The Inspector Walter Darriteau Murder Mysteries - Books 1-4 by David Carter (best finance books of all time .txt) 📕

Every day, the same silent man visited their ten foot by ten foot metal tomb, bringing one bowl of rice per unit and one bottle of water each, and each time he would come back and take the bucket away, empty it, and bring it back ten minutes later.

Shu tried hard to engage him in conversation.

Could you bring me some chocolate?

Where are we going?

What will happen to us?

I like your tattoos.

Give us a smile.

Give us a kiss

Don’t be so cruel!

But the man never so much as grunted, and after a while Lily said, ‘You’re wasting your time. He’s probably under orders not to speak,’ and she was probably right, but it didn’t stop young Shu trying.

‘Maybe he’s dumb?’

‘A right dumb-ass if you ask me,’ said Fenfang, and they all laughed at that. ‘A right dumb-ass!’

After more than five weeks on the sea they felt the ship slowing, they detected men running to and fro down the corridor, they heard excited chatter, that unmistakeable chitchat that comes when a long voyage was coming to an end, though the girls couldn’t make out a word of what the men were saying.

Lily said what the others were thinking. ‘We’ve nearly arrived.’

Shu glanced nervously at the others. Looked scared.

Fenfang went to her and rubbed her shoulders and back.

‘You’ll be fine, we’ll stick together, won’t we Lily?’

‘Course we will,’ said Lily, and Shu tried a hopeful smile.

An hour later there was the tiniest bump as the State of Heavenly Peace tenderly kissed the wharf.

Another hour passed and the door opened. A menacing looking man stood in the doorway. In his hands was one long piece of thin rope. It was a frightening sight. Shu turned away.

‘You! Come here,’ he said to Fenfang, and the tall girl stepped forward. He tied the rope to her wrist, leaving a couple of metres length in his hand. He beckoned to Lily. She stepped forward, anxious to discover where they were. The man tied her wrist, ordered Shu forward. The little one joined the crocodile, happier to be together, attached to the others. Then he said, ‘We are going outside. If one of you screams or calls out or tries to escape I’ll cut all your throats,’ and he pulled a long bladed knife from the belt of his baggy trousers to make his point.

The girls didn’t say a thing.

The man nodded and tugged the rope and led them outside. It would be the first time they had left that ten by ten tin tomb in more than five weeks. Fenfang was looking forward to gulping fresh air. Shu stared at the armed man and was close to wetting her grubby pants. Lily Sang switched on her Jun Woo head. She wouldn’t miss a thing. Names, places, companies, culprits, criminals, abusers, users, tattoos, distinguishing features, conversations, everything would be recorded in the computer of her mind. Many men would go to prison for this, that was her aim, and for a very long time too, anything less would be failure, and Jun Woo had never failed at anything in her entire life.

Forty-Five

Jan and Jenny’s trawl through the Oriental businesses across Chester turned a blank. Everyone they saw was interested, but no one knew who the dead girl was. The monster’s idea that Sadie might be missing from classes at some local English language school had proved equally fruitless, and to cap it all the appeal through local media, releasing those dreadful photographs, had failed to land a single useful lead, all factors that encouraged Walter to believe that the dead girl must have been an illegal immigrant, and therefore, not in any UK government computer system.

And despite DCS Wortley’s insistence that Jessica Stone was still on Walter’s patch, no trace of her, or even rumours of her whereabouts, could be found. The Barton brothers’ trial was fast approaching and the prosecuting barrister was getting mighty nervous. He hadn’t won a case in four, and didn’t want to stretch the barren streak to five.

To cap it all, neither Donald Rushnell nor the missing cash had been located, and though Walter was reluctant to, he judged that the Rushnell case would be the easiest to solve, not that he ever preferred easy, but when things were not going well, any progress was better than nothing. They had good photographs on graphic wanted posters splashed throughout the media, and with the aid of a new £20,000 reward being put up by Lion Loans, it was only a matter of time before someone out there recognised the guy, and rang the police number in a state of high excitement.

The team needed a break. Not a holiday, but a fresh lead to kick-start their enquiries and revitalise the squad.

It was coming up lunchtime and Walter was thinking of going out for a pie and a pint. Sometimes a solitary meal and a pint of real ale brought ideas and inspiration that nothing else could. That was the hope, but he changed his mind and asked Karen to put a car on stand-by.

East of the city in Remembrance Chrissie was preparing a light ploughman’s lunch for her hardworking husband, though hard work was not his burden alone. She had risen early and had cut and boxed thirty cases of beautiful mauve Chrysanthemums, flowers she intended taking to Shrewsbury market the following day. Shrewsbury was a flowery kind of place, always did well with blooms there, ran a flourishing flower show too, and at £15 a box she was hopeful of bringing in some much needed income, for the pile of red unpaid bills on the old sideboard was growing by the day.

She opened the back door and called Colin in for his lunch. He’d been rotavating a piece of ground eighty yards by twenty, and he was getting too old for that. They’d cleared away the beans and tomatoes, sold the lot in Wem and Whitchurch, and were now running out of produce to