Read Online Spirit Animals (Ritual Crime Unit Book 3) by E. E. Richardson - Free Book Online Page A

worth their salt eager to get a shot of it in the background as they interviewed the horrified neighbours. The brightly coloured paint of the metal slide and climbing frames was flaked and rusted now, and as graffitied as the house.
    Beyond the play area was a line of scruffy trees—and among them stood a woman.
    She caught Pierce’s eye with the very still way that she was silently observing the scene, removed from the rest of the eagerly gawking crowd. Not one of the goths, though she would have fitted among their number at first glance, pale-faced and dark-haired; she was wearing a simple grey hoodie, though, and against the T-shirt underneath Pierce saw the glint of something silver. Her eyes weren’t up to the task of identifying it at this distance, but she supposed it could have been the necklace Leo described.
    Leo’s girl witness from fourteen years ago? Even if she’d been a teenager back then she should be older than this woman looked, but faces could be deceptive. Pierce took a step towards her, picking her way through the assembled crowd. She glanced over her shoulder for Gemma, but she’d moved away to take more pictures of the house from round the side, and there was no way to get her attention without drawing other people’s.
    Pierce turned back to her quarry, and saw that in the brief moment her attention had been diverted, the woman had already moved, heading away into the trees. She cursed silently to herself and hurried through the fringes of the crowd to follow.
    By the time she reached the tree line herself, the woman was already some distance away across the sloping green, and Pierce almost had to jog to just to match her walking speed. “Hey!” she called out. “Police! I need to speak to you.” That didn’t always get a positive reaction, but a negative one could tell her something too.
    In this case it got a complete non-reaction, the woman disappearing behind another cluster of trees without so much as looking back. Pierce chased after her, and found they’d reached a gravel footpath, leading to a set of metal gates with bold yellow warning signs. Pierce could see the overhead cables of the railway line beyond.
    Perhaps realising she was cornered, or willing to talk now they were out of sight of the people on the street, the woman had stopped just ahead of the fence. She turned back to face Pierce with a guarded expression.
    Pierce raised her hands to signal her peaceable intentions, slowing her approach to a non-threatening pace. “I just want to ask you some questions about the boarded-up house at the end of the row,” she said. “Are you a neighbour? Do you know anything about the people who used to live there?”
    Was this the girl that Leo had seen on the day of the raid? If it was, then Pierce thought that he must have overestimated her age back then: she didn’t look like she could be out of her late twenties now. But even if this wasn’t her, they still had one thing in common—she was indeed wearing a silver necklace in the shape of a bat with outstretched wings.
    “Listen,” Pierce said, in her most calmly encouraging tones. “My name is DCI Claire Pierce. I’m with the Ritual Crime Unit. Nobody’s in trouble, I just want to—” She was interrupted by the ring of her own phone, a loud electronic blurt that shattered the relative peace of the scene. Probably Gemma, checking where she’d got to. “Sorry, if you’ll just bear with me a second....” She struggled to wrestle her phone free from her overstuffed pocket.
    By the time that she had it in her hand, the woman was already gone.
    “Hey!” Pierce ran forward to the railway fence, looking both ways before she glimpsed a flash of a grey hoodie disappearing under the concrete bridge off to the right. She eyed the fence herself for one abortive moment, but even if she’d been stupid enough to trespass on the tracks, the thing had nasty spikes running along the top.
    The woman obviously knew the area well, and