Free Force Of Habit v5 by Robert Bartlett Page B

- or much, if any, of the rest of it.
    ‘But you’d have nothing if I hadn’t gone after Rawlins. What if forensics draws a blank? He'd probably be in a hole in the ground by now and we would never have had a chance of getting hold of him and finding out who did this because its odds on Rawlins didn’t kill Denise Lumsden.’
    The Chief sat back down. Looked at the three inch headlines proclaiming he did.
    ‘Odds on since when?’
    ‘Since I saw the body. The blood had been making its way south for some time. He was still banged-up.’
    The Chief went red again.
    ‘And yet you lay the blame on the judiciary for letting him out to kill her in front of the whole city last night - including the press.’
    ‘The local press,’ he distanced himself from the Miss Marple saga. ‘and no one is to know that I was manipulating it to have a pop. All anyone reading that will remember is the judge letting him out, regardless of any later story announcing that he didn't kill her. They've listed what he did to get sent down in the first place and everyone will think he's a right scumbag and that they should have thrown away the key not let him walk free. After all the grief we’ve been getting lately over the gang trouble I took the opportunity to redirect the public's attention.’
    ‘Until they read the Mail and think we’ve abandoned old ladies in a no go ghetto.’
    North decided to move things along. Get the whole newspaper thing behind them.
    ‘Look, Lumsden was probably killed while Rawlins was still inside. He goes home, finds her and for some reason he does a runner. Initially I’m just thinking he panics. He’s just got out after a year on remand for beating the crap out of her and the last thing he needs is to be found there. He knows he’s going to be first in the frame for it. He wasn’t to know he already had the perfect alibi. I decide to pop into the only place we can connect him to, his local, the Pond House pub, where the manager and clientele are uncooperative, there’s a ‘Welcome Home Terry’ message scrawled across the darts chalkboard and I can feel it in the air - he’s still there. But we need a warrant and so I make the request but it’s going to take some time. Then it all starts to go pear shaped.
    ‘Mason and James hold the fort and wind up beaten and cuffed five miles away with no perps in sight. Somehow Rawlins’ guardian angel gets away - the chopper playing it too cagey, lack of immediate ground resource because it was just one of several potential sites we were trying to cover - and Rawlins manages to remain nearby, undetected despite a full search of the area by the chopper and its box of tricks. He has it on his toes, managing to cause a car crash with a near fatality in the process.
    ‘I now believe that Rawlins didn’t run from the maisonette because he believed we would be after him for it. I think he knew what Lumsden was up to with the drugs and he thought that it had got her killed. He contacted someone, they came get him and they were good enough to overpower Mason and James and escape. From what I’ve learned of him that doesn't sound like the kind of mates Rawlins would usually have. It does sound like the kind of people who could run a drug operation large enough for someone like Denise Lumsden to get a twenty grand cut.
    ‘He ran to them and then ended up running on his own. Nothing they did last night indicates a group of people likely to suddenly cut Rawlins loose after all the trouble they went to. I can’t see them having it on their toes when the helicopter spooked them and leaving Rawlins behind – not alive and able to talk, I can’t. No, it seems likely that something spooked Rawlins and he ran from them. We probably saved his arse, the chopper showing up when it did. Rawlins didn’t kill Denise Lumsden but he’s the key to finding out who did.’
    North was dismissed so they could conflab.
    Egan hadn’t said a word. He was probably keeping schtum until