Cut You Dead (Dr. Samantha Willerby Mystery #4) - A J Waines Page 0,28

and I was shocked, to see she’d had it all taken off.’

‘Me too. A pixie cut suited her – I mean anything would because she was so pretty, but…’ I waited, but she couldn’t end her sentence.

‘Do you know when she had it cut?’

Julia blew out a breath and took her time. ‘I remember we met two days before she died and it was short then. She was at college Monday to Friday, so she would probably have had it cut the Saturday before.’

I blinked fast, grabbing a pen for my notepad. ‘Hold on…’ I was working it through as I jotted down the details. ‘So, she had her hair cut on the Saturday – only six days before she died. Is that right?’

‘Yeah.’ Julia came to a halt. ‘Why – is that important?’

‘I’m not sure yet,’ I said guardedly, ‘but this could be very helpful. Was that her regular hairdresser?’

‘Yes. She’d been seeing Giovanni himself at the salon for ages. He was very good. A bit too expensive for me, but Lorna’s hair was really important to her.’ Julia’s voice cracked and she dropped her head again, rubbing her forehead. ‘Sorry…’ she sniffled, as her voice disintegrated into tears.

‘Don’t be. What happened to Lorna was terrible.’ The stark description I’d read on Lorna’s police file had left me sickened: struck unconscious with the branch of a tree… parallel grooves in the gravel indicating the body was dragged to the railway line… hit by a train… dead on impact…

I snapped back to the present. ‘Thank you for your time, Julia. I’m sorry it’s upsetting for you.’

She wiped the heels of her hand into her tearful eyes. ‘I don’t care – if it gets her case reopened.’

‘I hope it will. I’ll let you know.’

I was about to end the call, when Julia spoke again. ‘She didn’t want to get her hair cut – you do know that?’

Her words took my breath away. ‘No, I didn’t.’

‘She had no choice. Someone had hacked a chunk of it off at the back.’

A band of heat closed around my throat. ‘Really? What happened?’

‘I was the one who noticed it. It was an awful mess. A gap in the top layer where someone had just snipped it off.’

‘When? Can you remember?’

‘Oh, I spotted it at a pop concert at the Hammersmith Apollo. I remember the date because it was my mum’s birthday. November twelfth.’

Exactly a week before Lorna was killed.

I kept Julia talking. This was important. ‘Did you see it happen?’

‘No. It was dark inside the venue, obviously, and really crowded. But Lorna did mention it might have happened in the queue outside.’

‘Did she see who did it?’

‘No. She thought she felt something on the back of her neck, but she’d put it down to raindrops falling from an umbrella or someone’s hood. Like I say, there were loads of people around.’ Julia stared intently through the screen at me. ‘Having said that, she did say she thought someone had been following her.’

There’d been no mention of this on Lorna’s police file.

‘Did she tell the police she was being followed? Did she report it to anyone?’

‘I don’t think so. I reckon she didn’t think there was much point. She mentioned it briefly to me before the concert, but said she didn’t know who it was – she never saw his face.’ Julia hesitated, her finger trailing back and forth over her chin. ‘Come to think of it, I remember she told me it stopped after her hair was chopped off. I thought it was either someone who’d briefly taken a shine to her or was part of some stupid prank.’

22

Terry was on time, as ever, waiting outside the Victoria Arms. There were too many staff involved with HOLMES 2 to accommodate them at the Stanhope Street police station, so he worked at an annex near Camden Road train station, half a mile away.

He was looking in the other direction, so I spotted him before he saw me. Drawing closer, it was as if I’d never seen him before. I took in the debonair way he held himself; his chest lifted, the powerful ridges of his shoulders shaping his jacket and his lean long legs. An intense anticipation, a longing I’d rarely felt before, almost got the better of me and my legs threatened to buckle.

‘You look flustered,’ he said, rather too observantly. ‘Tough day?’ He held open the pub door for me and I grabbed hold of it gratefully.

‘No. Quite the opposite, actually.’ Inside, the bar