Cambridge Blue by Alison Bruce Page A

Lorna wanted to repeat herself, but was overtaken by the feeling that her brain could no longer connect with her mouth.
    She felt giddy and needed to steady herself. Her left hand moved, it rose from her side and drifted back towards the top rail. And like the slow topple of a felled redwood, the rest of her followed, staggering back, the railing all that stopped her from hitting the ground.
    It was then that she had a moment of clarity, an instant where she knew how and why she’d been drugged, and the enormity of her fatal miscalculation. She tried to reach out, to beg for her life. She managed to gasp, ‘I’m sorry,’ just as two hands flew forward and, with a single push to the sternum, sent her toppling over the railings and on to the pile of rubbish.
    She landed on her back in a crumpled heap, almost parallel to the footpath, with her head nearest the ground and her hair trailing in the mud. The other figure squatted and they stared at each other from either side of the bottom rung.
    Lorna heard the words hissed at her: ‘Do you know why?’
    She knew, but she couldn’t reply. She attempted to nod instead, but her head wobbled through an uncontrolled arc and her arms and legs twitched with a life of their own. Lorna tried to stay conscious, guessing she’d been overdosed and hoping that she would be found before it killed her. To stand a chance now, she just needed to be left for dead.
    But no one was going anywhere. Lorna watched as first a plastic carrier bag, then a length of string, were brought out of a pocket. A little more consciousness suddenly returned; her eyes widened and her breath came like the little huff children use to steam up windows. A pair of hands reached through the railings and dragged the plastic bag over the top of Lorna’s head, like a swimming cap.
    Lorna’s heart was beating so loudly that she barely heard the words spoken to her, the words that were merely intended to add to her suffering. Then the bag was pulled over her face and she felt the string being knotted at her throat.
    Inside her head she was screaming out, Oh, God help me. She breathed in and the bag was sucked into her mouth, then out again as she exhaled. I’m sorry . On her second breath, she knew the supply of air was already used up. Her chest rose and fell, burning with the effort. Please no more. Her heart beat louder. Please, please. Then, eventually, it stopped.

NINE

    Goodhew woke at 5.25 a.m. and hoped that the early bird really would catch the worm. He had no desire to spend more time than necessary trailing around the back streets and squats of Cambridge, hunting for the elusive Ratty.
    He was pissed off with Marks, and too familiar with Ratty’s activities to believe that the mission he’d been sent on was any more useful than being sent to stores for the clerk’s long stand.
    Ratty was about five-five in height and somewhere between twenty-five and forty – Goodhew guessed nearer twenty-five, despite the pock-marked skin, receding hair and sunken eyes that argued older. Ratty had once boasted that he’d been on the stage as a child, and then attempted to prove the point by belting out the first lines of ‘Unchained Melody’. It wasn’t a bad performance, but his liquorice-stump remnants of teeth hadn’t done him any favours; in the end he’d merely been cautioned for disturbing the peace.
    From time to time, he vanished completely, and on the first few occasions his acquaintances had assumed he lay rotting somewhere after a fix too far. But he’d always reappear and, assuming the role of an oracle for the city’s nightlife, he would proclaim to have witnessed virtually every major event that appeared on the police station’s radar. Often his information was remarkably accurate, but Goodhew guessed that Ratty was no more than a top-class eavesdropper, sucking up drunken gossip the way some of his down-and-out cronies hoarded newspapers or carrier bags.
    OK, so in this case it was the rape