Someone Who Isn't Me Danuta Kot (best books to read .TXT) 📖

check his messages fast. Maskall owed Curwen some favours, including the time Curwen had managed to get a charge of ABH against him – when he’d thumped the man who was screwing his wife – dropped by ‘losing’ a piece of key evidence.

Now, if he needed financial information on the quiet, Maskall was the person he went to. Right now, he wanted all the information Maskall could get for him on Lavery’s company, Docklands Holdings.

He had to get the thing finished, get evidence that would allow him to bypass whoever was protecting Lavery.

He had to clear up this mess. There was still time.

‘Sir?’

His heart raced as he spun round. Dinah Mason was behind him, her neat blonde hair shining under the strip lighting, red glasses slipping down her nose. She looked angry and agitated.

‘What’s the problem, Mason?’

‘I spoke to the DCI, sir, about the woman in the pub, about Becca Armitage and Andy. He went ballistic. He said it was a side issue and that if he couldn’t rely on me to do my job, then I was off the team, and I wasn’t to distract people with this by talking about it.’

As Curwen listened to her story, he got more and more confused. He’d wanted to keep Hammond away from Becca the Barmaid because her involvement with Andy would have to be investigated, which could be bad news for him. But now Hammond knew Becca and Andy had been seeing each other, and hadn’t just ignored it. He’d dismissed it – and kept it away from the team.

What the fuck?

‘I’ll look into it,’ he said. Mason had no option but to accept that and get back to work, leaving Curwen to try and work out what the fuck was going on.

Another possibility was starting to form in his mind. Maybe Lavery had kept out of trouble because he had better protection than Curwen could ever have realised. Lavery wasn’t just a small-time landlord of a run-down seaside pub. He was a businessman, and Curwen suspected he’d only just started uncovering the extent of Lavery’s interests.

Was one of those interests a senior police officer?

If so, it wasn’t just Curwen’s career that was fucked. He was in danger of ending up like Andy almost had, at the bottom of the estuary.

Rule one: if someone is out to fuck you over, the only thing to do is to fuck them over first.

He had to get Lavery, and fast.

Chapter 28

Bridlington

Becca’s night was an endless replay of dreams about things chasing her, hands grabbing her, her stepfather’s footsteps on the stairs, her mother’s voice calling her a liar, and periods of wakefulness that were almost welcome, when the pain in her shoulder and her neck dragged her out of her nightmares. She must have fallen into a deeper sleep at some point because when she opened her eyes again it was daylight and for a moment, everything was peaceful – until she tried to move her neck and pain brought the memory of last night flooding back.

She was so stiff it was hard to move, and there was no more paracetamol. The drug had barely helped anyway. She remembered Jared with his collection of opiates that, right now, much as she hated pills and pill-heads, would have been welcome.

Remembering him made her feel so alone she could hardly bear it. She got out her phone and scrolled through the photographs, stopping at one of her and Jared standing by his bike on the cliffs at Kettleness. She missed him, but they couldn’t sort their lives out together, so they had to do it apart.

She hoped he was doing better than she was.

The kitten was scratching and scraping around. She could hear the click of tiny claws as it pattered across the floor. What was she going to do with it? She could ask George if she could have a kitten, but what if he said no? Best keep it and say nothing. For the moment.

Slowly, she pulled herself out of bed, and moving carefully, went and got some more kitten food and milk. The kitten was back on the armchair, but the mess on her scarf that she’d left on the floor showed what it had been scratching and why it had got down in the night. She picked the scarf up and shoved it into a plastic bag – it was beyond cleaning. It could go in the bin.

She needed to buy stuff – cat litter, something to put the litter in, more food, more milk. It was all money and she just didn’t have enough. She extended a hand towards the little animal. It had been so timid before, but now it stayed put as she stroked its cheek and heard the buzz of a purr.

She felt a glow of triumph. It liked her.

She’d always managed on her own, so she’d do it now, somehow.

Hoping it would be OK without a litter tray for a bit longer, she fed it, then went and stood under the shower until the hot water ran out, scrubbing the dirt off herself and washing her hair. Reluctantly, she looked in the mirror.

Her face was bruised and her lip was swollen where it was split. Her knees were grazed, and there were bruises all over her body. She could tell people she’d fallen, but what would that make them think? That she’d been drunk, that’s what they’d think.

It was her half day at the supermarket today and she thought about pulling a sickie. She was sick. It was hard to move, she was hurting so much, and her ribs were still painful where the shit, the dickface, had kicked her. Why not give herself a day off to recover?

Because she needed the money.

And although part of her wanted to give up, to stay away from the pub, show them she’d got the message, that she’d understood, that anger – the anger Matt talked about – came back. Why should she? They’d hurt Andy