Free Destroying Angel by Sam Hastings Page A

every bit as round and shapely as her breasts, the contours shown off beautifully by tight blue jeans. He sighed, imagining how it would feel to get his hands on such a ripe young body. Any woman who dressed the way she did was asking for trouble, he considered, and then decided he was wrong. She wasn’t actually dressed all that provocatively; it was just that with a body like hers it was hard not to look sexy.
    She smiled and nodded as he raised the barrier for her, a friendly easy-going gesture, very different from the way most people treated him. Watching the car go, he shook his head, wishing once more that he was young enough to be able to set his sights on such gorgeous women.
    Susan parked the Rover in the shade of a dirt-encrusted sycamore and got out. The Grand Union Canal ran to one side, as smooth as glass, the surface reflecting the brilliant blue of the sky and the shapes of the buildings that flanked it on the far side. She had driven nearly three miles to reach the side of the canal opposite to the trading estate on which de Vergy Fine Wines was based, but had at least managed to get fairly close to the back of the ruined warehouse.
    She walked down the tow-path. To one side was wasteland overgrown with straggling brambles, sycamore and buddleia – to the other the canal. Across the canal, the tall brick walls of the warehouses fell straight to within inches of the water’s edge. Sergeant Yates had told her how the fire had been started. One of the rear windows had been smashed with a chunk of brick and a petrol bomb thrown in after it.
    Reaching the section of the canal opposite de Vergy Fine Wines, she considered it carefully. Forensic would have already gone over the ground; the solid concrete of the canal path making it unlikely that they would have found anything. What interested her was the actual physics of the thing. To have thrown the piece of brick and then the bomb from the six-inch wide strip of ground that ran under the windows would have been nearly impossible, not to say highly dangerous, for the fire-raiser. It had therefore presumably happened from where she was standing.
    With all the windows now blown out and showing only as soot-blackened frames, it was impossible to tell which window had been smashed first. Still, they were all some two feet high and about six feet long. Given the width of the canal, it would have taken a fairly impressive piece of throwing to have smashed a window and then put the bomb through the hole – unless…
    Susan stood pondering, forming and discarding theories but always sticking on the fact that she really needed to know more about the other five fires. Given that Gage was disinclined to be helpful, that meant Berner. Rather looking forward to the prospect of sucking his cock again, she turned to go, catching a movement across the wasteland as she did so.
    Peering between tall fence stakes, she saw a man spraying a graffiti tag onto a half-demolished concrete wall. The first word looked like ‘Fire’ and he was now working on an ‘h’ that followed what was surely a ‘G’. Finding a gap in the railings, Susan stole onto the wasteland, using bushes for cover until she was near the man. As she rounded a great pile of rubble, he came into her view. He was at the mouth of a sort of cul-de-sac where a bulldozer had pushed an alley into the rubble. The wall he was spraying was the last remaining piece of whatever structure had once stood there. She sank into a crouch and moved a flower-laden buddleia branch to one side, watching as he finished his tag. As she had thought, he’d written ‘Fire Ghost’.
    The letters were three feet high and a brilliant scarlet, to which he now added an equally vibrant orange. Susan watched, wondering if this could really be the elusive arsonist who had eluded the police five times. She had heard no reports of distinctive tags found near the scenes of the other fires, nor did it seem credible that he would be so stupid as to