A Velvet Scream Read Online Free Page B

place too, of something unpleasantly rotting mixed with stale urine. The men spilling out of the club must have used this place as a pissing wall.
    Joanna turned away.
    â€˜We’ve retrieved her knickers,’ Barra said, ‘from over the wall where he must have chucked them along with the other shoe, but we haven’t found a coat.’
    â€˜She probably didn’t wear one.’ Joanna had seen the girls shivering as they queued up to enter the clubs both here and in Hanley. She had stopped once and asked them why they suffered the cold. The girls had been quite happy to tell her: because it cost five quid to leave it in the cloakroom, queuing up to dump it in the cloakroom lost them valuable dancing time and the coat would probably be nicked if they left it while they had a dance. ‘Right.’ She didn’t need to tell Barra to bag the knickers up together with anything else they found and send them to forensics. It wasn’t necessary because Barra must have combed a thousand crime scenes before. The last thing he needed was Inspector Piercy breathing down his neck. ‘I’d like to take a quick look around the nightclub. Is the owner here?’
    â€˜Yes. I saw him twenty minutes ago.’
    â€˜How much does he know about what happened last night?’
    â€˜I just said an alleged serious sexual attack on a minor. Naturally he insists as it happened in the car park it’s nothing to do with the club and he can’t help us. It’s for over-eighteens. Strictly.’
    â€˜And Kayleigh’s fourteen.’
    â€˜Poor kid,’ Barra said sympathetically. ‘She’s bound to be a wreck after this. She was probably heading that way before the assault. Now – well.’
    They crossed the car park and approached the building, Mike striding at her side.
    â€˜We’re going to get this guy,’ she said as they reached the door. ‘I just know it.’
    He grunted. ‘Is that before or after your honeymoon?’
    She almost, almost , responded: what honeymoon ? Because now the case was all-absorbing and the wedding, even the disciplinary hearing tomorrow morning, was forgotten, but she stopped herself just in time, horrified by the answer that had arrived so automatically. She met Mike’s eyes with an expression of rising panic. She knew that he had spoken the truth this morning: that the job would always absorb her to the exclusion of all else, even Matthew. Worse still, Matthew knew it too. Bloody Sergeant Clever Korpanski had even been uncomfortably near the truth about Matthew wanting a trophy wife and two point four kids. She strode towards the entrance, quickening her pace. Korpanski opened his mouth to say something but she was leaving him behind. At a guess, knowing Mike, it would have been something cheerful and funny, but when he caught her mood he clamped his lips tight shut before a single word escaped. Instead, he gave her a ghost of a smile followed by an awkward, almost apologetic twist of his mouth.
    Barra had already put the boards up outside the nightclub, inviting people to speak to the police following a ‘Serious Incident’. Date and time were there together with a hotline telephone number. Hopefully someone would recognize the man from the description that Kayleigh Harrison had given. Maybe the investigation would hit lucky and someone would even identify him. If he was a local man with a southern accent he would stick out a mile in this moorlands town which had not only an accent but also a vocabulary and grammar all of its own. People would know him. If, on the other hand, he was from outside the area, what was he doing in Leek at this time of year, so outside the holiday season and with roads which were frequently closed to traffic because of the weather?
    It was different in the summer with an influx of seasonal holidaymakers who rented cottages in the Peak District, visited Alton Towers and the factory shops in