Page 49 of Child's Play
‘Another good watering hole gone,’ Bryant observed. ‘Used to drink there in my twenties.’
‘Been there recently?’ she asked.
He shook his head.
‘Well, stop moaning, then,’ she snapped.
It reminded her of the outcry from the public when car makers Rover were shedding thousands of jobs, all from folks driving foreign cars. Successful companies rarely went out of business.
She approached the gap in the seven feet high white boards designed to keep vandals out. She paused for a minute and looked around.
‘Get uniforms to check for CCTV, anyone looking out of the window and anyone who could have been waiting at this bus stop right here.’
‘Bloody wish Penn was on our team right now,’ Bryant said, heading towards a police sergeant at the edge of the hoarding.
Yes, it was exactly what he would have been tasked to do.
‘Long time no see,’ she called to Keats who was amongst a clutch of white techie suits.
‘And I wasn’t missing you a bit, Inspector,’ he replied without turning. ‘And thank you for your prompt attendance. I assume you were driving.’ He looked around her. ‘Did you kill him en route?’
‘He’ll live,’ she said.
Keats stepped aside. ‘Preliminary examination completed but we chose not to move him until you got here.’
Kim stepped around a rolled-up newspaper that had already been marked with an evidence number.
She approached the male victim lying face down on the ground, his head turned so that his right cheek lay against the gravel. A pool of blood had collected beneath him, and Kim could see the tear in the man’s light sports jacket. Their victim had been stabbed from behind.
‘One wound?’ Kim asked, walking around the body.
Keats shook his head. ‘I’m thinking two. The first one in the back to get him down and another one to the front.’
Clearly the man was local, within walking distance. A routine trip to the newsagents to collect his newspaper had ended in death. There was a sadness in the ordinariness of the circumstances. The man was fetching a bloody paper. What the hell had he done to deserve this?
She stood at the foot of his body assessing the position.
His left leg was straight but his right was bent so that his foot touched the opposite knee. His arms were to the side and not outstretched as though trying to break his fall. There was no standing position that could have led to a fall that looked like this.
‘Staged?’ she asked.
Keats nodded and came to stand beside her. ‘Look at the edge of the blood pool. It’s dry and smeared as though he was being moved around while bleeding out from the front.’
Kim took another walk around the body as the photographer took the last few shots.
She paused at his head and looked down, frowning.
‘Keats, is that chalk?’ she asked, looking at the faint white markings all around him.
Initially she’d thought they were faded white lines left on the tarmac from the parking area at the front of the pub.
‘Not sure. We’ll know more when we move him.’
She nodded; she’d seen enough.
The techies all moved forward and rolled him onto his back.
His white open-necked shirt was stained with blood proving Keats right about the second stab wound.
