A Capital Crime by Laura Wilson Read Free Book Online Page A

there’s certainly no money to pay them. Her spendthrift father, who’d sold off parcel after parcel of land in his lifetime, had left her only a few thousand pounds, and as for what she’d get from Guy …
    But I don’t want to depend on anybody, she thought. For the first time in my life, I want to stand on my own two feet.
    She would go to London. When she was dreaming of escapefrom Guy and Evie, that had always been her plan, but now, for the first time, she began to give it a practical form – impossible before, as Evie had a nasty habit of opening other people’s letters ‘by accident’ and Diana knew, from bitter experience, just how vengeful her mother-in-law could be.
    At least she’d had the good sense to ask the taxi to wait. She’d return to the station, collect her bags, and telephone to her friend Lally before she boarded the train. Lally, who’d been a fellow MI5 agent during the war, and was now married to another old colleague, Jock Anderson, would surely let her stay while she found herself a job. Jock, who still worked for the Secret Service, might be able to help her with that. There was their former boss, too, Colonel Forbes-James – he might know of something. She’d find herself a small flat like the one she’d had in Tite Street during the war, and she’d make a brand new start.

Chapter Eight
    ‘A well-nourished adult woman, five feet two inches in height, estimated weight seven and a half stone. The body has been tied up in a tablecloth. It is dressed in a blue woollen jacket, a spotted cotton blouse and a black skirt. The skirt has been disarranged so that the lower parts are exposed. Knickers and stockings are absent …’
    Dr McNally, the pathologist, looked like a clergyman – spare and ascetic in his white gown and rubber apron, with spectacles perched on his nose – and as he solemnly intoned the words, dictating to his secretary, Miss Lynn, he sounded like one, too. The Middlesex Hospital mortuary, to which both bodies had been removed, was a cold, low-ceilinged abattoir, its tiles and metal and porcelain surfaces gleaming in the harsh overhead light. It smelt of a mixture of decomposition and disinfectant. A tap dripped, and bronchitic coughing could be heard, intermittently, from somewhere in the basement corridor outside.
    The pathologist turned to his assistant, a wizened little man called Higgs, who had been there for as long as Stratton could remember, working for McNally’s predecessor, Dr Byrne, who had been murdered in 1944. ‘You may begin removing the clothes.’ To Stratton, he said, ‘You’ll be making a list, I trust.’
    ‘That’s correct.’
    Ballard produced his notebook and pencil, and wrote down each piece of clothing as it was removed. Finally naked, lying flat onthe slab, neck resting on a wooden block and head tilted back on a white towel, the woman – confirmed as Muriel Davies by the Backhouses, but not yet formally identified – looked as though she were snarling like a dog. The woman in the older Mrs Davies’s photograph had been quite a looker, but now her upper lip was puffy and slightly drawn back from the teeth and there was a dark area – bruising and dried blood – around her nose and mouth. That, thought Stratton, explained the ‘bleeding from the mouth’ comment in Davies’s second statement – the bastard had thumped her first. Her eyes were closed, and one was blackened. Stratton could see that her neck was bruised, and that the body contours were beginning to disappear. There were maggots clustered on the mound of her left breast, as if suckling. Averting his eyes from this, Stratton noticed that her left hand was unadorned. ‘You didn’t remove her wedding ring, did you?’ he asked Higgs.
    The assistant shook his head. ‘Never touch nothing till I’m told.’
    ‘She was married, was she?’ asked McNally.
    ‘So we understand,’ said Stratton. ‘Perhaps she’d taken it off for some reason. Sorry to interrupt.