Price to Pay, A Read Online Free

without coats wandering the rainy streets at teatime. Kids clustered just inside the entrance to the Arndale, shrieking at the screen of their mate’s mobile phone. Kids whose parents probably worked long shifts for shit pay and then headed straight for the booze shelves at the nearest supermarket.
    The girl’s eyes were still bright, though. And her smile revealed teeth that were white and well aligned. Care home kid? Iona wondered. Who could tell?
    The same horrible running order ran beneath her photo. British passport. Eventually O’Dowd cleared his throat. ‘This girl exploded at a border crossing on the Israeli-Lebanese border five days ago.’
    A few seconds of stunned silence. Someone somewhere whispered, ‘That’s her?’
    ‘It is. A few among you may remember the incident being reported; it briefly made the news that day. Her identity, however, remained unknown until yesterday. Make no mistake, ladies and gents, this represents a huge and deeply worrying development. Girls like this – young, white, British, non-Muslim – do not become suicide bombers. They just don’t.
    ‘For those exact reasons, this girl was able to approach, completely unchallenged, the Israeli position. Soldiers even directed her away from the main crossing point. There are no survivors to verify how she seemed; the blast took out a good chunk of the border building along with four members of the Israeli Defence Force, including a major. Needless to say, there was little left of the girl – whose real name, it turns out, was Jade Cummings.’
    Around her, Iona could see officers sitting slack-jawed in their seats. Someone said very quietly, ‘Holy shit.’
    O’Dowd drew breath sharply through his nose and sat up straight. ‘OK, that’s your dwell time over. Time to re-engage brains. How do we know this girl’s identity? Serendipity, as they say. An officer with the Greater Manchester Police was returning from a diving holiday in the Red Sea. He saw a paper at Tel Aviv airport that contained a story about the bombing. Included was a photo of the girl’s face.’ O’Dowd grimaced. ‘When these types of bomb go off, it’s not unusual for the upward blast to take the head of the bomber clean off. Often it’s propelled a considerable distance. When the officer returned to work yesterday he happened to be on the team handling the investigation into the murder of Eamon Heslin. He was going through the profile of each girl and – bingo – there’s the mystery bomber he’d seen in the paper at Tel Aviv.’
    Someone at the back gave a humourless laugh. ‘Hooray for holidays in the Red Sea Riviera.’
    O’Dowd’s expression didn’t lighten. ‘The security services in Israel were contacted immediately; they were able to confirm our photo matched their head. So, our priority is now finding out how Jade Cummings came to be over in Lebanon with a couple of kilos of high explosive strapped to her body. Is there a link to the fact she was in care? Did she have any boyfriends, and if so, what were their ethnicity?’ He flicked to another slide: one with the photos of Shandy and Rihanna side-by-side. ‘We also need to find out what the hell is going on with these two. That will be made much easier if we can work out where this laptop came from. Obviously, Eamon Heslin can’t tell us that and cracking open the hard drive may take time.’
    He sat back, interlinked his fingers and surveyed the room. ‘Any reports of muggings, break-ins or thefts from cars, public transport, offices or homes need to be pursued. Not just those where a Dell Latitude was taken – remember, due to the nature of this thing, the person probably won’t have made a report. But an incident may have been rung in by the security staff of an office building that was burgled, someone in a shared house, the attendant in a multi-story car park, British Transport Police if several passengers were robbed on a particular train, the list goes on.
    ‘If you examine