Free Schreiber's Secret by Roger Radford Page A

the mother was a balabust a who was for ever tidying the house and could cook the hind legs off a donkey. His wife must have been one of the first Jewish princesses. To boil an egg she had to consult a cookery book.
    Consumed by his cheerless existence as a balding, bespectacled and powerless Jewish patriarch, Joe Hyams was startled to find himself already driving along Forest Road and nearing his destination. He stopped by the entrance to Fairlop station.
    “We’re here, guv.”
    “Just drive on a little further, please. Closer to the car park entrance. It has started to rain and I don’t want to get wet.”
    Joe Hyams, accustomed as he was to taking orders from fares, duly pulled to a halt a few yards further on. The wind was starting to get up and the rain whipped cruelly against his windscreen. It was turning into a filthy night. “That’ll be forty-five pounds please, sir,” he said, stretching to open the partition window without turning round.
    There was precious little time for Joe to appreciate the tickle of cold steel against the nape of his neck. No time at all to make peace with his Maker. The worries of Joseph Stanley Hyams were truly over. He was also spared the indignity of knowing that his killer had left as a calling card the symbol most despised by his race.
    Discounting dreams, it was only when he was asleep that Mark Edwards did not breathe, eat and drink newspaper reporting. Many had forecast that he would burn himself out by the age of forty. Well, that was ten years away and too much of a distant threat to worry him.
    His list of police and criminal contacts was second to none, and even the old hacks among the nation’s crime reporters were forced to give him his due. Respect from those who could still remember when Fleet Street was more than just a generic term was respect indeed.
    Edwards switched on the table lamp by his bed. After a couple of seconds his eyes managed to focus on his watch. It was five-thirty in the morning. Not the time he usually awoke. But now he was up he knew he was unlikely to doze off again. He was a morning person. The biorhythms dictated that. He really believed that some people were night owls; the sort that loved to go to bed in the early hours but could never get up in the morning. Their minds just could not function as well in daylight. He was different. He could function on six hours’ sleep, as long as it was early to bed and early to rise.
    He thought back to the dream that had woken him. There he was, on yet another story about police corruption. Some of his best friends were coppers, and the bad press worried him as much as it did them. He knew his reports were bound to tarnish the innocent, for Joe Public was beginning to believe that all coppers were bent. He, Mark Edwards, might work for one of the popular newspapers, but he prided himself on searching for and writing the truth. The headlines, however, were not his responsibility, although he sometimes wished they were. Some of the sub -editors in the glass menagerie got carried away. He often wondered whether they ever read the stories they subbed.
    Light worrying plagued Edwards most mornings until he actually got out of bed, or until it was interrupted by something more stimulating. A sigh to his right proved the catalyst. She was a mood changer. She had a sensuality that could make a shoal of barracuda turn on each other. Propped on a pillow, Edwards gazed down at the sweeping lines of the form beside him. His restlessness had caused him to pull the duvet almost completely off her. Her skin was like satin, her long and shapely legs, drawn up slightly, rose inexorably towards the most perfect bottom he had ever seen, then up, past the small of the back, and along the delicate delineation of her spine towards the nape of a neck that was half lapped by gold leaf. God, she was beautiful.
    His lover’s right leg straightened languidly and the combination of the ripple of her buttocks and the lingering