Read Incinerator for Free Online Page A

break my heart, but I was pretty sure he hadn’t meant she was going to rip me off. I’d sat with her after that pummelling she had taken from Bruno and looked into her eyes and she’d told me she’d see me today. She’d made several appointments for today, in fact, from what her receptionist had said, andwhy would she bother if she had been planning all along not to be here? The more clients she pissed off, the sooner her theft would be spotted. If it was a theft.
    If she
hadn’t
run off with my money, then what had happened to her?
    The door opened and a sharp-faced woman entered. She was thirty-something with dark hair, high cheekbones and the expression of a copper who hated dealing with the public but had drawn the short straw in the station canteen. Her short cropped hair and smart suit suggested she wanted her colleagues to assume she was a lesbian so they’d stop hitting on her and let her get some work done.
    “Finn Maguire?” Her accent was Brum and I noticed she didn’t bother calling me “Mr.” Two words in and she was already patronizing me. “I’m Detective Sergeant McCoy, this is Detective Constable Whelan.” I honestly hadn’t noticed she had a DC with her, a guy in a rumpled suit who didn’t look much older than me, so nondescript he faded into the background like a stain.
    By the time I’d explained my problem thelook on McCoy’s face suggested my story was a wind-up that someone was going to regret, starting with me.
    “You’re how old—seventeen?—and you had half a million pounds in the bank?”
    “I inherited it from my dad. He was left it by a family friend.” I’d told her all this already. I hadn’t told her Dad had been murdered over it, because that was none of her business. It didn’t matter anyhow; like most cops she’d jumped to a conclusion early on and was ignoring anything afterwards that didn’t fit. “My lawyer had control of it, not me,” I explained again.
    “Only she’s absconded with it.”
    “I don’t think she has.”
    “Well, has she or hasn’t she?”
    “She’s not the sort of person who would.”
    “Believe me, for that sort of money a lot of people would.” I noticed that she’d shifted from sceptical to sardonic, which was progress of a sort.
    “I think it’s more likely something happened to her.”
    “Let’s hold off on the conspiracy theories for now. Give us the facts, and let us do the investigating,OK? Your lawyer Nicky Hale has disappeared, and so has your money, is that right?”
    I could see where this was heading. Nicky had gone, her passport had gone, and the money had gone. As far as McCoy was concerned she could skip straight from recording a crime to marking it “case solved” and heading to the pub to celebrate.
    “Yeah. That’s right.”
    “I might as well tell you now, you’re unlikely to see that money again.”
    “Then what the hell are we all doing here?”
    “Oh, she’ll be caught eventually, don’t worry. But chances are she’ll have blown all the cash by then. If she hasn’t already.” McCoy actually found this funny, I realized—a lippy kid with more money than he knew what to do with had been taken to the cleaners by his bent brief. McCoy realized she shouldn’t have let her amusement show in her voice. She cleared her throat, looked down at her paperwork and clicked her pen pointlessly.
    “Right—is there a number where we can contact you, Mr. Maguire?”
    * * *
    My first thought as I emerged from the station into the cool evening was that there was little point heading straight back to the gym. Delroy could manage without me till closing time, and anyway I didn’t want him to read on my face how deep in shit I was—how deep in it we both were. Things were bad enough, but my deal with Sherwood had made everything worse. Detective Sergeant McCoy had made it very clear that as far as she was concerned, this was a case of fraud, not robbery, and the suspect had made a clean getaway, so what was