Frankie Read Online Free Page A

as if he had his eye on her – she was too streetwise to allow guys like him anywhere near her. But she’d seen too much of herself in little Mary to allow anybody to take advantage of her. It was a reflex action, a coil deep inside her that had finally snapped. Frankie couldn’t change the past, but maybe if she could stop it happening again …
    ‘It was him or me,’ she muttered, trying to convince herself as she ran. She needed to get to the other side of the river, as far away from the scene as she could, so she headed towards Vauxhall Bridge. Her breath steamed in the cold air, and her hand throbbed with pain – she kept her fist clenched to stem the bleeding. But as soon as she stood on the bridge, she saw the heart-stopping sight of blue police lights coming from the north side. She had been on the streets long enough to know to avoid those flashing lights, and tonight she had more reason than usual.
    She turned and headed away from the bridge and into the streets of south London. She knew them like the back of her hand. God knows she’d walked them often enough.
    There was no knowing what Mary – or any of the others – would say about her to the police. They wouldn’t go out of their way to shop her, but their first loyalty was always going to be to themselves. Suddenly Frankie realized that in her eagerness to leave the scene she had forgotten that her prints would be firmly on the bottle that killed Strut. She had been arrested enough times for her fingerprints and mugshot to be on file, but she knew she couldn’t go back to collect the bottle. She needed to disguise herself, and get out of town as quickly as possible.
    To do that, she needed money. And fast.
    Still running, Frankie turned a corner and headed west. She kept a lookout for a shop that would be easy to break into, but most of them had metal shutters fastened tightly over their windows, and in any case she doubted their tills would be full. Had she been in a richer area, she might have taken the risk of breaking into a couple of expensive-looking cars and rooting around for the small change the owners often kept in the front for parking – that little trick had seen her out of more than one hungry evening before now. But she needed Mercedes and BMWs to earn her money that way, not the clapped-out rust-buckets parked up round here.
    After thirty minutes of half-walking, half-running, she figured she was far enough away to think about crossing the river. She took a right-hand turn and started weaving her way up towards Chelsea Bridge.
    It started to snow again as the lights of the bridge came into view, but she wasn’t cold: the running, spurred on by the adrenaline pumping through her body, had taken care of that. The imposing towers of Battersea Power Station were lost in the flurries of snowflakes. It was pretty, but Frankie did not have time to take in the scenery. She knew that she was going to have to be driven to another act of desperation tonight if she was going to disappear. She didn’t want to do it, but she couldn’t think of any other way.
    She ducked into a dimly lit side street and stopped to catch her breath in the arches that ran under the railway line. Her hand was still bleeding, and she knew she needed the use of it for what she had in mind. There was no way she could risk going to a hospital to get a clean bandage,so she took off her overcoat, ripped a strip of material from one of the two dirty T-shirts she was wearing, then tied it tightly around her hand. It still hurt, but at least she could use it.
    As she was pulling her coat back on, she saw two police officers in their bright yellow jackets walking past the end of the street. She pressed her back against the wall of the arch and waited for them to pass. The fight had been forty-five minutes ago, and in a different part of the city, but she couldn’t take any chances. The police might already have a description, in which case they would all be keeping a lookout