Like False Money by Penny Grubb

Author:Penny Grubb [Penny Grubb]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780709095057
Publisher: Robert Hale
Published: 2011-09-17T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 14

ANNIE HOPED THE Earle case might prove more productive. How much did she tell Pat about what had happened last night? And what exactly had happened? She had a theory on the latter and before she went back to the apartment, would test it out.

Back in Hull, Annie headed away from the river and towards Orchard Park. She drove to the tower block, left the car and headed for the lobby. Once inside, she joined two people waiting in the lift bay. When the lift doors opened and they stepped inside, she half followed, keeping her foot in the door to hold it open, and peered at the panel, swiftly counting up the buttons and looking for the discreet holes that allowed special access to key holders. She stepped back out again and allowed the doors to close. She’d seen all she needed.

Outside again, she returned to the car and cruised round the area looking for a vantage point. A traffic island in the middle of a busy junction looked about right so she pulled the car off the road on to waste ground and climbed out.

It was several minutes before a gap in the traffic allowed her to cross to the middle of the junction. Once there, she pushed her way over lumpy and uneven ground through a tangle of grass and brambles that snaked through a clump of low bushes. The fight to find a way through reminded her of Doris Kitson. Had she learnt anything from all the chatter, all the meandering diversions? More to the point, had she missed anything?

She stood in knee-high grass with the roar of traffic in her ears and the sickly tang of exhaust fumes in her nostrils. Prickles of sweat stippled her skin. A haze of pollution shimmered in the air. The heat was oppressive in town in a way it wasn’t out in Milesthorpe. The temperature gauge in the car had climbed to twenty-six.

Her hands held the binoculars she’d used to watch the livery yard at the bottom of the hill in Milesthorpe. She lifted them to her eyes and focused on the distant roof of the tower block. Doris Kitson was mistaken: there was nothing wrong with her powers of observation; she hadn’t registered Mally’s father’s small blue car because she had no reason to and had other things on her mind.

The shapes on the high roof made no immediate sense. She’d never been on the roof of a tall building to know what was normal. There could be a miniature estate hidden away, a self-contained village. She liked the idea of trees and green spaces unseen by the city below, but all she saw was a concrete landscape with a couple of small brick built huts in amongst a forest of wires and aerials.

It would be the lift machinery, things to do with the heating systems, the means to keep these blocks of hundreds of homes operating.

And that was where those men had gone. She hadn’t seen

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