A Little Learning by J. M. Gregson Read Free Book Online Page B

scenes of only the more serious crimes on the patch. That had never been stated, but both of them knew it.
    Jim Chadwick looked carefully past them to make sure no higher rank was muscling in on what promised to be a high-profile crime. ‘Jack the Lad didn’t take kindly to being hauled out in the middle of the night. Binns the Blood has been this morning.’
    ‘Jack the Lad’ was the police surgeon, whom Chadwick, purely on the basis of his youth and bachelor status, suspected of being a local Lothario. It was not surprising if the young doctor was less than happy to be brought from a warm bed, whether his own or some anonymous lady’s, to certify as dead a corpse which had plainly ceased to breathe at least twenty-four hours earlier, in which the first signs of rigor mortis were already apparent. But he knew as well as everyone else that this was one of the rituals which must be observed: the first essential was that the fact of death had to be established and confirmed by a doctor.
    ‘Binns the Blood’ was a different and far more important professional. Dr Mark Binns was the pathologist, who had visited the site whilst Peach was having his fun with the two students who had discovered the body. Binns had taken body temperature and anything else he thought significant at the house, and sanctioned the removal of the corpse for the more leisured and searching investigation of the post-mortem.
    ‘The night porter saw bugger-all. Anything useful here?’ said Peach. They spoke in shorthand, these two, the result of long years in the job.
    ‘Binns confirmed it as murder,’ said Chadwick gloomily. ‘Lot of bloody use that is, as you’ll see when you look at him. Man would have had to be a contortionist to shoot himself from that angle.’
    Peach saw what he meant as soon as they reached the main bedroom of the house. The corpse lay on its back, staring at the ceiling, but what was left of the head was slightly on one side, and they could see a ragged-edged but surprisingly regular bullet wound in the back of the it, just above the line of the collar, which had faint powder marks upon it. He said, as though completing the words of a ritual, ‘No sign of the weapon, I suppose?’
    ‘No. And sod-all else, so far.’
    ‘Any ideas on how the bugger got in?’ Automatically, Peach spoke of the killer as a man, because statistically it was overwhelmingly likely to be so. Their criminal would remain male, would continue in the argot of the service to be called words like ‘chummy’, until he had some more definite identity. It didn’t mean that females wouldn’t be considered as carefully as anyone else; it was simply a recognition of the statistical probabilities of the serious crime scene.
    ‘There’s a window forced at the back. Small one, in the utility room. Someone’s prised away the frame where it was rotten at the bottom. Jemmy, or a big tyre lever, by the looks of it. It’s the only window in the house that doesn’t have modern double-glazing, as usual.’ Chadwick’s tone held in it his contempt for a public that was too often penny-pinching when it came to security.
    Peach shook his head. ‘That’s the way those students got in. The ones who found the body.’
    Chadwick brightened up a little. He didn’t like students, thought most of them were a waste of public money, even if they didn’t get grants any more. ‘Don’t suppose there’s any chance those buggers did for him, is there? Resenting being slung off their courses, or getting lower grades than they should have? Or in a drug-crazed orgy of violence?’
    Peach smiled. ‘Afraid not, Jim. Dr Carter was cold and dead long before they found him, I think. It will be small consolation to a fascist hyena like you, but the tale they told us at first was a right bucket of you-know-what. They found him a couple of hours before the time they claimed. And it wasn’t because they saw any mysterious light in here. They were bent on a little petty