Page 3 of Dying Breath
‘No, he is not!’
‘Why doesn’t he speak?’
‘You scare him.’
This made John laugh. The sound was so alien to him, and what must have been every other person in the room, that a hush fell over it. All eyes turned to look in their direction. John was laughing so loud that he lifted his head to look at him. Then he stopped as abruptly as he’d started and winked at him.
‘You don’t need to be scared of me, kid. If I’d wanted to hurt you I’d have done it a long time ago, same with her. I could have killed her with one hand, squeezed her neck until it snapped in two and carried on eating my bacon sandwich with the other. That’s how easy it is.’
The two guards stepped forward; one of them drew the truncheon from his belt and poked John in the back with it.
‘Watch your mouth.’
He held his hands up and the heavy chains securing them rattled. ‘Sorry.’
His mum looked John straight in the eye. ‘Then why didn’t you?’
‘Because I liked you, I always did. You were much prettier than your sister; she had a mouth on her, that one. It didn’t do her any good in the end though, did it? She had a smart mouth and look where that got her.’
He looked at his mum, waiting for her to speak and tell John to shut up. He knew exactly where it had got his Aunty Linda. She was dead – her body had been found on the playing fields near to the house they lived in now. He’d heard the kids at school talk about the naked woman who had been found stiff and cold near the swings. It had upset him at first to hear people talking about his Aunty Linda like she was nothing, and he’d got into a few fights over it which had made it worse. One day he’d gone into school and found a yellowed piece of newspaper inside the desk he always sat at. Someone had written the word ‘prostitute’ in black felt tip across his aunt Linda’s smiling face staring up at him. He knew that a prostitute was a bad woman and he’d crumpled the paper up and thrown it into the bin. There had been sniggers from Mitchell and his gang of mates, who sat behind him on the back row. Now he never talked to them. He didn’t talk to anyone except his mum and his friend Jake. It was easier that way.
Chapter Four
Lucy walked into the empty major incident room. It hadn’t been used for a while. There were still some photos of the previous crime scenes Blu-Tacked onto the whiteboards; she walked across and pulled them down. She picked up the whiteboard rubber and began to scrub out the lists that she’d written on there, annoyed that no one had bothered to come in here and clean up properly. She’d been off work for a couple of weeks and assumed it would have been done.
Peter Browning walked in with a mug of coffee for her and put it on the desk that she always used. ‘Useless bastards could have cleaned the stuff away properly.’
She nodded. ‘If you want something doing…’
He sat down on a chair. ‘So what’s up, boss? Is this going to turn into a major investigation?’
Lucy tried not to let it show that he’d just pissed her off with his flippant attitude. He should know better; any murder was a major investigation.
‘It looks that way. I want a briefing in an hour, can you let the others know?’ She didn’t bother turning back around to speak to him and he got the message. Nodding to himself, he stood up and left her to it.
She went and sat down, logging onto the computer. Amanda was good; she’d already uploaded the photographs so Lucy could have access to them. Lucy printed out a couple of the victim and stuck them on the whiteboard. She liked her staff to be able to see the faces of the victims – it made them keep it real. It was all too easy to forget you were dealing with actual people when you worked long hours trying to catch killers. But she never did. They stayed with her and she continued to think about them long after the cases were closed and the offenders had been locked away. Usually when she woke up in the early hours of the morning and couldn’t get back to sleep.
She sipped the coffee, wondering how the woman had ended up at Strawberry Fields. No one would have chosen to be out walking late at night in that weather and where were her shoes? She’d been driven there. Judging by the amount of blood that had soaked into the gravel and filled the puddles on the ground, that was where she’d been killed. It was the primary crime scene, so who had taken her there? Why did they want her dead?
They’d found a bankcard with the name M. Benson on it in her jeans pocket, along with a soggy ten-pound note. Colin Davey was searching the intelligence system to see if there were any matches for the name, as well as the usual social media sites. She grimaced as the cold from her feet reminded her they were still damp. She needed to change her shoes. Going down to the locker room, she took out her spare pair of shoes and put the pumps she’d been wearing on the boot rack in the drying room next to the biggest pair of standard-issue Magnum police boots she’d ever seen. She’d have to try to remember to fetch her shoes later. When she arrived back upstairs, the phone was ringing in her office and she dashed to answer it.
‘It’s Catherine.’
‘What’s up?’
‘This is going to sound strange, but it’s really bothering me – the fact that she’s been bludgeoned over the head and her shoes are missing.’
Lucy smiled, relieved that the pathologist was as puzzled as she was. ‘I know what you mean.’
‘Post-mortem is scheduled for tomorrow afternoon; it’s the quickest I can do it. At least it will give you time to identify her and hopefully find her family. That’s another thing that’s bothering me. I feel as if I know her. She looks familiar, only I don’t know her – why am I thinking this?’
Lucy shrugged. ‘I can’t help you there, Catherine. Maybe you did know her.’
‘I don’t think that I did, though. There’s something about how she was found and I can’t put my finger on it. Christ, maybe it’s my age. I’ll see you tomorrow, Lucy.’
The phone went dead and Lucy put the receiver down.
The briefing room wasn’t as full as Lucy had hoped. She looked at Mattie, who shrugged, and she wondered if Browning had bothered to pass on her message. As she took her place at the front of the room, Tom came in late, as usual, with a stack of papers tucked under his arm. He stood next to her and whispered, ‘Can’t stop, there’s a management meeting and I can’t get out of it. I’m supposed to be doing a presentation.’
