Read Online Booked for Murder by Val McDermid - Free Book Online Page B

bit in the last half-dozen years. There’s nothing wrong between me and Sophie, I swear. The reason I’m here early is something else entirely. Look, I’ll explain when I see you, okay? I’m running out of money here.”
    â€œAll right. Listen, can you get yourself round to the office? Only I’ve got to leg it to an important meeting, but I can leave the spare set of keys with reception, and you can sort yourself out, is that okay?”
    â€œThat’s fi–” The money ran out and Lindsay found herself talking to
dead air. She hailed the first cab that passed and asked him to wait outside the warehouse in Camden occupied by Watergaw Films while she picked up the keys. They stopped at Meredith’s to collect Lindsay’s luggage, then carried on to Helen’s terraced house in Fulham. As the black taxi juddered through the early afternoon traffic, Lindsay pondered her next move. Collecting keys and luggage had reminded her that she needed to check out the flat where Penny had been living.
    Dredging her memory for details of a half-forgotten dinner conversation with Penny and Meredith, Lindsay recalled that Penny had swapped her house for a flat in Islington belonging to a friend of Sophie. An academic, Lindsay recalled. A philosopher? A psychologist? A philologist? Something like that. The Rubik’s cube of memory clicked another turn and the pieces fell into place. A palaeontologist attached to the Natural History Museum. Called . . . She pinched the bridge of her nose in an attempt to awaken her protesting brain as the taxi rattled along Fulham Road. They turned into a side street wide enough for cars to double park without obstructing the road, then rounded the corner into a street of three-storey terraced villas, their stucco in varying states of repair that reflected whether they were single residences or split into rented flats. As the taxi squealed to a halt, Lindsay suddenly realized she didn’t really need to remember his name. He was the man living in Penny’s house, at the end of a phone whose number she knew almost as well as her own.
    Feeling triumphant, she paid off the taxi and staggered wearily up Helen’s short path with a bag that felt heavier with each step. She unlocked the three mortises that fastened the front door of the sparklingly painted house and keyed the last four digits of the phone number into the alarm pad to silence the high-pitched squeal of the warning klaxon. Then she stumbled into a living room that could have been sold to the Tate Gallery under the title of Installation: Millennium Chaos . There were piles of newspapers and magazines in a haphazard array by the chairs and the sofa. The coffee table was invisible under an anarchy of used crockery. A spread of CDs was strewn in front of the stereo and tapes were tossed randomly on the shelves to either side of it. Books teetered in tall pillars against the
wall. The only remotely ordered area in the room was a cabinet of videos that seemed to be arranged according to some system, though there were gaps in the rows and half a dozen unboxed tapes were piled on top of the TV. A tabby cat sprawled on one of the two video recorders, barely registering Lindsay’s arrival with a flicker of one eyelid.
    Lindsay closed her eyes briefly. She’d had her moments in the untidiness rankings, but she’d never come close to this. Helen had been right. Sophie would go absolutely nutso. Grinning, she gripped her suitcase and staggered upstairs. The spare room was considerably clearer than downstairs. On the floor next to the ironing board was the biggest pile of clean but crumpled clothes Lindsay had ever seen, but that apart, the room could have been almost anyone’s guest room. What marked it out as belonging to Helen were the framed TV and film stills featuring actors she’d placed in her previous career as a casting director. Though she’d progressed to producer/director in