Читать книгу The Victim - G.D. Sanders - Страница 17

Alone in the CID Room, Ed glanced at her watch. There was no hurry, but she’d reached a good place to stop. Shutting down the computer, she slipped her mobile into her bag and left the Station on foot. In the city centre, she crossed the Buttermarket to Sun Street and took a window table in Deakin’s where she toyed with a mineral water, wishing Verity Shaw was already there to distract her from her thoughts.

Last June, transferred to Canterbury from the London Met, Ed had been pitched straight into the disappearance of a local schoolgirl. With her new team she’d discovered the case was one of a series of abductions stretching back ten years. The perpetrator was now in jail awaiting trial. However, although the investigation was effectively wound up, Ed still woke at night with an image of the abductor in her head. She had worked on horrendous crimes with the Met, but in London she’d been able to switch off and walk away. With the abductions in Canterbury it had been different. For the first time in her career, the images stayed with her, not because she had led the investigation, but because she couldn’t forget the mothers separated from their daughters. The image of the abductor returned and she shuddered at the evil he had perpetrated.

As she took another sip of water, Ed’s honesty forced her to concede she was troubled by more than recurrent thoughts of the abductions. She would never let her mood influence her work, but for some months she’d felt decidedly below par. Not down, exactly, but until recently things had not been as she would have liked. Ed knew herself well enough to know the reason. There had been a long gap without a man in her life.

Men!

They’d not always treated her well; indeed, a few had treated her badly. Ed could live without them, but on balance, she would rather have a bastard in her bed than no one at all. This time, perhaps, she’d struck lucky. So far there had been no sign that Daniel was a bastard. He was fit and attentive, but he was another cop and that should be warning enough.