Free Out of the Dark by Natasha Cooper

it.
    Two whole lever-arch files were finished by the time one of Trish’s fellow tenants looked in to suggest a drink later in El Vino’s.
    ‘Not tonight, Bill,’ she said, faking regret. He’d never tried to wind her up like Robert Anstey, even though he’d been Antony’s preferred junior for the past two years, but she had other things to do. ‘I’ve got to chase up a loose end. But thank you. Have a good time.’
    When he’d gone, she packed up her papers. She was pleased she’d made herself work. There were still at least four hours of daylight, which would be plenty to check out Jeannie Nest and still drop in to see David afterwards. Trish looked up the Mull Estate in Southwark and was amazed to see that it was only a little way south of her own warehouse flat on the far side of Borough High Street. It shouldn’t take more than ten minutes to walk there.
    She shut down her laptop and left chambers to take her usual route home over Blackfriars Bridge, envying all the people who had flats in the Oxo Building. She loved the river and its openness, but when she’d been looking for somewhere to buy, internal space had seemed much more important than any view, however glorious. She’d stretched herself to the limit to buy and convert the huge top floor of an old engineering works and had watched both her earnings and the prices of Southwark lofts climb steadily ever since.
    Tempted to go in and change as she passed the iron staircase that led up to her own front door, she resisted, fearing that she might never drive herself out again if she did. Instead she walked on, turning right, left, then right again until she’d reached her destination. It was as though she’d stepped across a frontier. She was facing the most depressing housing estate she’d ever seen.
    Built of dirty redbrick, probably between the wars, it looked cramped as well as broken down. Each of the four long blocks was six storeys high, and each storey consisted of a row of front doors ranged along a walkway. Washing hung there and rubbish lay in heaps everywhere she looked.
    Trish could see a white metal cube on the top balcony to her left; it looked like a washing machine, or perhaps a fridge. Suddenly the weird statistic that something ‘was less likely to kill you than a fridge falling on your head’ made sense.
    There was no grass anywhere, or trees; only cracked concrete. The area between the blocks was half-filled with rusty cars. Weeds grew in the cracks, and muddy puddles showed how bad the ground drainage must be. A group of small children were throwing stones at the worst of the cars. It had only one tyre left and the windscreen was smashed. Above them a skein of geese flew in arrow-straight formation across the gold-and-blue sky, as
though to show the inhabitants of this desolate place just how firmly shackled they were.
    Trish found it hard to imagine her father coming here. Even if he’d wanted a prostitute, surely there were more alluring places to find one. Still, if Sylvia Bantell’s private detective had been any good, this was the place where Paddy had come on several occasions nine years ago. The lead had to be worth pursuing.
    Once she’d double-checked that she had the right address, Trish asked the staring children which block held number 63. One, a blonde girl with gappy teeth and sharp eyes, asked why she wanted to know.
    ‘I’m looking for someone called Jeannie Nest,’ she said. ‘Do any of you know her?’
    ‘No.’ After a second the child’s face brightened. ‘But I’ll show you sixty-three if you give me a pound.’
    ‘Oh, I think that’s a bit expensive,’ Trish said lightly.
    ‘Then you can fuck off,’ said the child, turning and running towards the far side of the concreted space. The others casually went back to dismantling the wing mirror on one of the cars.
    Trish blinked, then looked around to get her bearings, before picking her way up a stinking brick staircase to the second floor of the