Deadly Cry (DI Kim Stone #13) - Angela Marsons Page 0,9

she was back on top. A blip. A dry spell. What Tyra hadn’t realised was that each surgery was making her look less like herself, and that the gigantic boobs had turned her into a novelty fixture. When approaching Tyra to represent her interests, Kate had envisaged a year or two of minor bookings, eking out the last dregs of the woman’s career, to help pay her mortgage until she secured a couple of high-paying clients.

That was until Tyra had revealed she’d accidentally slept with a well-known footballer after a drunken night in a Birmingham club. Kate had been unsure about the accidental part. How did one accidentally sleep with someone else, she had wondered, but she’d seen the financial opportunities straight away.

Together they’d devised a plan to maximise exposure and had started a marketing campaign of teasing out the information, dropping hints via social media and her YouTube channel. With the sniff of scandal in the air, Tyra’s followers on all platforms had tripled, and Kate had chosen the perfect moment for the identity of the footballer to be revealed. His denial had been met with photos from Tyra’s phone of the two of them, and social media had exploded. Hashtags placed carefully had kept the story trending for days. The offers had started rolling in: TV appearances, radio interviews, podcasts. An interview with a national newspaper had been followed by three publishing houses bidding for her tell-all, especially once Tyra alluded to the fact he wasn’t the only celebrity who had graced her bed. The deal had been secured, and Tyra’s memories had been turned into a book by a ghost writer Kate had used before.

It had been hard going. She’d worked seventeen-hour days for months. She’d spent many hours of that time massaging the ever-inflating ego of her client, who was relishing the limelight and eager to wring every last bit of drama from the situation.

But the tide had begun to turn. Kate could feel it. The dignified silence of the wife who had been wronged was damaging the campaign. An all-out bitch fight would have been better.

Oblivious to the change in tone to some of the messages, Tyra was milking the situation for every hour it had left in it, but more and more trolls were coming out of the woodwork and the name-calling had turned meaner. The idle death threats from the keyboard warriors were met with the same response: ignored and blocked. They were vague, vitriolic, violent and forgotten by the sender minutes later. It was par for the course. Anyone in the public eye was a magnet for the haters.

It wasn’t a situation she hadn’t been in before, but human nature dictated that hateful characters made more money.

In the meeting, she’d been asked if there was any direct threat to Tyra Brooks and she had said no.

She glanced towards her mobile phone sitting in the hands-free cradle.

She had lied.

Nine

Stacey paused before knocking on Lesley Skipton’s door. Was she really being fair to the woman raking it all up again if everyone felt there was no real hope of closure?

As a victim of rape, Lesley had already been subjected to enough. Not least the physical attack, but everything else that came afterwards.

Rape investigation had moved on in the last twenty years, but women still had to fight through the disbelief and doubt that came into the eyes of everyone to whom they told the story: police officers, medical staff, solicitors, a jury, in some cases even friends and family.

It was the only crime Stacey knew where everyone immediately looked for a loophole. Was she drunk? Was she being provocative? Was her skirt short? Did she invite it? No one accused a mugging victim of waving their wallet in the air or a burglary victim of advertising their worldly goods in the window. Only in cases of sexual assault was the victim made to feel like they had invited the crime. Stacey was yet to imagine any action at all that a woman could do to invite the horror of a sexual assault.

No, Stacey decided as she knocked the door, she wasn’t making a mistake in trying to get justice for a rape victim. And so what if the original investigating team thought it was a done deal? If she’d learned anything from her boss over the years, it was that you didn’t give up on something just because it was hard.

The door was opened a fraction by a fair-haired girl with the majority of