Behind Dead Eyes (DC Ian Bradshaw #2) - Howard Linskey Page 0,133

block in town where she was well known. The woman on the reception desk welcomed her warmly and Annie told her she was there for one of her regular meetings with her firm’s tax advisor. Other than the woman who asked her to sign into the building when she arrived there was no further barrier between the outside world and the lifts that rose to a number of floors housing different accountancy firms, which was one of the reasons Annie had chosen the site.

Annie Bell signed the entry register while exchanging banal pleasantries with the receptionist about the weather. She then thanked her and headed for the elevator. The tax advisor was on the third floor, but Annie rode the lift all the way up to the twelfth. She then got out and walked past a number of desks manned by people working for an accountancy firm she had never used. Hardly any of them even bothered to look up but it wouldn’t have mattered if they had, because Annie looked like she belonged there and wouldn’t have aroused suspicion.

When Annie reached the far end of the room she went through an exit door and found what she was looking for: the long metal staircase that acted as a fire escape. She took the staircase up one more level, pushed hard on the metal bar of the emergency exit door until it swung open, then stepped out onto the roof. The fire alarm immediately went off but she paid it no attention. Instead she walked to the very edge of the building and stopped, then looked down at the concrete surface of the road far below her. Then she took out her mobile phone and dialled a number.

Annie waited as the phone rang and rang. Eventually she was connected to someone on the switchboard. ‘I’d like to speak to Detective Sergeant Ian Bradshaw,’ she said.

‘Please hold.’ The phone rang again, three times, and then a male voice came on the line.

‘Bradshaw.’

Ian Bradshaw did not say another word during that conversation. Instead, he listened to Annie, who spoke as if she had given a lot of thought to her words before calling him. She told him her name, her whereabouts and her intentions and who she blamed for them. Then she told him to come alone and hung up without giving him the opportunity to respond. As soon as he realised she was gone, Bradshaw raced for the door.

When Bradshaw reached the site, a flustered woman greeted him. She was standing to one side of a large group of employees from the office block who had all been evacuated to muster points at various corners of the car park. In the background a fire alarm was ringing incessantly. ‘Who called you?’ she asked when he showed her his warrant card. ‘I was about to phone you. We only just saw her …’ And she pointed to the figure high up on the roof. Bradshaw couldn’t make her out clearly but it had to be Annie Bell. She appeared to be sitting on the edge of the building, legs hanging over the side. ‘She told me she had a meeting with her tax advisor,’ the woman babbled. ‘She’s been here before, loads of times. I never thought—’

‘It’s okay.’ Bradshaw held up a hand to calm her then looked back up at Annie. ‘Please just tell me how to get to her.’

When Bradshaw entered the building the alarm was still blaring and he had to endure its noise as he hurriedly climbed twelve flights of stairs, eventually arriving breathless at the top and emerging through the opened fire exit door. He hadn’t been on the roof of a building since the day his former partner had gone straight through a skylight and broken his back. Detective Constable Alan Carter would never walk again. Never keen on heights, Ian Bradshaw’s fear of them had magnified that day.

Now, as he strode across the top of the twelve-storey office building, a bitter northern wind swirled around him. Bradshaw knew the drop from this flat roof had to be over a hundred feet onto merciless concrete below and he had the beginnings of what he preferred to regard as a heightened state of anxiety, as this was something he might be able to control. It made his heart race, affected his ability to breathe normally and created an illogical certainty he was about to drop down dead at any moment. His doctor referred to these spells as