“And you think I do?” Lindsay said, amused in spite of herself by Helen’s attempts at pathos. “I know nothing about this woman. I don’t know her surname, her age, what she looks like, where she lives, what she drives or what kind of clothes she wears. I don’t know who her friends are, what she does on her days off or anybody she’s ever shagged. If anybody’s going to get something on Stella, don’t you think you’re a bit better equipped?”
Helen shook her head. “Her surname is Piper and she’s thirty-two.” She rummaged in her bag and came out with an A3 brochure promoting Watergaw Films. She flicked it open to the back cover. There, beneath Helen and Guy, was a head-and-shoulders shot of Stella Piper. Straight dark hair cut close to her head, liquid brown eyes accentuated with eyeliner and mascara, a pert, upturned nose and a rosebud mouth.
“She looks like Bambi,” Lindsay said.
“Knowing her, it wouldn’t have been the hunters who shot her mother,” Helen said darkly. “She drives a metallic green Fiat Punto and she lives in some trendy warehouse conversion on the canal behind King’s Cross station when she’s not round Guy’s flat in Stoke Newington. She wears that skin-tight fashion that looks great on Kate Moss and would make you and me look like sausages that need to go on a diet. As for friends, I shouldn’t think she’s got any.”
“Fine, but I still don’t know where to start digging,” Lindsay insisted firmly.
“You could start by following her.”
“Helen, I haven’t even got a car,” Lindsay protested.
“That’s no problem. We use a hire firm just round the corner when we need some extra wheels. I’ll take you round there and sort you out with something right now.” She finished her beer in one swallow and looked expectantly at Lindsay.
Lindsay closed her eyes and sighed. In the long years of their friendship, Helen had only ever asked for Lindsay’s help once before. It had seemed straightforward that time too, but it had led Lindsay into a confrontation with a murderer that had forced her into the hardest decision she’d ever taken and had altered the course of her life irrevocably. It wasn’t an experience she’d willingly repeat. But even putting the most pessimistic of glosses on Helen’s present request, it was hard to see how it could get her into the kind of trouble she’d been trying to avoid ever since that bitter tragedy in Glasgow.
She opened her eyes and shook her head with an air of fatalism. “I have a horrible feeling that I’m going to regret this,” she said, picking up her glass and following Helen’s example. “Let’s go and get me a set of wheels.”
Chapter 11
Lindsay fiddled with the radio tuning buttons again. She’d been parked across the street from the industrial unit that housed Watergaw Films for the best part of an hour. So far, she’d grown irritated with one presenter’s attempts at controversiality, bored with a magazine program that seemed to cater for the prurience of people without a life of their own, and infuriated to discover a play she’d been listening to was the first of three episodes of a serial. Now she’d never know why Prunella had taken the Old English sheepdog to the archbishop’s consecration. Giving up on talk radio, she settled for a station that played oldies with minimal chatter between records.