Free The Shadows of Justice by Simon Hall

appealed in days that could feel filled with incessant noise. It was also an unspoken asset that Lizzie seldom visited. The clash of characters between her and this room made an effort to enter like coaxing a demon onto holy ground.
    The delightful anachronism of the metal cabinets filled with card index files lined one wall. For years now, records of all the stories Wessex Tonight covered had been saved on computer. But there dated back many decades of the earlier times of the programme, and all were remembered in these files.
    A project to transfer them to the far less evocative destination of a hard drive, or set of memory sticks, had been mooted for many a year. But in the great tradition of the British, it had never quite been got round to .
    Dan was quietly pleased by this, and would always argue for any available resources to be directed elsewhere. Computers may be faster and more efficient, but they lacked the soul of these indexes; the yellowing colour of the card and the smell of the history they told.
    All of which made precisely no impression on the pragmatic detective with a missing young woman to find.
    “So we’re in a library,” Adam complained, as they strode through the door. “So what?”
    He’d been carping for most of the short drive. In truth, although Dan could remember covering a story featuring the mysterious sre , sre , sre birds, he wasn’t sure exactly where and when. More importantly, he had no thoughts at all about what relevance it could possibly have in finding Annette.
    As Adam so deflatingly put it, “We’re hunting kidnappers and you’ve got me following a lead which consists of some birds singing?”
    “Well… yes.”
    “It doesn’t sound great.”
    “No,” Dan conceded.
    “Not even anywhere close to remotely approaching great.”
    “Well, no.”
    “So why are we doing it?”
    “Just – a feeling.”
    It was Katrina who again took on the role of referee, one she had fast realised was required when dealing with the odd relationship set before her.
    “There’s nothing else we can do at the moment,” she soothed. “So we’re not losing anything and we might just make a gain.”
    The journey up to the studios had been a five minute interlude. Adam drove, intermittently wondering aloud whether the kidnappers would have heard Newman’s interview and bemoaning the tenuousness of the lead. Dan sat in the back, trying to remember the story and the enigmatic birds, but instead found himself studying Katrina.
    It was another fair morning. The traffic was light, with almost as many buses on the roads as cars. But that was common for Plymouth: a city of historically low wages, and so – even in this automobile-obsessed society – relatively light car ownership.
    The fine hair on the back of Katrina’s neck made for a chevron. It took no Olympian leap of Dan’s imagination to envisage an inviting path downwards.
    He focused instead on a couple walking past. Both were rotund, to push the art of euphemism to its limits, and sweating in the day’s warmth.
    The straps of Katrina’s bra bevelled through the white of her blouse. They were edged with patterns of lace. Dan wondered if it was silk or cotton. The former, he suspected. It was far more her.
    The strolling couple were sporting skimpier clothes than might have been advisable. The exposed flesh shone like a snowfield in the sun. The male of the species lit a cigarette, which it passed to the female.
    The outline of a dark shape patterned the back of Katrina’s shoulder. It was subtle, difficult to make out through her blouse and no bigger than a few centimetres tall, but looked like a tattoo. Dan thought he could see the details of a figure, perhaps a loop on top of a cross.
    Subtlety was not a concept that came easily to the smoking couple. Much of the available area of legs and arms had been inked. It was as if they’d made a block booking at the tattooist. Perhaps the parlour had been attempting to work up some trade