Dead Level (The DI Nick Dixon Crime Series Book 5) by Damien Boyd Read Free Book Online Page A

said Janice.
    ‘A motorcycle, dear,’ replied Mrs Freeman.
    ‘What time was it?’
    ‘A bit after two perhaps.’
    ‘And what were you doing up at that time?’
    ‘I wasn’t. I was lying in bed.’
    ‘Upstairs?’
    ‘No, I sleep in the dining room now, dear. I can’t do the stairs anymore.’
    ‘What about a stair lift?’ asked Jane.
    ‘Over my dead bod . . .’ Mrs Freeman stopped mid-sentence. ‘Sorry, that sounds awful.’
    ‘And the dining room is at the front of the house?’ asked Janice.
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘Did you have your hearing aid in?’ asked Jane.
    Janice looked at her and raised her eyebrows.
    ‘No, I take them out at night.’
    Jane placed a mug of tea in front of Mrs Freeman and then passed another mug to Janice.
    ‘How much can you hear without them?’ asked Janice.
    ‘I get by. They’re more to help me filter out background noise.’
    ‘So, you’re lying in bed without your hearing aids in. It’s a bit after two and you hear a motorcycle in the road outside.’
    ‘That’s right, dear.’
    ‘How d’you know it was a motorcycle?’
    Mrs Freeman stood up and shuffled back down the hall. Jane watched her disappear into what she assumed had once been the dining room and was now her bedroom. Janice leaned across the table.
    ‘How’d you know about the hearing aids?’
    ‘There’s a letter on the hall table from Hidden Hearing.’
    Mrs Freeman reappeared shuffling along the hall, this time using a Zimmer frame with what looked like a photo frame in a net slung from the handles. She paused next to Janice and handed the photograph to her. Janice looked at it and then passed it to Jane.
    It was an old black and white photograph of a motorcycle display team riding in a pyramid. Jane counted fifteen men riding five motorbikes.
    ‘That’s my husband on top,’ she said, smiling. ‘Twelve years he was in the Royal Artillery motorcycle display team. They rode the BSA 500 back then. That photo was taken in 1961.’
    ‘Is he . . . ?’
    ‘He died eight years ago. But I know the sound of a motorbike, dear.’ Her eyes filled with tears. ‘I know the sound of a motorbike.’

    Janice turned left out of Mrs Freeman’s drive and continued along the lane towards Waterside Cottage. The police car blocking the lane beyond the farmyard on the right had gone, as had the tents in the road and front garden, although the lane was blocked at the far end by a Scientific Services van parked outside the cottage. Janice parked behind it. Jane jumped out of the car, ducked under the police tape and ran up the garden path.
    ‘Don’t come in.’
    She recognised Donald Watson’s voice coming from behind the front door and waited in the porch, watching the rain running down the stained glass windows.
    ‘All right.’
    Jane pushed open the front door and peered inside. Watson was kneeling on an approach plate in the hall.
    ‘What’ve you got?’ asked Jane.
    ‘Lots of blood but it looks like it’s all hers. The usual fibres and hairs, but they’re likely to be hers too, or the husband’s. The only really useful stuff is the vomit and cigarette butts. They’ve gone off to PGL.’
    ‘PGL? Why not our own labs?’
    ‘Closed for Christmas. We’ll hold the rest of the samples for them but the vomit and fag butts were urgent. I checked with DCI Lewis.’
    ‘Anything else?’
    ‘No.’
    ‘How much longer will you be?’
    ‘We’ll be gone by 4 p.m.’
    ‘OK.’
    ‘Happy Christmas.’
    The words took Jane by surprise. She had forgotten it was Christmas Eve. Maybe it would be happy for some, but not for others, and certainly not for Tom Perry. For her, it would be a working Christmas. That was the best that could be said for it. But that was the luck of the draw, and it could be worse. It could always be worse.
    ‘Yeah, right. You too,’ she said, closing the front door behind her.
    Janice was having an animated telephone conversation in the car, and the rain had eased off, so Jane squeezed past