Beautiful Lie the Dead. Barbara Fradkin

      Printed in Canada

      14 13 12 11 10 5 4 3 2 1

      Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

      Fradkin, Barbara Fraser, date-

       Beautiful lie the dead / Barbara Fradkin.

      (An Inspector Green mystery)

       ISBN 978-1-926607-08-5

      I. Title. II. Series: Fradkin, Barbara Fraser, 1947- . An Inspector

       Green mystery

      PS8561.R233B42 2010 C813’.6 C2010-904966-7

      The Inspector Green Series

       Do or Die Once Upon a Time Mist Walker Fifth Son Honour Among Men Dream Chasers This Thing of Darkness Beautiful Lie the Dead

      Table of Contents

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

       Eight

       Nine

       Ten

       Eleven

       Twelve

       Thirteen

       Fourteen

       Fifteen

       Sixteen

       Seventeen

       Eighteen

       Nineteen

       Twenty

       Twenty-One

       Twenty-Two

       Twenty-Three

       Twenty-Four

       Twenty-Five

       Twenty-Six

       Twenty-Seven

       Twenty-Eight

       Twenty-Nine

       Acknowledgements

ONE

      To Hannah Green, the Number 2 bus was the lifeblood of the city, belching oily fumes as it rumbled along the narrow streets of the inner city. On Ottawa’s transit planning chart, it was supposed to provide a link between two major shopping malls, the Rideau Centre at the heart of downtown and Bayshore Shopping Centre in the west. But it was the whacky journey in between that Hannah loved, first passing the gingerbread Victorian renos of Centretown, then the spice-laden clamour of Chinatown and the thrift shops of Hintonburg before it skulked like a smelly, overweight bag lady into the trendy kitsch of Westboro.

      On Monday night the weather was working itself up into one mother of a snowstorm, adding to the fun. Hannah loved watching the people as they clambered aboard in a swirl of snow, juggling Christmas shopping bags and yanking their mittens off with their teeth so they could fish into their pockets for change or a bus pass. She loved reading the clues they gave away, a weird habit she’d probably gotten from her father, the bigshot detective. The student with the three-hundred dollar Goretex jacket and the swagger in his step would probably get off in Westboro, or worse in her own neighbourhood of Highland Park just to the west of it. The old Chinese lady wearing a long woollen coat, a thousand mismatched scarves and a huge brown vinyl sac was going shopping at the Asian grocery store, and the teenage mother with the neon green ski jacket would wrestle her second-hand stroller and her sleeping baby down the steps into a snowbank outside the St. Vincent de Paul thrift store.

      Sometimes the people surprised her. Sometimes the tall, classy African family would not get off at the Ethiopian restaurant but at the library nearby. Sometimes the boozy trio of loudmouths whom she had pegged for the Royal Oak would head off instead to the stone church that hogged an entire block among the funky old stores of Hintonburg.

      And sometimes, like the young woman who flopped down in the seat across from her, they confounded her. The woman had boarded the bus at the corner of Bank and Laurier Streets, in the middle of the business district. She looked like a fashion natural. Long tumbling hair a shade of burnt red that you couldn’t buy in a bottle, perfect nails buffed to a natural shine. No make-up, but with cheekbones like that, who needed it?

      Hannah would have guessed high-end civil servant, except that it was eight thirty in the evening, too late for even the keenest government workers, and the woman was dressed in skinny jeans, high boots and a red suede jacket with awesome beadwork around the hood and hem. She was put together like a woman who knew what she was doing and had the money to do it.

      But her expression suggested a different story. She leaped aboard, wide-eyed and jumpy like someone high on coke. Her fingers didn’t work; she couldn’t open her purse, couldn’t pick up change. Hannah had been there enough times to recognize the signs. Even when the woman yanked her leather gloves off with her teeth, she took forever to snag the toonie at the bottom of her purse. And then it flew from her fingers and skittered across the floor.

      “Oh fuckety fuck shit!” she wailed, shocking even Hannah, who said much worse herself before she even got out of bed in the morning. The suede jacket and the high boots went better with a ladylike “oh pooh!”

      A dozen fingers groped on the floor to retrieve the