Dead Right by Peter Robinson Read Free Book Online

They weren’t touching one another at all, not holding hands or clutching arms the way many couples did when faced with such a situation. Could there really be such distance between them that even the possibility of seeing their son dead at any second couldn’t bridge it? It was remarkable, Banks had often thought, how people who no longer have any feelings for one another can keep on going through the motions, afraid of change, of loneliness, of rejection. He thought of Sandra, then pushed the thought aside. He and Sandra were nothing like the Foxes. They weren’t so much separate as independent; they gave one another space. Besides, they had too much in common, had shared too much joy and pain over the years to simply go through the motions of a failed marriage, hadn’t they?
    The attendant pulled back the white sheet to reveal the corpse’s face. Josie Fox put her hand to her mouth and started to sob. Steven Fox, pale as the sheet that covered his son, simply nodded and said, “It’s him. It’s our Jason.”
    Banks was surprised at what a good job the mortuary had done on the boy’s face. While it was clear that he had been severely beaten, the nose was straight, the cheekbones aligned, the mouth shut tight to cover the shattered teeth. The only wrong note was the way that one eye stared straight up at the ceiling and the other a little to the left, at Mr and Mrs Fox.
    Banks could never get over the strange effect looking at dead people had on him. Not bodies at the crime scene, so much. They sometimes churned his guts, especially if the injuries were severe, but they were essentially work to him; they were human beings robbed of something precious, an insult to the sanctity of life.
    On the other hand, when he saw bodies laid out in the mortuary or in a funeral parlour, they had a sort of calming effect on him. He couldn’t explain it, but as he looked down at the shell of what had once been Jason Fox, he knew there was nobody home. The palecorpse resembled nothing more than a fragile eggshell, and if you tapped it hard enough, it would crack open revealing nothing but darkness inside. Somehow, the effect of all this was to relieve him, just for a few welcome moments, of his own growing fear of death.
    Banks led the dazed Foxes out into the open air. They stood on the steps of the hospital for a moment, silently watching the people come out of the small congregationalist church.
    Banks lit a cigarette. “Is there anything I can do?” he asked.
    After a few moments, Steven Fox looked at him. “What? Oh, sorry,” he said. Then he shook his head. “No, there’s nothing. I’ll take Josie home now. Make her a nice cup of tea.”
    His wife said nothing.
    They walked down King Street, still not touching. Banks sighed and turned up towards the station. At least he knew who the victim was now; first, he would let his team know, and then they could begin the investigation proper.
    III
    Detective Sergeant Jim Hatchley would normally have enjoyed nothing more than a pub-crawl any day of the week, any hour of the day or night, but that Sunday, all he wanted to do as he walked into his fifth pub, The Jubilee, at the corner of Market Street and Waterloo Road, was go home, crawl into bed and sleep for a week, a month, nay, a bloody year.
    For the past two weeks, his daughter, April, named after the month she was born because neither Hatchley nor his wife, Carol, could agree on any other name, had kept him awake all night, every night, as those bloody inconvenient lumps of calcium called teeth bored their way through the tender flesh of her gums with flagrant disregard for the wee bairn’s comfort. Or for his. And he hadn’t been well enough prepared for it. In fact, he hadn’t been prepared for it at all.
    The first year and a bit of April’s life, you would never have known she was there, so quiet was she. At worst, she’d cry out a couple of times when she was hungry, but as soon as Carol’s tit was in her mouth