Free Blood On the Wall by Jim Eldridge

paintings. Reproduction classic French furniture: settees and chaise longues with gold upholstery. It was all ostentatious, a way of showing off the fact that Ted Armstrong had gone from nothing to one ofthe wealthiest men in the city. But now, the overwhelming feeling in this room was pain. It was in the way that Ted Armstrong held himself, like a marionette struggling to stay upright after its strings had been cut. And it was written all over Sophie Armstrong. Georgiou had only met her a couple of times before, at official police functions. Then he had thought she looked a very well-preserved forty, possibly could even pass for thirty. Now, looking at her, drawn and haggard and with her make-up badly applied, she looked more like sixty.
    Georgiou spent an uncomfortable half-hour with the Armstrongs. There was nothing he could tell them, and they knew it. All he could do was be with them and try and share their grief for a short while.
    Georgiou was glad of the drive back home to Bowness. Driving along the road across the marsh, with the Solway Firth stretching away to Scotland, and the vast expanse of sky overhead, it helped wash away the city. Carlisle was only small, but every city had a feeling of intensity about it. It was the closeness of the buildings to one another, the crowds of people pushing and shoving, the traffic. Carlisle was better than most, but Georgiou knew he could never live in a city again. He needed the feeling of space that the expanses of the Solway Plain gave him. Sea and sky.
    That evening, as he ate a supper of pasta he prepared for himself, he finally got down to reading the article in the
News and Star
. There was nothing new. But that was because there was nothing new to say. The allegations, however, were there in black and white in Mrs Parks’s words: ‘He beat up my son and they’re letting him get awaywith it because he’s a copper. He’s a vicious thug and he ought to be locked up.’
    Georgiou wondered if they had been deliberately provocative in the hope that he would sue for libel. If so, they were mistaken. In Georgiou’s opinion, the only people who got rich from libel were lawyers. No, the real thing that annoyed him about this case was the fact that Ian Parks was still walking around free, and his supporters, including Councillor Maitland, seemed to be succeeding to a certain degree in their campaign to depict him as the victim of the case.
    Georgiou put the paper aside and sat down with a writing pad and started to jot notes down about what they knew so far about the killer of Tamara Armstrong and Michelle Nixon. It was a thing he did when he had a problem to unscramble, whether it was a particularly difficult crossword, or a case. Put the random thoughts down in a seemingly meaningless way, and sometimes the answer would just pop out at him. He looked at the words he had written down:
    Electric flex. Broad bladed knife. Heads taken. Border Reivers. Head cult. Pagans. Celts. Ritual? Butchery skills. Stanwix. Haltwhistle. Railway shed. Park. Strong wrists. Strong enough to lift body into position. How tall is killer? Fastidious. Neat and tidy. Clothes splashed with blood. No sex. Gloves. Transport for killer? Michelle – prostitute. Drinker. Tamara – virgin. Michelle hanging from girder. Tamara hanging from tree. Eric Drake. Film. Horror? Paul Morrison. Diane Moody. Strong hands. Razza’s bar. Rena Matlock. Donna Evans. Suzie Starr. Ted Armstrong.Chairman of Police Authority.
    He sat for a while, looking at the words, but nothing leapt out at him. It was there, he could feel it. Somewhere in those words was the answer, if only he could find the connection.
    Maybe if he went to the pub he might find the answer forming in his brain. Sometimes, if he had a problem he couldn’t solve, he’d go to the Kings Arms, the only pub in the village, and sit and talk to his friend and neighbour, Denis. Denis’s farm was about five miles outside the village, but he also had a small