Free The Hireling's Tale by Jo Bannister

the thirty-seven who’ve already left.’
    Shapiro nodded. ‘Get over to the hotel, get those
eleven together and tell them what we suspect: that a hired killer is after one of them. That should loosen somebody’s tongue. I’ll see Kendall, have him flesh out the list with a bit of background information. Once we identify the target we can do something about protecting him.’
    ‘What do you want me to do about Maddie Cotterick?’ asked Donovan gruffly. He’d been sitting on the windowsill, contributing nothing until now.
    ‘I’m not sure what you can do. You could leave messages with some friends, so if it’s a coincidence and she’s safe enough she can let us know. Unless she turns up dead, she probably just went off on holiday without telling anyone.’
    ‘She didn’t pack for a holiday,’ objected Donovan. ‘She grabbed things in a hurry and got out. She was scared.’
    ‘If she’d heard about the girl on the boat she had good reason to be scared,’ said Liz. ‘If I was a tom, I’d think this was a good time to be out of town too.’
    It was fair comment, but somehow Donovan didn’t think they were taking Maddie Cotterick’s disappearance as seriously as they might. As seriously as they would have if she’d been, say, the local librarian, she hadn’t turned up for work one day and her house looked as if she’d left in a hurry. Perhaps it was natural, even inevitable. If he challenged them they’d say, reasonably enough, that people with regular jobs keep regular hours and acting out of character is less likely to be significant in those without much character in the first place. Yesterday he’d have agreed with them. But now he’d been in
her house, he’d got some kind of a handle on Maddie Cotterick, and he thought she was entitled to more from them than she was getting.
    He went back to his office and started leafing through her address book. One of the few advantages of converting a private house into a police station was that everyone above bog-standard constable got their own office. Donovan’s had originally been a maid’s bedroom. Shapiro’s, as befitted his status, had been the butler’s.
    ‘Did you sense a certain chill in the air just then?’ asked Shapiro after he’d gone.
    Liz nodded. ‘He thinks we’d be doing more if the victims had been People Like Us.’
    ‘Maybe he’s right. We’ve got two bodies, a prostitute and a wino, but what we’re actually talking about is who the next victim might be. Because if somebody’s brought in a professional mechanic, a man who’s such a perfectionist that he practises on real people, his target is someone important.’
    ‘More to the point,’ said Liz, ‘his target is still alive. If we find him quickly enough we may be able to keep him that way. Wicksy and the girl on the boat are a lower priority not because they’re less important but because things can’t get any worse for them. We have to protect the living before we can spare time for the dead.’
    ‘But you don’t think the two cases are connected.’
    She’d already said so, and given her reasons. If he was asking again it was because he was unconvinced. She thought some more but didn’t change her mind. ‘I can’t see how. There’s a mechanic in
town, and he killed Wicksy for target practice. That’s seriously scary. He’s going to kill someone else - but it won’t be the man who pushed a prostitute off a roof. Who’d have paid him - her friends? He earns big, big money. Whoever the girl was, if she mattered to someone with that deep a pocket she wouldn’t have been on the game.’
    ‘So we’ve got two killers to find, and one of them we have to find before he kills someone else. All we know about him is that he’s an expert with a sniper rifle.’ Shapiro shook his head, defeated. ‘Our only chance is finding the target. Go talk to the people at The Barbican.’
    Liz was halfway to the door when her step slowed and she turned back, her expression