A Lark on the Wind by Vince Vogel

Author:Vince Vogel [Vogel, Vince]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2021-09-06T04:00:00+00:00

4

Don Parkinson’s foot tapped a drumbeat on the puddled floor of a phone box. It had taken him some time to find one that still had a working phone inside. On the other side of the scratched windows, people passed by under umbrellas, blown like rubbish on the wind.

“Hello?” a woman’s voice answered.

“We need to meet.”

“Detective Parkinson, is that you?”

“Yes, it’s me. We need to meet.”

She breathed into his ear down the phone.

“We can’t,” she eventually replied.

“We have to.”

“I’m sorry, Detective, but we really can’t.”

It sounded like she was about to put the phone down, so he snapped:

“They’re coming for you!”

More breathing.

“I’m afraid they’re not. Stay safe, Detective.”

“Hey?!”

The line went dead and it made no sense. He was trying to warn her and she’d reacted with a blasé shrug of the shoulders.

None of it made sense.

Don was taken back to the first day he’d met the woman from the phone call. It was back in 2010, when he had been stopped leaving the Yard for lunch.

“There’s a woman here who wants to speak to you about the old Katie Kilkenny case,” the desk sergeant called out to him.

Katie Kilkenny!

Oh how he’d tried to erase you from his mind ever since those dark days of ’89. But you kept on coming back. Wouldn’t leave him alone.

The sergeant guided Don to an anteroom filled with green plastic chairs that shone limply in the glare of strip lighting.

A pretty Afro-European dressed ever so neatly stood up.

Before he had a chance to ask her name, she asked him, “Are you Detective Inspector Donald Parkinson?”

“Yes,” Don replied as if unsure.

“You worked the original case back in ’89?” she asked.

“I did.”

“You’re the only detective I could find who was part of the investigation.”

They stood staring across the room at each other. Both unsure of themselves.

“What have you got?” Don asked her.

She breathed out, chewed her lip for a few seconds and finally said, “Fred Mackenzie did not kill Katie Kilkenny.”

Don instinctively held a finger up to her.

“Not another word,” he said firmly, before checking where the sergeant was. Gazing back at the woman, he said, “Follow me to my office. We’ll do this there.”

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