Girl on Fire by Tony Parsons

Author:Tony Parsons [Parsons, Tony]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: thriller, Mystery
ISBN: 9781780895956
Goodreads: 35407282
Publisher: Century
Published: 2018-03-08T00:00:00+00:00

21

‘I lie belly-up in the sunshine, happier than you will ever be,’ I read. ‘Today I sniffed many dog butts – I celebrate by kissing your face.’

Scout sat up in bed, smoothing down her duvet and smiling secretly to herself as I read. She liked this one.

‘Another dog poem,’ she observed.

‘I sound the alarm!

Paperboy – come to kill us all –

Look! Look! Look! Look! Look!

I sound the alarm!

Garbage man – come to kill us all –

Look! Look! Look! Look! Look!’

She watched Stan, asleep at her feet, as if he might possibly enjoy a poem about a dog. And of course I watched her. My daughter at seven – pink-faced from her bath, her hair smelling of shampoo, sitting up straight for the ritual of the bedtime read.

‘Look in my eyes and deny it,’ I read.

Scout grinned at me, waiting for the punchline.

I closed the book and recited the last line from memory.

‘No human could love you as much as I do.’

‘Who wrote that one, Daddy?’

‘That’s by Anonymous, angel.’

‘He’s written some good stuff,’ Scout said. ‘Old Anonymous.’

I kissed the top of her head and took Stan with me when I turned out the light. Scout’s eyes were already closing as she snuggled down. But I knew that sleep would not come that easily for me tonight.

I spread an exercise mat on the floor of the living room and cranked out one hundred press-ups and then one hundred sit-ups in four sets of twenty-five. But although my body was weary my head was still full. I was nowhere near sleep. So I went to one of the big windows of the loft and watched the men at the meat market and the young dancers filing happily into Fabric.

As the time drifted past midnight, and the moon crossed the sky behind the great gleaming dome of St Paul’s, the streets below our window seemed to get busier. Smithfield is the insomniac’s neighbourhood.

The summer night passed slowly. In the small hours, I lay on my bed for a while but my head was still too full for sleep. So I got up, showered and shaved, and brewed a pot of black coffee. At 4 a.m. sharp Mrs Murphy arrived, bleary from sleep, shivering in the chill of the hour before dawn.

‘You’ll want your coat on out there,’ she told me.

I nodded, and checked in on my sleeping daughter and stroked my snoring dog.

And then I went to work.

The sun would be up at 5 a.m. but it was still pitch-dark when I arrived at the car park of West End Central. The place was already buzzing. Whitestone, in a Kevlar jacket and a PASGT helmet, was briefing a couple of uniformed coppers.

Jackson Rose was standing at the back of a jump-off van, talking quietly to his SFOs.

And a team of paramedics stood in the open doors of an ambulance gulping down coffee they probably didn’t need.

Every face in that car park was pulled tight with adrenaline.

Jackson’s shots didn’t look like police officers at all.

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