Frankie Read Online Free

wasn’t the person she had expected to see. ‘Where’s Ray?’ she asked, doing her best to take control of the situation.
    ‘Haven’t you heard?’ the guard replied in his thick East End accent. ‘Sick leave. Could be permanent.’
    ‘I didn’t know he was ill.’ Rosemary was shocked. Ray always had a bit of banter with her as she left the office of an evening. Surely he’d have told her if something was wrong.
    ‘Nor did he. Come on very sudden. Makes you think, doesn’t it?’
    ‘Yes,’ she replied. ‘Yes, it does.’ Rosemary stood in silence for as long as she thought was respectful. ‘Right.Goodnight, then. Time for me to go home.’ She side-stepped the guard who was still standing in front of her.
    ‘G’night,
Miss
Gibson,’ he replied without a smile.
    Rosemary continued down the corridor to the lift. Once she had pressed the button, she looked nervously over her shoulder.
    The security guard was still there, looking straight at her. Their eyes met for a few uncomfortable seconds. Then he turned and walked round the corner, out of sight.
    Frankie wasn’t afraid to do what it took to look after herself, but it had never gone this far. There was no point checking to see if Bob Strut was dead – nobody bled as much as that and lived; the main thing now was to get the hell away. Her hand was bleeding badly from the cut of Strut’s knife; but more importantly the police could be on the scene any minute. They wouldn’t care less that the world was a better place with Strut six feet under – if they could charge her for the killing and get one more vagrant off the street, it would be a result for them.
    Behind her was chaos. Strut’s cronies had fled the moment they realized what was happening, and most of the remaining down-and-outs were in a state of confusion: nobody wanted to be anywhere near the dead body, to be associated with it in any way, and yet they had no place to go. They held urgent conversations with frightened looks on their faces. In a far corner of the park, a few of the younger ones were more boisterous – happy Strut was gone, but too high to understand the seriousness of what was happening. Mary was still being comforted by the two older women as Frankie hurried up to her andcrouched down. She didn’t have time to console her, but she knew from the one conversation she’d had with the teenager since she arrived here that a softly-softly approach was called for. She gently put her arm around the young girl. ‘Mary,’ she whispered hoarsely.
    The girl just carried on sobbing.
    ‘Mary,’ she said more firmly, ‘you
have
to listen to me.’
    Mary turned her reddened eyes towards her.
    ‘When the police arrive, you’ve got to let them take you away.’
    Mary shook her head in disbelief. ‘They’ll think it was me –’ she started to say.
    ‘No, they won’t,’ Frankie interrupted her. ‘Everyone’s seen what happened. Trust me, Mary. This guy has friends. When they find out what happened here, they’ll be back. The safest place you can be is a police cell, and when they let you out, you must never come back here. If you can’t go home, move to a different part of the country. And whatever you do, don’t tell the police anything about me. Do you understand?’
    Mary just looked at her blankly, and Frankie couldn’t tell if she had taken in a word she had said. But she couldn’t stick around. She gave the girl a weak smile, then she turned and left, knowing that she would never see Mary again.
    As she made her way down the street along the side of the park, she walked as calmly as she could, not wanting to attract attention to herself. But she felt her pace quickening almost involuntarily as her body screamed at her to get away from that place. Soon she was running. As she hurried, her mind was working overtime. What the hell had come over her? Scumbags like Strut weren’t worththe time of day, and now she had risked everything on his account. It wasn’t even