Free Devil's Demise by Lee Cockburn Page A

a great big smile directed at a rather flustered DC Black.
    “Glad you could come in, better late than never though, eh!”
    Marcus apologised genuinely and pulled up a seat beside Taylor. She was looking as polished as ever, her tight fitting suit and long spiralling hair covering her shoulders, her scent intoxicating - any man’s dream, if you didn’t mind never reaching your goal.
    “How long have you been at it?” Marcus, realising what he had just said, was leaving himself wide open for Taylor’s reply, which followed quickly.
    “No, how long have you been at it more like?” Her laughter escaped and she patted him on the shoulders, as if to say
that’s my boy
.
    “Let’s get down to business. We are looking for women, I’m not sure that the accused will have a certain age group, as we only have one victim.”
    “That we know about!” added Marcus.
    “Although I do think it will only be women, the man at the house was not planned, he just got in the way, poor old soul.”
    “How many do we have?”
    “What, in Edinburgh or Scotland? Who knows how far he’s travelled to indulge in his sick fantasies,” Taylor replied with a tone of disgust, as her mind returned to Susan and the way he had sadistically left her.
    “I think we have about six or seven that have potential, having looked through the files. There are two in Edinburgh, three in Glasgow and one in the Borders that I think we should look at first.”
    Marcus pointed to the picture of one of the outstanding missing women, a young Polish prostitute; her name was Layla Petrovsky and she had been missing since Halloween a year ago.
    “How do we even know if she’s still in this country? She might have made her money and gone back to where she came from - maybe just had enough and left, who knows?”
    “Well, we’ll just have to work our way through all of them systematically and see if anything has been missed or if there is a lead we can still follow. A lot of enquiry has obviously been done and nothing has come to light so far that has made them suspicious enough to turn them into murder enquiries, not yet anyway.”
    Marcus began his enquiry into Mary Dawkins, a 29 year old music teacher from Edinburgh, who had not been seen since December the year previously, and Taylor took the other Edinburgh case, the prostitute Layla Petrovsky missing since November the same year; neither of them looked overly suspicious, just people who had their own reasons for not wanting to be found, or on the other hand, other people who didn’t want them to be found, but it was a start.
    On Layla’s report it had been her pimp Nicky who had reported her missing, not because he cared, but because he was losing a lot of money. Layla was a pretty slim thing with great earning potential as Nicky had beaten her regularly to do everything that the punters wanted: anal, kinky, bondage, sadomasochism, the works, because that brought in more hard cash for him and a lot of pain and degradation for her, but he didn’t care about that.
    Marcus and Taylor went their separate ways. Marcus headed to the west side of Edinburgh to look into Miss Dawkins missing from the Cramond area, a very affluent area of the city with large houses and expensive cars, two golf courses and a beautifulriver walk on the resident’s doorsteps. The Almond cascaded for miles, all the way down to the waterfront marina where enthusiastic yachtsmen moored their treasured boats. An area where there wasn’t a lot of crime, unless people took the time to travel to commit it. Marcus stopped outside the home of Miss Dawkins and walked confidently up the driveway. Just as he was about to knock on the door, it was pulled open by a young man in his late 20s with skinny features, sloping shoulders, messy hair, big eyebrows and a weak jaw. Marcus introduced himself and asked if he could come in and ask some questions.
    DS Nicks arrived on the east side of Edinburgh at the high flats near to the docks, the exact