered whether his size led to the careful way he had, although James, her boyfriend, was almost as tall and muscular, and he moved with a kind of fluid grace.

Evans checked for traffic and then crossed over to her, his eyes going to the boys. “Trouble?” he asked.

“We found a body,” Boy One said. Then he glanced at Billie and Boy Three, as if suddenly wondering if he should have spoken up.

“These boys were playing in the rubble down the alley and they found a body. I’ve checked. They aren’t mistaken.” She grimaced at the thought of what she’d found.

“Bad?” Constable Evans asked.

“Bad,” she agreed. “She’s been there for a while.”

Evans thought about it. “I should stay at the scene. Can you go to the station, let the station commander know?” he asked.

She gave a nod. “The boys can show you where she is.”

Her words seemed to both thrill and horrify the boys, but they danced away, impatient for Evans to follow them.

It was the shoe, Gabriella thought with a shiver as she walked toward the Chelsea nick. That’s why she felt as if she was floating a little bit above herself.

She had found the body of a young woman just a few months ago, and in a macabre mirror of the scene, Patty’s shoe had come off and lain a little way from her foot, just like the woman in the rubble.

She had never wanted to see anything like that again, but now she had.

She gritted her teeth, and walked a little faster.