Read Online Baby Love by Maureen Carter - Free Book Online

sometimes more.
    Not that she had any right to be here. Powell was in charge of the inquiry. She was on the missing-baby case. Professionally, she’d rarely been so torn. Talk about a rock and a slab of steel. Zoë’s image was constantly in her head.
Bev would go the extra mile and then some to get the baby back. But she owed the rape victims as well. She’d forged a bond with the first two girls. They phoned her now and again to find out if there’d been any developments, sometimes staying
on the line to chat about films or frocks. Teenage things, normal things.
    She didn’t want to let them down, so she’d come up with a working compromise. She just hadn’t told anyone at work. She’d decided to give her all to finding the baby, a hundred per cent. Then pull out more, on her own time, for
the big girls: Rebecca Fox, Kate Quinn and Laura Kenyon. Though the guv had taken her off Street Watch, there was nothing to say she couldn’t cast the odd glance down the road.
    Carefully she started edging down the embankment to the track. The slope was drier now but she didn’t want to do a Powell. What with the moonlight casting sinister shadows and the gnarled branches and twisted roots, it looked like a location
from Lord of the Rings.
    She gasped when a rat the size of an Alsatian darted for cover. There’d be colonies of the buggers round here. Imagine poor Laura lying scared and alone in the dark and rain, dehumanised, dumped like rubbish. Bev hadn’t met the girl yet
but hell... How do you get over something like that? She shivered, though it wasn’t cold.
    Another minute or so and she’d seen enough. She wasn’t here to search. There was no point, not when the SOCO A-team had covered every inch. She turned to head back to the Midget and stopped so suddenly she had to shoot out a hand to keep
her balance.
    The crime boys hadn’t been here in moonlight. Or torchlight.
    It was probably a ring-pull or a shard of glass, but something near the track had definitely glinted in the light. She backed fractionally, slowly moving her head, adjusting her eye-line, trying to reproduce the exact angle at which she’d
spotted it. No good. Probably a rat’s eye. One more go. Carefully, she inched forward, shining the torch in the direction of whatever she’d seen. Yes: a definite glitter. Now she had a firmer fix, it was worth a closer look.
    Inching and sliding, she homed in on one of the rotting sleepers. Down on her haunches, she spotted it at close quarters, reached a fingernail into the cracked timber and pulled out a tiny earring. It was silver and the diamond looked real. Bev closed
her eyes, tried to call up the interview notes she’d read that evening. She was certain Laura Kenyon had told Powell she’d not been wearing earrings. Was the girl lying? And if she’d lost an earring during the attack, what had happened
to the other? Was it down here as well? Or had the rapist added it to his trophy collection?
    Bev held the earring between thumb and forefinger, twirling it to catch the moon’s silvery light. Deep in thought, she was unaware of a figure in the shadows, barely twenty feet away.
    He was taking great pains not to be seen. Not yet. The time would come soon enough.
    Gondolas, gondolas, more fucking gondolas. The Monty Python sketch popped into Bev’s head every time she set foot in her new home. Only it wasn’t gondolas, it was packing cases. Six months she’d been here and still
hadn’t located the microwave, two library books and a particularly fetching pair of French knickers. She was sick of it: bits of her life crammed into crates and cardboard boxes. Towering stacks of the stuff.
    Was it lack of time? Or inclination? The Baldwin Street terrace didn’t feel like home, but if she didn’t do the unpacking and have her things around her it never would. Maybe she needed a housemate. Or a wife. How good would it be to come
home to dinner in the oven and slippers by the fire?
    She slammed a piece of