The Evil Beneath by A.J. Waines Page B

stroking back my hair.
    ‘I’m okay. Not a nice welcome, is it?’ I didn’t want to create any more drama, especially as there were two young women waiting for me in the reception area, pretending to read magazines. ‘I’ll get started as soon as I’ve been to the bathroom.’
    The bathroom was actually a single disabled cubicle, with a mirror and padded seat. I wasn’t seeing anybody until I’d soaked my face with water to get rid of the threatening bloke’s saliva. I scrubbed with a rough paper towel, managing to turn my cheeks a raw pink colour, but I didn’t feel clean.
    The demonstration broke up shortly after I started seeing clients, but images of the angry bloke’s dirty and bloody face, pressing right up against mine, distracted me at regular intervals throughout the afternoon. His threatening words were still fresh and vivid in my mind as I left the building and walked back to my car:
You’ll pay for this.
    As soon as I got home, I got straight into the bath. It still felt as though the remains of sticky spittle were eating into my skin. I hoped that hot water and plenty of sweet-smelling bath salts might cleanse it away, but even after I’d scrubbed with two different soaps, I still hadn’t managed to shift the sullied feeling.
    I settled on the sofa with my latest novel, hoping the words would take me somewhere else. When my brother died, books were my hiding place. My solace and protection. I loved the raw, fresh smell of sawn timber when opening a new book. But more than the promise of a good story, books taught me how to survive on my own. My parents were too preoccupied with their own grief to notice that I had gone into my shell. They didn’t realise that I cried myself to sleep or went to sit in Luke’s room in the middle of the night.
    Luke died because he went back into the house to find Pippin, our dog. He pulled himself free from my father’s arms, dodged the fireman who was directing a heavy hose at the windows and disappeared into the black fog. We never saw him again.
    At twelve years old, books like Frances Hodgson Burnett’s
The Secret Garden
had wrapped a comforting blanket around me and held me safe, while my parents paced the room beneath me. As I held the book close in the light of my bedside lamp, I would hear my mother sobbing and my father opening and closing drawers in his study, as if searching for something to bring Luke back. For me, books had been my private life-raft; the words on the page a reliable constant in a world where things could change dramatically and forever.
    This evening, however, I couldn’t concentrate.
    I switched on the
London News,
interested to see if there was any mention of the demonstration before I started chopping vegetables. There wasn’t. When I lived in Norwich, the local roundup might have covered such an event, but in London, the stakes were higher. I was about to leave the room, when a shot of Richmond Bridge filled the screen.
    ‘The body of a girl was found this morning under Richmond Bridge, in Surrey,’ said a female reporter, standing beside a boat. ‘Police have yet to make an identification.’
    I could see blue and white tape, wrapped around poles at the edge of the water. It looked just like the crime scene at Hammersmith.
    I was on my feet. All thoughts of making supper were instantly extinguished, as I swayed from side to side in my dressing gown. The shot cut to the familiar set-up. Uniformed officers with microphones behind a long table, answering questions. Detective Chief Superintendent Rollinson, presumably representing the police in the Richmond area, was speaking:
    ‘We have no reason to connect this death to any other crime at the present time, but, of course, we are exploring all avenues in our efforts to find out what happened.’
    ‘How old is the girl?’ called out a reporter.
    ‘We believe the girl to have been in her teens,’ replied DCS Rollinson. ‘She was found by a fisherman first thing this