DO NO HARM an absolutely gripping British crime thriller full of twists by JUDITH CUTLER

Author:JUDITH CUTLER [CUTLER, JUDITH]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Joffe Books crime thriller, mystery and suspense
Published: 2024-05-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Fourteen

The rest is silence.

* * *

However rushed and flustered she felt, Fran always tried to look cool. If she’d combed her hair and applied some slap, senior officers believed the flannel she had to fob them off with, and junior officers trusted her to deal with their problems. Like Tom now, for instance. She even popped a confident smile in place as she opened her office door. And stopped short.

‘Dilly! What are you doing here?’ She stepped inside quickly, closing the door.

The answer, by the looks of it, was that Dilly Pound was enjoying herself, Tom dancing attendance on her. Bottled water, a plastic dish of salad, some uneaten fruit, all on a canteen tray, sat on Fran’s desk, with Dilly occupying her chair and Tom his usual one pulled up opposite.

Tom didn’t even have the grace to blush. He just gave his usual innocent smile. Without a word about Jill Tanner, he explained, ‘Dilly was hungry and I thought no one would notice if I got her the sort of lunch you have if you’re in a hurry.’

Used to have. These days her half hour with Mark, however snatched, was sacrosanct unless one of them was locked in the sort of business that had made Mark inaccessible today.

‘Well, you’d better work out why I’m extraordinarily peckish and go and find me a supplementary sandwich,’ she grinned, appeased by his reasoning. As he left, she turned, amused, to the young woman who seemed to have been absorbed into her unofficial family. ‘OK, Dilly, you’ve obviously explained to Tom why you’re here: could you tell me?’

‘Of course.’ Dilly at least was clearly aware of the potential awkwardness of the situation. ‘And I do apologise. I came straight here. I had to. It never dawned on me you’d be out. And your secretary . . . she just showed me in. And Tom was working away at your desk and he told her you’d just popped out — you know, as if you’d gone to the loo or something — and that she could leave me. You know, trust me not to — well, hack into your files, or something. I don’t know.’ And this was a woman who could talk to camera in long coherent sentences! ‘Which was wonderful. Look.’ She patted an opened A4 Jiffy-bag. The letter inside was slightly creased, as if something else had been in the bag too. ‘It came to me at work.’

In her position, Fran would probably have wanted to be looked after too. Even by Tom, if Mark wasn’t around. Today’s note, sent by courier to TVInvicta, had shifted from the Bible to Shakespeare — thank goodness she’d done Hamlet for A Level — for inspiration. The rest is silence. Apart from that it was in the format she’d come to expect: A4, average weight paper, laser printed. She’d bet her pension there was no DNA on it either, or anything else the slightest bit of use to the forensic science team.

‘And the note wasn’t quite all.

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