Black & Blue: BookShots (Detective Harriet Blue Series) Read Online Free Page B

watching the men outside. One of the girls had wandered in from the main hall with a sea captain’s hat on her head, tipping the brim in the closet mirror and tilting her naked hips. She’d snagged the hat from the leader of a bachelor party, the pack of drunken boys hollering from the back courtyard as other girls danced around the lazy-eyed groom.
    ‘What do you think?’ The girl had taken the cap off and sent it sailing across the room into Hope’s hands like a Frisbee. ‘Captain Hope, reporting for duty.’
    Hope had stared at herself in the mirror after the girl had gone, the cap too big on her head, a tiny girl playing dress-up. She’d remembered sailing with her father, those few times he had indulged himself over the years and rented cruisers for a trot around the harbour. Pretending he owned them. Lies and make-believe. Hope was so tired of all the games – the ones the men made her play, the ones she played with herself. Captain Hope, Master of Her Own Destiny.
    It would take a miracle to achieve something like that, she’d thought.
    Or would it?
    What exactly
would
it take?
    Hope walked the length of the vessel now, examining the newly painted surface, and then climbed down the ladder onto the floor of the dry dock. When she’d acquired the
Dream Catcher
it had been a hideous wine-bottle green, but the guys she’d hired for the makeover had finished the last coat of the new colour – a chic, modern ash grey. Hope had started making lists of steps in her plan that very night as she’d huddled away in the back of the brothel, and once the list had been completed, she’d made a new one. She couldn’t remember how many lists it had taken, how many crossed or cancelled steps. Find a couple selling their yacht. Find an ally to comfort the couple as they enquired about the sale, someone cute and easy to manipulate, someone who knew how to act in a prescribed role. Hope had followed a recipe she found online for chloroform and cooked it in the brothel kitchen, whistling, as if she were baking a cake.
    Picking out and commissioning the fresh paint job on the boat was one step she’d been looking forward to for a while. She stood now with her hand on the vessel and listened to the hull to see if there was any sign of the couple from within. Nothing. She wandered around the back of the boat in her sun hat and glasses and stood watching the men on the ladder as they applied the new name to the side.
    ‘Just in time for the big reveal,’ the tall one said. He was a stunning young man in a cut-off singlet, spattered all over with tiny spots of white paint. He looked as if he were covered in stars. He reached up and began peeling away the paper stencil around the lettering on the hull of the boat.
    ‘The
New Hope
,’ she read. She felt a dark stirring in her chest at the sight of the words. She’d had the boys paint them in a deep crimson. Her dream, written in blood.

CHAPTER 13
    TOX WAS ALREADY in the interrogation room with Claudia’s parents. Not only was it one of the unfriendliest rooms in the station to speak to them, but I had no idea what he’d already said. I felt my stomach tighten as I spotted him sitting there in the cramped, musty room beyond the two-way mirror, their horrified faces. Mum and Dad had recently been crying. She was a heavy blonde woman, and their daughter’s lean features and dark hair came from her moustached father. I threw open the door just in time.
    ‘… breast implants?’ Tox was saying.
    ‘What?’ Mrs Burrows frowned. She glanced at me, her mouth twisted.
    ‘Yeah, what?’ I sat down beside Tox.
    ‘I was just asking Mr and Mrs Burrows here how long it had been since their daughter got those breast implants.’ He looked lazily at me. ‘You did notice the cadaver had breast implants, right?’
    ‘Mr and Mrs Burrows.’ I put my hands calmly on the table beside the handcuff hooks. ‘I must apologise for my partner here. Detective Barnes has been under a lot of