Blood Never Dies by Cynthia Harrod-Eagles Read Free Book Online Page A

didn’t see him,’ Slider said.
    ‘Can’t get emotional over it,’ Atherton warned.
    ‘Wait,’ Slider said, remembering. ‘Here’s one – as well as no wallet, et cetera, there were no keys.’
    ‘Ah,’ said Atherton. ‘Well that’s trickier. He’d have had to let himself in with something.’ He paused and added reluctantly, ‘So it does look as if there was someone else there.’
    ‘And they gathered up all his personal gubbins and took it away—’
    ‘In a black plastic sack. But I wonder why?’ Atherton said thoughtfully.
    ‘Didn’t know what might be incriminating so grabbed everything meaning to sort it out later,’ Slider suggested.
    ‘Which supposes there was something incriminating amongst said gubbins,’ Atherton concluded.
    Slider sighed and stretched. ‘Well, either way, we have to investigate at least until we find out who he was.’
    ‘Probably when we know the who, we’ll know the why, and it will all become obvious.’
    ‘Thank you, Pollyanna. Give a yell for someone to get me some tea, will you.’
    Fathom appeared at the door. ‘Guv, got the PNC results.’
    ‘I’ll come.’
    It was not good news. The name Robin Williams was not uncommon, and because it was sometimes an abbreviation they had extended the search to Robert Williams as well. There were two local, and eighteen national subjects of those names with criminal records, and none of them, quite evidently from their photographs, was their victim.
    The fingerprints had come up with no match.
    ‘Which means we know the corpse had no criminal record,’ Atherton summed up, ‘but we still don’t know if that was the corpse’s real name. Worst of all possible outcomes.’
    ‘Start circulating the photograph to the usual agencies,’ Slider said. ‘Check the name and the mugshot with Mispers.’
    ‘Right, guv.’
    ‘And there’s overtime for anyone who wants it this evening, canvassing the neighbours who were out at work today. I’d like to get a lead before we’re reduced to going public with a photo of a stiff.’
    The city evening had a used feeling, body-warm and slightly smelly; the carbuncular sunset was lurid with oranges, pinks and purples that only God would have thought of putting together. Slider arrived home with gritty eyes and a sinus headache, and the feeling he always had at the beginning of a case, that there was just too much to do and too many things to find out – a depressing apprehension of too many balls in the air for it to end well. He was a man who had always sought out responsibility, but that didn’t mean he actually had to
like
it. He was a harness-galled horse that backs itself between the shafts out of sheer habit.
    There were no lights on in the house when he pulled up before it – glad, as always, that the front garden had been replaced with hardstanding, so the old days of cruising the neighbourhood looking for a parking space were over. Joanna’s Mazda was there facing outwards. She always backed in – said it made her nervous not to be able to make a quick getaway. There were ways in which she had retained the boyishness of her bachelor days, despite marriage and baby George. It was the orchestra, of course, that kept her that way: musicians egged each other on to behave like lads. It was like the Job in that respect. Coppers and musicians, they were all Peter Pans.
    The house was quiet, smelled of clean dust and old wood. There were worse things to smell of, he thought. They had a lot to do to it still, but money was tight and time was tighter. He stood in the hall listening to it breathe, then went in search of his wife. He found her sitting on the concrete patch – you couldn’t in all justice call it a patio, still less a terrace – just outside the French windows from the drawing room. She was quite still, staring down the dark garden at the last of the heat, swelling and redness just sinking below the trees at the end. The remaining member of the diagnostic quartet,