The Sixth Soul Read Online Free Page B

to her like a radio signal from deep space, a message from a distant world that she and her baby were now no longer a
part of.
    A stressed mother . . . stresses . . . an unborn . . . baby.
    She couldn’t get her breath.
    She heard her heart beat against her ribs, picking up pace by the second, and felt it as a pulse behind her eyeballs.
    Instinctively, she folded her arms across her middle, covering her baby with the armour of flesh and bone.
    Phillip had tried to talk over television news broadcasts that had reported the discovery of Alison Todd’s body and the growing details that were released by the media. But Phillip
wasn’t around all the time, as when he was asleep in the pit of night and she had wandered downstairs and come across the BBC twenty-four-hour news channel.
    Footage from the scene of the discovery of a body: blue and white tape cordoning off an area around Lambeth Bridge; the grimness of the reporter’s face as she recounted from the place
where
a second body, believed to be that of Mrs Todd, was found by a man walking his dog at dawn.
    The police were refusing to reveal whether the mother was dead or alive when the killer performed a forced Caesarean section to remove the baby, along with pieces of the womb. The precise cause
of Alison Todd’s death was unknown; there had been a media blackout on the detail, to weed out crank confessions.
    Rather her than me
.
    Her own words burned a hole in her memory.
    She wept in the darkness, using all the strength in her diaphragm to still the scream, the cry from her heart and her throat. When her baby gave a sudden sharp kick, her willpower collapsed.
    The lid was low and her scream bounced back into her face. She drew in another breath and cried out for her mother, plummeting into hysterical tears as the word died on the lid inches from her
face.

7
    K
now Your Enemy . . . London’s Drug Dealers and Addicts
.
    The bank of faces on the wall of the open-plan office of Isaac Street Police Station gazed into the fluorescent silence. In contrast with the faceless Herod, they looked like a reasonable bunch
of boys and girls. As with budgets, space was tight and the office doubled up as the incident room for the ongoing murder investigation.
    It was nine o’clock at night and DCI David Rosen had been on duty for just over fifteen hours. Reaching the point of fatigue that should have sent him home for food and sleep, he remained
in the office, held there by an uneasy instinct. He’d phoned his wife Sarah, apologized for his absence. It was nothing new to her, and she was up to her eyes in marking her pupils’
exercise books.
    Spread across Rosen’s desk was a colour map of London, on which abduction points were marked with red crosses and numbers. The body drops-offs, the blue crosses, seemed to form no
discernible pattern. Jenny Maguire, victim one, in the lake at St James’s Park. Alison Todd, victim two, under Lambeth Bridge. Jane Wise, victim three, at the corner of Victoria Street and
Vauxhall Bridge Road. Sylvia Green, victim four, outside the Oval cricket ground. Where would Julia surface? Rosen pored over the map, hoping for inspiration.
    He opened Outlook Express. There was one potentially meaningful email, with an attachment, from Carol Bellwood.
    David, I loaded all the significant information from this morning’s scene of crime at 22 Brantwood Road and 24 Brantwoood Road into HOLMES. Two
     hours later and every data permutation possible, I’m sorry to say there have been no matches.
    Sorry, Carol
    PS check att, with regard to this morning’s talk, is this what has happened to the babies?
    HOLMES contained all the recorded data for every reported crime, solved and unsolved, in the United Kingdom. If Bellwood, the best HOLMES reader Rosen knew, couldn’t squeeze something
useful out of the database that cross-matched details from all crime recorded in the UK, then no one could. It was a blow and he swore sourly as he breathed out.
    He