A Long Time Dead (The Dead Trilogy) by Andrew Barrett Read Free Book Online Page B

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    Roger took the interior photographs; shots of the body in situ, shots of blood spatter patterns on the wall unit and floor, with and without scales; photographs of any item deemed foreign to the scene, though he found it difficult to discern what belonged and what didn’t.
    Under Chris’s barked instructions, Roger photographed condoms, spectacles, pornographic literature, underwear, foil wraps, burnt spoons and the like, and acting under further instructions, bagged them and sealed them ready for Lenny Firth. He photographed anything that could assist the investigation, including the partial footwear impressions in blood on the lounge floor. No significant tread pattern though. There was also a photograph of the deceased girl holding a young child – it had a smudged footwear mark across it, and Roger seized it for future examination.
    “What about trying some reagent on the footwear marks in blood?” Roger suggested. “We might be able to pick out more detail.”
    “Waste of time. We’ll concentrate on the body.”
    “If I’d said let’s concentrate on the body, you’d have wanted to do the footwear. Argumentative git.” Roger got busy and carried on taking photographs, did his best to ignore Chris.
    At 4.30am, Shelby escorted the Forensic Pathologist, Bellington Wainwright, into the scene. Chris joined them in standing around the body, arms folded, silent in contemplation. “If it was summer,” Shelby said, “she’d be a sloppy mush by now, and you wouldn’t be able to see her for the maggots and bluebottles.”
    Wainwright nodded his agreement. “Friday, you say?”
    “Last seen about 4.30pm.” Shelby glanced at his watch. “Back soon,” he said.
    The girl, a twenty-one year-old bleached-blonde, lay on her back among mounds of litter. Seeping blood had formed in a thick and lumpy pool around her head, reddening her hair as it escaped the gash in her throat.
    Roger padded around the house, looking, and feeling. Absorbing. He checked out the bedrooms. They were a shambles; clothes and soiled bed linen scattered over the floors, inch-thick dust on rotten chipboard furniture, graffiti on holed doors and smashed windows covered by sheets of damp wood.
    There was only one half-decent room in the whole house – and that was home to a well-worn double bed. The bedroom smelled of lavender massage oil, it smelled of perfume – cheap stuff but a welcome change from the rest of the house. On a dusty bedside stand, among cider bottles and ashtrays, were packets of condoms and tubes of KY Jelly. The carpet was sticky underfoot.
    The bathroom, stained with black mould around the sink and bath, smelled of excrement and, strangely, of laundry. In the bath, a pair of pink jeans was soaking in some pre-wash solution. Back downstairs in the kitchen, it was the same filthy story; washing-up piled high in the sink, fat splattered across the wall near the cooker and a black bin bag overflowing with rubbish festering in the corner. After a while, Roger got used to the stench, and almost stopped feeling sorry for her.
    Roger arrived back in the lounge. While the pathologist deliberated, Roger looked around at the nicotine-stained ceiling, at the furniture unfit for the tip. He recalled the ashtrays full of cigarette ends, and the foil wraps and needles hidden behind cushions on the sofa, and the empty lager cans under the chair. All were now in evidence bags leaning against the wall unit, ready for logging and removal.
    No one mentioned the sad piece of tinsel, naked in places, hanging across the chimneybreast, nor that Twelfth Night was a week ago. No one mentioned the two Christmas cards on the mantelpiece. No one mentioned them because inside they were blank.
    Clipboard in hand, Wainwright inspected the corpse, scribbled notes about the girl and her immediate surroundings.
    Roger asked, “What do you want me to do, Chris?”
    Chris dabbed a length of adhesive tape across the dead girl’s exposed flesh and