Free Common Murder by Val McDermid Page B

with the yobbos of the popular press. Now if you were to say you were from the Tatler— though looking at the outfit, I doubt you’d get away it.” Lindsay looked ruefully at her clothes which still bore the traces of her headlong flight the night before, in spite of her efforts to clean up. “You been down the peace camp yet?” he added. “They’re about as much help as this lot here.”
    â€œSo I’d be wasting my time hanging around here, would I?”
    â€œIf you’ve got anything better to do, do it. I’d rather watch an orphanage burn,” Bill answered resignedly with the cynicism affected by hard-boiled crime reporters the world over. “I’ll be stuck here for the duration. If I get anything, I’ll file it for you. For the usual fee.”
    Lindsay grinned to herself as she returned to the BMW. As they pulled away, Lindsay noticed the tall blond man she’d tagged as Special Branch when she’d seen him at the camp. He was leaning against a red Ford Fiesta on the fringes of the press corps, watching them.
    â€œTo Fordham nick,” she said to Cordelia. “And stop at the first public toilet. Desperate situations need desperate remedies.”

6
    Lindsay emerged from the public toilet on the outskirts of Fordham a different woman. Before they left the camp she had retrieved her emergency overnight working bag from the boot of her car, and she was now wearing a smart brown dress and jacket, chosen for their ability not to crease, coupled with brown stilettos that would have caused major earth tremors at the peace camp. Cordelia wolf-whistled quietly as her lover got back into the car. “You’ll get your lesbian card taken away, dressing like that,” she teased.
    â€œFuck off, she quipped wittily,” Lindsay replied. “If Duncan wants the biz doing, I will do the biz.”
    At the police station, Lindsay ran the gauntlet of bureaucratic obstacles and eventually found herself face to face with Superintendent Rigano. They exchanged pleasantries, then Lindsay leaned across his desk and said, “I think you and I should do a deal.”
    His face didn’t move a muscle. He would have made a good poker player if he could have been bothered with anything so predictable, thought Lindsay. When he had finished appraising her, he simply said, “Go on.”
    Lindsay hesitated long enough to light a cigarette. She needed a moment to work out what came next in this sequence of unplanned declarations. “You had Deborah Patterson in here for twelve hours. I imagine she wouldn’t even tell you what year it is.
    â€œThey’ll all be like that,” she continued. “They’ve gone past the ‘innocents abroad’ stage down there, thanks to the way the powers that be have used the police and manipulated the courts. Now, they have a stable of sharp lawyers who don’t owe you anything. Several of the peace women have been in prison and think it holds no terrors for them. They all know their rights and they’re not even going to warn you if your backside is on fire.
    â€œSo if you want any information from them, you’re stymied. Without me, that is. I think I can deliver what you need to know from them. I’m not crazy about the position I find myself in. But they trust me, which is not something you can say about many people who have a truce with the establishment. They’ve asked me to act as a sort of troubleshooter for them.”
    He looked suspicious. “I thought you were a reporter,” he said. “How have you managed to earn their trust?”
    â€œThe women at the camp know all about me. I’ve been going there for months now.”
    He could have blustered, he could have threatened, she knew. But he just asked, quietly, “And what’s the price?”
    Glad that her first impression of him hadn’t been shattered, Lindsay replied, “The price is a bit of