Free The Shining Skull by Kate Ellis Page B

looked again. He hadn’t imagined it.
    He hadn’t imagined the second skull tucked beneath the first, grinning out from behind the first in a macabre game of peek-aboo.
    Suzy Wakefield bashed the off switch of the radio with a violence that surprised her estranged husband Darren who was helping
     himself to a drink from the mirrored cocktail cabinet that stood in the corner of the room.
    Darren swung round, almost spilling the contents of his glass. ‘Hey, I was listening to that. It was the news.’
    Suzy swung round and stared at him. ‘It was about that bloody lunatic who’s going round assaulting women in taxis. Do you
     think I want to be reminded of what could have happened to . . . ’
    ‘My little girl can take care of herself. No problem. She’ll be lying low for a bit to teach you a lesson.’ Darren Wakefield
     smiled in the smug way that had always infuriated his ex-wife.
    Leah Wakefield’s father was well built with dark hair and a penchant for gold chains and shirts unbuttoned to reveal his tanned
     chest. He had always fancied himself but his tendency to narcissism had increased with the realisation that he had produced
     a beautiful and talented daughter who would make them a fortune. He had been lured from Suzy’s side by a young PR woman many
     years his junior and, with the woman Suzy termed ‘the Bimbo’ in tow, he had developed a taste for the high life. Suzy suspected
     that it was only a matter of time before Leah pulled the financial plug on his exploits. And that thought had given her a
     warm glow of satisfaction in her darkest hours.
    Suzy began to pace up and down. ‘I’ve been ringing round everyone she knows. Nobody’s seen her.’
    ‘And you think they’d tell you if they had? Give the girl some space, will you.’
    Suzy Wakefield looked into her former husband’s unworried eyes and what self control she had left suddenly snapped. She gave
     him a stinging slap across the face before launching herself at him and pummelling his chest with her fists.
    Darren stood quite still, a smirk of amusement on his face, holding off the assault with one hand as he had done so often
     duringthe course of their marriage. At five foot nothing, Suzy was no match for him, a goldfish attacking a shark.
    He waited until Suzy subsided to the thick piled carpet in tears of frustrated rage before speaking again. ‘This isn’t going
     to bring her home, is it? This is why she left in the first place,’ he said before walking out of the door.
    ‘I never particularly liked Barry Houldsworth,’ Gerry Heffernan said thoughtfully as Wesley locked the car. ‘He was an insensitive
     old bugger. Once told a woman whose daughter had been raped to pull herself together.’
    ‘Not in tune with the caring, sharing ethos of the modern force then.’
    Heffernan chuckled. ‘You could say that. I reckon our DC Carstairs would take on the role of his spiritual successor given
     half the chance.’
    ‘Too right,’ said Wesley with feeling. Steve Carstairs was hardly his favourite underling, although he had to admit he’d been
     behaving himself of late. ‘So Houldsworth wasn’t popular then?’
    ‘He was popular enough with a certain type – the ones who joined the force to model themselves on
The Sweeney.
The ones who watched more telly than was good for them. There were quite a few coppers like that around in those early days.’
     He gave a wide grin. ‘I had the reputation of being the station softy at one time.’
    Wesley raised his eyebrows. ‘Really?’ It was hard to see the ex-merchant-navy man who had put the fear of God into so many
     villains as the station softy. Perhaps it said something about Houldsworth’s régime back in the nineteen seventies. Wesley
     was only glad he had only been a tot playing cops and robbers with plastic handcuffs at the time.
    ‘I suppose you could say Houldsworth was one of the old school.’
    ‘Was he at Tradmouth till he retired?’
    Heffernan shook his