A Velvet Scream Read Online Free Page A

evening.’
    â€˜Yeah. Fine. What does he look like?’
    â€˜Thick set. Muscular. Looks like he “works out”. Early thirties.’
    â€˜Have we got any sort of statement from Kayleigh about her attacker?’
    â€˜Not much of one so far. She says he was tall, skinny, London accent.’
    â€˜Not a local lad then?’
    â€˜It would seem not. No one she knew anyway.’
    â€˜OK. Well, it’s not much but it’s something to go on.’
    Barra nodded.
    â€˜The accent of our Audi owner?’
    â€˜About as local as oatcakes.’
    â€˜Sort of lets him off the hook then, along with Kayleigh’s description.’
    â€˜Sort of.’ She could tell that Sergeant Barraclough was not quite convinced.
    â€˜What job does this guy do?’
    â€˜He’s a rep for a pharmaceutical company. Visits doctors in their surgeries and such like.’
    Joanna looked around. ‘Have you found much here?’
    â€˜Bits and pieces. Not a lot. The sort of stuff you’d expect. Plenty of condoms. A couple of fag ends and lager cans but it’s so wet and cold.’ He paused. ‘The snow really hasn’t helped.’
    â€˜No. Right. And how is the girl?’
    â€˜Physically, she’s recovering.’
    â€˜I’d better go and see her.’ Joanna said. ‘Just show me exactly where she was found, Barra.’
    â€˜Over here.’ He led her between lines of tape, to the far corner of the car park where a low wall stood, probably a relic of some long destroyed outbuilding. Now it served as a store for bins – and was well hidden from the rest of the area. ‘Quite clever, really,’ Barra observed. ‘She’d have been out of sight. And considering the music would have been blaring, out of hearing as well. They just kept the old bins and stuff here. Bits of rubbish. Shand, the guy who found her, said she was covered in rubbish; looked just like an old pile of nothing until she moved. Lucky she did or this would have been a murder investigation.’
    Joanna looked around her. ‘Do you think our perpetrator recced the place first and chose this spot deliberately, or just hit lucky?’
    She knew exactly what she was asking. In spite of the cockney accent, was this a local man with local knowledge?
    Korpanski, too, was looking around – along the ground, then upwards. ‘Hit lucky or unlucky?’ he asked. ‘If he’d taken a look around first surely he’d have seen that?’ He indicated a CCTV camera set high on the corner of the nightclub, pointing down towards the car park.
    â€˜I think he must have recced the place first,’ Barra said. ‘It’s just a little too lucky and well hidden here. But the camera’s set quite high up. I wouldn’t be surprised if the angle’s all wrong. Maybe we’ll find he’s done the old “hoody” trick and isn’t that recognizable from up there. It’s a bit too high. If I’d been advising the owners of the club I’d have said to bring it down a foot or two and get an angle which would at least give us a sporting chance of a face and identification. From up there we’ll just get the tops of heads and boots.’
    â€˜I wonder,’ Joanna mused, ‘if he is a stranger? He could still be a local man with a London accent. Hopefully we’ll find him soon with or without the CCTV. Anyway, we’ll take a look at all that later.’ She peered down at the spot where Kayleigh had been found. It was a depressing little area, even without the memory of the sordid scene that must have been played out here last night. Melting snow, grey and cold, plenty of slush, dented lager cans, cigarette butts, polystyrene burger boxes, the general detritus of scruffy humans who can’t be bothered to bin their rubbish even though the bins stood right here, mere inches away. In spite of the open air there was a stink around the