Read Online Cambridge Blue by Alison Bruce - Free Book Online Page A

struggling with his sack and the high seat of his adult bike. Had that been Ratty once, striving to get somewhere in life?
    Ratty was still talking, but Goodhew ceased to listen. The boy’s sack swung wildly as his shoulders swayed from left to right in an effort to move faster still. He was about a hundred yards away and his face burnt red from under his mop of blond hair. His mouth was moving. Shouting something, or just gulping air?
    Goodhew made a single instinctive step in the cyclist’s direction, hairs rising on the back of his neck: he knew something was wrong.
    At fifty yards, he heard the breathy squawk of the boy’s voice, all the words but one mangled to nothing in the gap between them. ‘Quick!’ was the one word he recognised.
    At twenty yards, the boy became more clear. ‘There’s a body.’
    He lurched to a halt next to Goodhew, wobbled as his foot reached for the pavement. Goodhew grabbed his arm as he toppled from his bike and held the boy upright until he’d disentangled his other foot from the frame. It clattered to the ground and lay with the back wheel spinning in the weak sunshine.
    Sweat pinned a veil of hair flat across his forehead, while the rest stuck up at all angles. He waved his hand back excitedly in the direction he’d come, clinging to Goodhew’s jacket with the other hand as he fought to catch his breath. ‘I recognise you, you’re police, aren’t you? Up there,’ he gasped. ‘Up there, on Midsummer Common.’
    ‘Where exactly?’
    ‘This end.’
    ‘Hang on.’ Goodhew spun round to see Ratty retreating back towards the city centre. ‘I need a statement,’ he called after him.
    Ratty turned and walked back several steps. ‘I don’t know anything,’ he shouted.
    Goodhew turned his attention back to the boy, whose right arm was still partly raised in the act of pointing. The most obvious sign of distress was his trembling hands; beyond that he didn’t look too bad. Goodhew peered into his face: not quite ready to pass out from shock, he decided. ‘Can you show me yourself?’ he asked gently.
    The boy shut his eyes for a moment, then nodded. ‘I touched her,’ he whispered.
    Goodhew righted the bike and they walked with it between them. ‘Don’t worry, we’ll get it sorted out.’
    He quickly radioed in to the station.
    ‘They’re sending a car, want us to meet them there.’
    ‘I heard.’
    Goodhew nodded. ‘Sorry, of course you did. What’s your name?’
    ‘Matt. Matt Lilley. I do the papers on Maids Causeway.’
    They walked quickly towards the end of Christ’s Piece, where the aptly named Short Street would take them through to Maids Causeway and the southern boundary of Midsummer Common. Goodhew’s stomach churned uneasily. ‘So tell me what happened.’
    ‘It’s bin day, isn’t it? And there’re sacks outside most of the houses. I’d done the houses near the traffic lights, and noticed there was rubbish over on the other side of the road, beyond the railings – you know, on the grass. I didn’t think anything at the time. It was only afterwards when I remembered they were there. So I did the houses on that side, too, then I went back to the lights to cross over and do the houses down Brunswick – you know, the ones that face the Common.’ Goodhew noticed Matt’s left hand resting on the saddle of his bike: how the fingers gripped the narrow front, and a smear of sweat from his palm had stained the brown leather a liquorice black. ‘I don’t usually cross just there, but one of the houses had an extra paper I’d missed, so I went back and crossed at the lights, ’cos that’s, you know, where I ended up. There weren’t any cars and I just rode across, and so I was looking straight on, right where the pile of rubbish was. That’s when I wondered which house it all came from. It was a big pile of sacks, and it wasn’t really light by then, but I saw her straight away.’
    They both knew that the terrace now on their right was the last