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  CRITICAL ACCLAIM FOR LEIGH RUSSELL

  ‘A million readers can’t be wrong! Loyal fans of Geraldine Steel will be thrilled with this latest compelling story from Leigh Russell. New readers will discover a terrific crime series to get their teeth into. Clear some time in your day, sit back and enjoy a bloody good read’ – Howard Linskey

  ‘Taut and compelling’ – Peter James

  ‘Leigh Russell is one to watch’ – Lee Child

  ‘Leigh Russell has become one of the most impressively dependable purveyors of the English police procedural’ – Marcel Berlins, Times

  ‘A brilliant talent in the thriller field’ – Jeffery Deaver

  ‘Death Rope is another cracking addition to the series which has just left me wanting to read more’ – Jen Med’s Book Reviews

  ‘The story keeps you guessing until the end. I would highly recommend this series’ – A Crime Reader’s Blog

  ‘A great plot that keeps you guessing right until the very end, some subtle subplots, brilliant characters both old and new and as ever a completely gripping read’ – Life of Crime

  ‘Russell at her very best and Steel crying out to be turned into a TV series’ – The Mole, Our Book Reviews Online

  ‘This is an absorbing and compelling serial killer read that explores the mind and motive of a killer, and how the police work to track down that killer’ – Jo Worgan, Brew & Books Review

  ‘An absolute delight’ – The Literary Shed

  ‘I simply couldn’t put it down’ – Shell Baker, Chelle’s Book Reviews

  ‘Highly engaging’ – Jacob Collins, Hooked From Page One

  ‘If you love a good action-packed crime novel, full of complex characters and unexpected twists this is one for you’ – Rachel Emms, Chillers, Killers and Thrillers

  ‘I chased the pages in love with the narrative and style… You have all you need within Class Murder for the perfect crime story’ – Francesca Wright, Cesca Lizzie Reads

  ‘All the things a mystery should be, intriguing, enthralling, tense and utterly absorbing’ – Best Crime Books

  ‘A series that can rival other major crime writers out there…’ – Best Books to Read

  ‘Sharp, intelligent and well plotted’ – Crime Fiction Lover

  ‘Another corker of a book from Leigh Russell… Russell’s talent for writing top-quality crime fiction just keeps on growing…’ – Euro Crime

  ‘A definite must read for crime thriller fans everywhere’ – Newbooks Magazine

  ‘For lovers of crime fiction this is a brilliant, not-to-be missed, novel’ – Fiction Is Stranger Than Fact

  ‘An innovative and refreshing take on the psychological thriller’ – Books Plus Food

  ‘Russell’s strength as a writer is her ability to portray believable characters’ – Crime Squad

  ‘A well-written, well-plotted crime novel with fantastic pace and lots of intrigue’ – Bookersatz

  ‘An encounter that will take readers into the darkest recesses of the human psyche’ – Crime Time

  ‘Well written and chock full of surprises, this hard-hitting, edge-of-the-seat instalment is yet another treat… Geraldine Steel looks set to become a household name. Highly recommended’ – Euro Crime

  ‘Good, old-fashioned, heart-hammering police thriller… a no-frills delivery of pure excitement’ –SAGA Magazine

  ‘Cut Short is not a comfortable read, but it is a compelling and important one. Highly recommended’ – Mystery Women

  ‘A gritty and totally addictive novel’ – New York Journal of Books

  To Michael, Jo, Phillipa, Phil, Rian, and Kezia

  With my love

  Glossary of acronyms

  DCI–Detective Chief Inspector (senior officer on case)

  DI – Detective Inspector

  DS – Detective Sergeant

  SOCO – scene of crime officer (collects forensic evidence at scene)

  PM– Post Mortem or Autopsy (examination of dead body to establish cause of death)

  CCTV– Closed Circuit Television (security cameras)

  VIIDO–Visual Images, Identification and Detections Office

  MIT–Murder Investigation Team

  Prologue

  Their expressions differed each time, some pleading, others defiant, but the terror was always present. More exciting than their writhing bodies, their naked fear was addictive. No other thrill could ever be as satisfying as gazing into victims’ eyes when the realisation hit them that they were going to die, no revenge as fitting as the power to end a life in righteous execution. The death penalty was delivered in secret, but that was fine too. The knowledge that justice had been served was its own reward. Other people might not understand, but there was a higher power whose approval was assured.

  Death had not been the original intention, but it was difficult to ensure their silence without it. Removing the first victim’s tongue had seemed like a clever idea which had proved horribly messy. In the end, it had been impossible to spare the woman’s life. In no time at all she had choked to death, but not before she had lost a lot of blood. The memory was still sickening, even after such a long time.

  Moving the corpse would have been pointless once she was dead because it was obvious she had been killed on her own blood-soaked bed. So she had remained there, a bloody heap of flesh, until eventually someone must have stumbled on her body. But by then, it was all over.

  After that, there had been no more blood. Apart from the mess, it was too unpredictable. Every physical touch left a trace, leading to the risk of identification by some overzealous forensic team. Suffocation required no direct contact with the victim, alive or dead. And there was no blood. Given that death was unavoidable if the victim was to remain silent, suffocation had to be the most sensible option. With a suitable method established, it was simply a matter of selecting the next victim.

  Unsuspecting women proved surprisingly easy to come by.

  1

  Since her retirement to York, Mandy had taken to walking along the towpath as soon as she woke up in the morning. It was important to keep to a routine so, regardless of the weather, she went out every day before breakfast. The walk was a pleasant one, and she enjoyed observing the changes of the seasons. The trees were beginning to turn golden and brown, and the sky was overcast more often than not. Glancing down at the river bank that morning, her attention was caught by a blue creature moving gently up and down on the water. Looking more closely, she realised that what she was looking at was not an unusually brightly coloured fish, nor even a strange bird, but an item of clothing caught in the fronds of a river weed. As she stared at it, she was shocked to see what looked like a hand protruding from one end of a blue sleeve. She closed her eyes, and let out an involuntary cry on opening them again, because she had not been mistaken. Concealed within a sodden sleeve was a human arm, perhaps still attached to a corpse hidden below the water.

  Mandy looked around frantically for someone to help her but she was alone on the towpath. With trembling fingers, she pulled out her phone and called the emergency services to report what she had spotted in the river.

  ‘Yes, a dead body… yes, I’m sure it’s dead,’ she faltered, after giving her name and location as precisely as she could. ‘That is, I can only see one hand, but that’s definitely dead. That’s all I can see of it, a hand. Everything else is out of sight under the water… no, I haven’t touched anything… yes, I’m sure it’s dead.’ She did not need to look at the hand again to describe it in detail. ‘The skin’s kind of green and grey.’

  It seemed to take a long time for the pol
ice to arrive. Meanwhile, a couple of other people had walked past along the towpath. Mandy made no attempt to detain them. She could not bear to draw attention to her horrible discovery, which might entail her having to find it and look at it again. In addition, she had a vague notion that the site ought not to be disturbed before the police had a chance to examine it for clues. There could be a significant footprint in the earth that would lead investigating detectives to the killer, assuming there had been a murder, and someone stepping forward to peer at the body might trample all over such vital evidence. So Mandy stood beside the river at the side of the towpath, like a mute sentinel guarding her hidden plunder, while pedestrians and cyclists passed by oblivious of her macabre vigil.

  After a few moments she calmed down. Only then did it occur to her that she could have made a stupid blunder. What she had spotted in the water might be the arm of a life-sized khaki-coloured hand, or perhaps a mannequin from a shop window. But she had summoned the police, and it was too late to change her mind. She had given them her name and address, besides which they would be able to trace her from her phone number. All she could do now was wait for the police to arrive and if it turned out she had made an embarrassing fuss over nothing, that was just too bad. There was nothing she could do about it now. The police could hardly arrest her for making a mistake.

  At last, a pair of uniformed police appeared and almost immediately the dreary quiet towpath erupted into a scene of bustling commotion. Within minutes, access had been blocked off to prevent members of the public from approaching, while white-clad officers began busily examining the river bank. Mandy was escorted away for questioning by a young policewoman who looked very smart and stern in her uniform.

  ‘Is it a body?’ Mandy enquired, although the teeming police presence had already confirmed her suspicion.

  ‘I’m afraid so.’

  ‘How did she die?’

  ‘She?’ the young policewoman repeated. ‘How do you know the deceased person is a woman?’

  Mandy shook her head, struck by a horrible thought. If the police thought she knew too much, they might suspect she was somehow involved in the death.

  ‘I didn’t – I don’t –’ she stammered. ‘I just thought – it didn’t look like something a man would wear. That bright blue, I mean.’

  Miraculously, someone brought her a cup of tea and wrapped a silver sheet around her shoulders. Although she had not been aware of feeling cold, she realised that she was shivering and was grateful for their care. She sipped the hot tea and tried to control her shaking.

  ‘I walk along here every morning, at about the same time,’ she explained, when the policewoman asked her if she was ready to give a statement. ‘It’s important to get some daily exercise, and it’s so lovely along here, watching the changing seasons. It’s a really nice place to walk, well, most of the time. Anyway, this morning I was walking along, like I do every day, and I just happened to notice the blue jumper. I thought it was an unusual fish at first, or a bird, but when I looked, I saw there was a hand –’ she broke off with a shudder. ‘I realised it must be a dead body and called you straightaway. And that’s all I know.’ She hesitated. ‘Do you think she meant to drown herself, or did she fall in by accident?’

  ‘As yet we have no idea how the victim came to be in the river,’ the officer replied quietly.

  The policewoman’s matter-of-fact tone calmed Mandy, and she stopped shivering and tried to breathe deeply and slowly. The most likely explanation of the tragedy was that the dead woman had been drunk, and had stumbled into the water while staggering along the towpath in the small hours. It was a frightful way to die, but perhaps she had been too befuddled to grasp the danger she was in. If you were unconscious when you died, presumably you just stopped breathing without knowing anything about it. In any case, the shock of being immersed in freezing cold water might have killed her before she had time to realise what was happening.

  ‘Let’s hope we all go like that,’ she said.

  The policewoman looked surprised and Mandy realised she had spoken aloud.

  ‘I mean –’ she stammered, ‘I mean I hope she was too drunk to know what was happening to her. I assume she was drunk, and that was why she fell in the river.’

  ‘It seems likely,’ the police officer replied with a noncommittal nod.

  ‘I guess we’ll never know for sure,’ Mandy said.

  The policewoman gave her a curious look. ‘Maybe not,’ she said.

  Mandy nodded. ‘I suppose finding out how and why she died is what you do. I mean, that’s your job, isn’t it?’

  The policewoman nodded but did not reply. Feeling foolish, Mandy cleared her throat. ‘I’d better be going then,’ she said.

  ‘If you’re sure there’s nothing else you can tell us?’

  Mandy shook her head. ‘There isn’t anything else. Will you tell me what happened? How she died, I mean.’

  The dead woman was a stranger, yet Mandy felt a strange sense of kinship with her. If it hadn’t been for Mandy, the corpse might have lain in the river for weeks, slowly eroded by water insects and animals, prey to maggots and rats and other scavengers.

  ‘I’m sure the media will report it,’ the policewoman responded, becoming brusque in her manner now that Mandy had concluded her brief statement.

  ‘I wasn’t being inquisitive,’ Mandy tried to explain. ‘I was just – concerned, that’s all.’

  The policewoman smiled and thanked her for her time before turning away.

  2

  Geraldine had not long been at her desk when Detective Chief Inspector Eileen Duncan called a briefing. As the team listened, Geraldine stared at Eileen’s ferocious expression with a mixture of admiration and concern. The senior officer’s dedication to her work was unquestionable, but she had an unfortunate tendency to bark aggressively at the team. Everyone knew that complicated investigations could take time to clear up, and the Serious Crime Command in York had a reputation for solving crimes swiftly, so Geraldine was not convinced that Eileen’s pushy attitude was actually helpful.

  Scowling around the room, Eileen announced that a woman’s body had been pulled out of the river. The consensus among the police officers present was that the woman had probably been drunk when she had stumbled into the river, while making her way home.

  ‘Even sober you could trip on the towpath in the dark and fall in,’ Eileen agreed, her large square jaw set in a determined line. ‘She might even have been unconscious when she fell in the water.’

  ‘That would have been a kindness,’ Geraldine murmured to herself. ‘Drowning must be a terrifying way to die.’

  Although they had not yet determined that the woman’s death had been anything other than an unfortunate accident, several unusual features at the scene meant that it was being treated as possibly suspicious.

  ‘Until we know more, we have to remain open minded about the cause of death,’ Eileen said.

  ‘It’s odd that no bag or purse has been found,’ a constable said.

  ‘And she had no keys or money on her,’ someone else added.

  ‘All of that could be lying on the river bed,’ Ian said.

  A search was under way along the river bank for the dead woman’s bag, but it might have sunk without trace, weighted down with coins and keys. Leaving the room, Geraldine smiled at Ariadne, who sat opposite her. As detective sergeants working on a murder team, they were both accustomed to answering the summons to work at any time

  ‘At least this report came in the morning when we were already at work,’ Geraldine said as they walked along the corridor together. ‘The older I get, the less I appreciate receiving a summons in the middle of the night.’

  ‘It must be particularly annoying to be disturbed at night if you’re sleeping with someone else,’ Ariadne replied pointedly.

  Geraldine did not answer. She and her colleague, Detect
ive Inspector Ian Peterson, had so far held back from announcing to their colleagues at the police station that he was living with her. They had not yet admitted to anyone else that, after many years of friendship, they were now romantically involved. Since he had moved in with her, she had been trying to see as little of him as possible at work. When he smiled at her, she sometimes had to look away, afraid that her face would betray her emotions. A few of her colleagues must have noticed that neither she nor Ian went to the pub in the evening any more, but no one had commented on their absence, at least not to their faces.

  Ariadne’s eyes were as bright and black as Geraldine’s and now they gleamed with barely suppressed curiosity.

  ‘So tell me, what’s going on with Ian?’

  ‘I don’t know what you mean. Nothing’s going on.’

  ‘Listen, I won’t tell anyone if you’d rather it wasn’t common knowledge, but I thought you two were –’

  ‘Were what?’

  ‘I thought you were an item these days?’

  Doing her best to hide her irritation, Geraldine laughed. ‘I don’t know what gave you that idea.’

  Ariadne sniffed and looked decidedly put out, and Geraldine turned away to hide her confusion. She was aware that she and Ian could not delay much longer before speaking to Eileen to explain their new relationship. But it was a long time since she had been romantically involved with anyone, and she was afraid of doing anything that might disturb their private happiness.

  ‘You can tell me to mind my own business if you like, but don’t lie to me,’ Ariadne said.

  ‘I thought I was telling you to mind your own business,’ Geraldine replied quietly. ‘Look, whatever’s going on between Ian and me is just that, between Ian and me. If there is anything going on, and I’m not saying there is, then we’re not ready to talk about it with anyone else yet. I don’t want to fall out with you, so can we please leave it at that?’

  By the time they reached their desks, a slight awkwardness had arisen between them. Geraldine regretted her brusque response to Ariadne’s questions, and decided to approach her friend at the next opportunity and try to explain her reluctance to talk about her private life although she was not sure she understood her own attitude herself. Before agreeing to Ian moving in with her, Geraldine had insisted they remain discreet about their new relationship.