48 Hours, Then She Dies: An edge of your seat page turner set in Edinburgh by Harry Fisher

Author:Harry Fisher [Fisher, Harry]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Singl Fish
Published: 2024-10-05T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 35

To stand any chance of finding people who might have been bent, back in the day, we’re working through the chain of command in Hugo’s Division at the time. I’d passed this on to Andrew who’s looking more uncomfortable as the day wears on. The poor dear can’t sit for long and standing up isn’t much easier for him. At one point, he was stretched out on the floor conducting a conversation with Ella, who’ll probably end up with a crick in her neck as a result.

It takes a while, but eventually with the help of the Thompson Twins, Andrew unearths organisation charts for the period in question. Those were different times. My mum worked in a typing pool, and she’s forever regaling me with tales of how primitive things were in her day. Forms and the like were typed first before being run through a manual duplicator to churn out copies. These old machines, Gestetners, took up half a room and spewed ink all over the floor. The copies came out a funny purple-black colour and off-straight; enough to make you look twice. Seeing one now, I remember Mum explaining how she used the underscore key to draw horizontal lines, before rotating the paper through ninety degrees for the vertical lines. Apparently the design process was so complicated, it became part of the secretarial exam.

The format too is strange. No first names are listed, and nearly all have more than one initial. Some have three or four. It could be his parents were keeping family politics in harmony, but I have to say “D Insp W. E. P. Farquharson” is a belter. I imagine a gentlemen sporting flowing whiskers, monocle jammed in one eye, resplendent in a three-piece suit with a silver pocket watch dangling from its chain.

The charts and their contents mean nothing to me, so I hand the bundle back to Andrew. ‘See what you can find out, my boy.’ He throws me a look of distaste.

‘Ah, well,’ I say. ‘It’s not as if you’re planning to go out clubbing, is it?’

◆◆◆

Andrew’s been on the trail of Stevenson’s other sister, Denise Lithgow. ‘Long story short,’ he says, ‘she’s not answering the mobile number we got from Florence. She doesn’t live at the address we have, but eventually I got one from the solicitor who conducted the sale of the house. Apparently she doesn’t have a landline, which is more and more common these days. The Control sent their nearest car round. Upshot is, she wasn’t in, but a neighbour did have a number for her. So I’ve left a message.’

I blink at him. ‘And that was the abridged version?’

◆◆◆

The sound techs provided a second report from the afternoon call with Stevenson, and Andrew paraphrases it for us. ‘This time they did detect a radio or TV broadcast – voice not music. Traffic noise moderate but still nothing to suggest heavy commercial vehicles. Many instances of children shrieking and shouting, but the schools had just disgorged their contents.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.