Page 8 of Watching You
Salter pulled her shoulders back. ‘Because I’m a woman.’
Carlisle didn’t even blink. ‘Because you’re a human being, and I wouldn’t wish these memories on anyone.’
‘Oh. I appreciate that, actually. It’s harder doing this now that I have a little one at home. Everything’s more personal. You have kids?’
‘I don’t. I want them though. I can imagine it changes everything.’ He folded his arms. ‘You’re going to look anyway, even though the photos and a postmortem visit would do just as well, right?’
‘It’s the job,’ Salter said. ‘Tell me what you know.’ She put on a suit and shoe covers then followed Carlisle over to the covered body.
Carlisle pulled back the scene preservation sheet and Salter reeled backwards, putting a hand to her mouth to stopper the cry that wanted to escape.
‘What am I looking at?’ Salter asked.
‘The victim has been bent backwards. Her head has dropped down her back and her legs are doubled up from the hips in the wrong direction. Sort of an opposite foetal position.’
‘How?’ was all Salter managed.
‘She was hit fast. There are tyre marks that indicate the car mounted the pavement back there,’ Carlisle pointed backwards, ‘but no brake or skid marks.’
‘It was deliberate.’
‘It was murder. I rarely reach that conclusion myself, but at the speed the vehicle must have hit, the driver couldn’t possibly have believed anything except death would follow. There are two sets of injuries, one from the collision and one when the body hit the ground. I know that already because I can see impact marks to the backs of her legs but there’s also a skull injury to her upper forehead and into the hairline which couldn’t have happened at the same time.’
‘She flew up so high she landed on her head?’
‘It’s not science at this point, but my preliminary estimate is that the car was going a minimum of forty miles per hour on impact. Most likely more than fifty.’
Salter let that sink in. ‘How the hell are we supposed to break that sort of news to her family?’
‘Very quietly,’ Carlisle said. ‘Come with me.’
They walked to a driveway across the road where marker flags were being pushed into the grass.
‘What is that?’ Salter screwed up her eyes.
‘It’s a bag of carrots,’ Carlisle said. ‘From one of the shopping bags the victim was carrying. And I can’t stress this enough – I’ve never seen objects fly that far in the context of a vehicle to pedestrian collision.’
‘It’s like an assassination,’ Salter said. ‘Hold on.’ She pulled gloves from her pocket and trod carefully in the direction of a patch of long grass bordering a hedge. Crouching, she gently pulled out a compact mirror from the weeds and opened it to reveal the shattered glass inside. She sighed and set it back down where she’d found it. ‘Poor thing got her seven years of bad luck all in one go.’
Chapter 9
24 May
Detective Superintendent Overbeck stood at the door of MIT’s briefing room and hit an empty metal mug against a desk.
‘I don’t know what you animals do in here all day but it smells like a cattle barn in Texas. Open some windows for God’s sake and leave your sandwiches in the fridge when you’re working. Who the hell still eats mushed-up egg? You, get me a coffee.’ She held out the mug to a detective constable who stood up so fast that he knocked his own drink all over his desk. ‘Ah, Scotland’s finest,’ Overbeck muttered as she stalked into the centre of the room. ‘Where’s that ballsack Lively?’
As if by magic he appeared in the corridor, leaning over and coughing, and dripping sweat onto his trainers.
‘Detective Sergeant Lively.’ Overbeck took her time pronouncing his name as if he were a newly discovered species with which she was familiarising herself. ‘Has the zombie apocalypse started?’ Lively managed to straighten up but the panting was preventing him from speaking. ‘Only it appears that you have engaged in actual physical exertion. Exertionthat gives the impression that you moved at speed. A feat, I suspect, that you have not attempted since there were only a handful of television channels. So I’m assuming threat to life, at the very least, was the cause of your sudden burst of muscular engagement.’
‘Very funny,’ Lively muttered, heading into the room.
Overbeck held up one carefully manicured hand with nails that had cost more than Lively’s trainers. ‘Under no circumstances,’ she said. ‘You will stand in the corridor until I have finished speaking, at which time you will head directly for decontamination.’
She perched on the edge of a table, her sheer tights showing legs that an eighteen-year-old would have been proud of, at the ends of which were heels that would have put the fear of God into an orthopaedic surgeon. Overbeck was stick-thin. Her ex-husband used to say it was because even calories were terrified of her and got out as quickly as they possibly could. Only she knew that insomnia was the real reason. Daisy Overbeck hadn’t slept more than four consecutive hours since she’d first joined Police Scotland three decades earlier.
‘I’m going to keep this brief. We have three bodies at the mortuary and three separate open murder investigations. I haven’t seen anything even vaguely approaching a motive or suspects in any of those cases. That’s no progress from any of the three teams currently working on this floor. Somebody tell me why those facts have forced me to visit you today.’
