Free Walk a Narrow Mile by Faith Martin Page A

as Steven began questioning the courier. He made sure to get both his name, the name and address of the courier company, as well as the young lad’s immediate superior, before he let him go.
    They waited until the puzzled lad was gone before she turnedthe padded envelope over thoughtfully in her hands and studied it. It had her name and the name of her boat and nothing more. She glanced at Steven.
    ‘What do you want to bet that whoever the customer was, he paid in cash, and probably got some little kid to hand deliver it the courier’s office?’ she asked.
    Steven smiled grimly. ‘No bet. Do you want to call in the bomb squad?’ he asked seriously.
    Hillary thought about it seriously.
    ‘No. But let’s be careful.’ If they called in the bomb squad it would be all over HQ tomorrow. And for DI Rhumer’s investigation to stand any chance of catching her stalker, he needed to keep it on the Q.T. as much as possible.
    She held the envelope far away from them, dangling it over the edge of the boat and out over the water. If it did hold something nasty, maybe she’d be able to drop it in the water before it did any real damage. Then she had a sudden, appalling thought.
    ‘What if it’s anthrax or something?’ she said. ‘It mustn’t get into the water system.’
    ‘Open it flap side up. That’ll keep the contents inside.’
    Hillary did so. Nothing flashed, banged, or shot out at her, hissing. She peered cautiously between the two sides of the envelope, then reached in and drew out an old-fashioned jewellery box.
    She opened it.
    Inside, was a pretty, antique pendant of two love-hearts joined together by an arrow. Over her shoulder, Steven looked at it grimly.
    ‘Any message?’
    There was: in the envelope, obviously computer printed:
From Lol.
    ‘Well, that gives us something to play with, at any rate,’ Steven said, trying to keep the mood upbeat. ‘First thing in the morning, Rhumer can start trying to trace that.’ He nodded down at the pendant.
    Hillary shuddered, snapped the lid shut and handed it over.
    ‘What say we finish off that bottle of wine and go to bed?’ she asked savagely.
    Wordlessly, Steven reached an arm around her and held her close. He kissed the side of her neck. ‘Now that’s an offer no man in his right mind would refuse.’
    After a tense second, Hillary Greene smiled.

CHAPTER FOUR
    T he next day, Hillary got in to work early. She’d slept badly again, and once the sky began to get light just after 4.30, she’d left Steven sleeping in their narrow fold-out bed and had spent the next few hours going through Geoff Rhumer’s list. She paid special attention to those men he had highlighted as having worked in either MisPer or on sex-crime cases involving rape or sexual attacks on women.
    A lot of the names were familiar to her for one reason or another, of course. She had worked out of the HQ at Kidlington for most of her working life, and during the years, she’d come across many of the men named. Those she knew, she put a small neat asterisk by the name and a number, and on a separate page wrote out anything and everything she knew about the man, both from her own personal knowledge, or from what she’d heard about them through the general scuttlebutt on the grapevine.
    Some she recalled simply for winning football or rugby matches and being a minor celebrity for a week, whilst others had a rep for being a bit of a lad with the ladies, or the horses, or the booze. A lot had worked on some of her cases where she had needed extra manpower doing the scut-work and labour-intensive jobs that higher-ranking members of her team wouldn’t have had time for. She spent a lot of time mulling over those particularly, since it might have been possible that she’d inadvertently ticked them off or somehow got on theirbad side, but she honestly couldn’t recall a problem with any of them.
    Of the others, some she knew to speak to, others just to nod to, others had names that recalled