Deep Cover by Peter Turnbull Read Free Book Online

grin.
    â€˜Oh?’
    â€˜Nothing . . . nothing, sir.’ Vicary replied. ‘It just struck a private chord . . . The deceased . . . female . . . life was pronounced extinct.’
    Ainsclough checked his notepad, ‘At seventeen fifty-eight hours, sir.’
    â€˜Seventeen fifty-eight,’ Vicary repeated.
    â€˜I see.’ Shaftoe looked at the body. ‘You’re too young to be a customer of mine, pet, far too young. She doesn’t look much older than twelve.’
    â€˜We’re told she is a teenager, sir.’
    â€˜Yes, she could be a finely built thirteen or fourteen, but I’d be surprised if she was much older than that.’ He paused. ‘Strangulation, it seems.’
    â€˜Yes, sir. The police surgeon who has just left said much the same thing.’
    â€˜Have you photographed the corpse?’
    â€˜Not yet, sir.’
    â€˜I see . . . so can’t be moved yet?’
    â€˜No, sir, not overmuch.’
    â€˜If you can turn her over, I can take a rectal temperature. It might help determine the time of death, although time of death is an inexact science at best, really no more accurate than sometime between when she was last seen alive and when the corpse was discovered, but the Home Office like thoroughness. So, I’ll take a rectal temperature and a room temperature, then, frankly, nothing I can do until I get her to the London Hospital. So I’ll do that, undertake the post-mortem tomorrow. Leave you to await the scene of crime officers, and their cameras and fingerprinting kit and whatever.’
    â€˜Very good, sir.’
    Vicary despatched Ainsclough and Brunnie to New Scotland Yard. They had reports to write and statements to take from Billy Kemp, Sonya Clements and Josie Pinder. He remained at the scene with three constables and a sergeant.
    John Shaftoe, who did not drive, was conveyed to the London Hospital by his driver in a small black car. He went to his office and opened a medical file on the as yet unnamed female found deceased, possibly strangled, in the house on Claremont Road, Kilburn. He locked his medical bag in a secure cabinet and then, pulling on a donkey jacket and a flat cap, he left the hospital by an obscure side entrance and walked into the enveloping darkness of London’s East End. An observer would have seen a low-skilled manual worker, short and stocky, ambling homeward after a good day’s graft, which was exactly the image that John Shaftoe, MD, MRCP, FRCPath, wanted to portray.
    He walked by the walls of the buildings, this being a practice he had acquired during his youth in south Yorkshire, where ‘hard’ men who wanted a fight walked close to the kerb, and feeling disinclined to battle his way through what he always thought to be the oddly ill-named rush hour, he called in at a pub and stood at the bar with his foot on the brass rail, enjoying a pint of IPA. Eventually, as often happened, one of the locals came and stood alongside him. The two men nodded at each other. Shaftoe read the man as being an East End villain and even though, at just 5' 4" tall, Shaftoe was as least cop-like as can be, he still had to be checked out.
    â€˜Doing OK, mate?’ the East End villain asked with a smile.
    â€˜So, so,’ Shaftoe replied, avoiding eye contact.
    â€˜Not seen you in here before?’
    â€˜Not been in here before.’ Shaftoe pronounced here as ‘ere’ and before as ‘a-for’.
    â€˜North country?’ the villain explored, pronouncing north as ‘nawf’ and country as ‘can-ry’.
    â€˜Sheffield.’
    â€˜Holiday?’
    â€˜This time of year?’ Shaftoe smiled and allowed himself brief eye contact with his interrogator. He glanced at the TV screen above the bar which showed a cartoon film with the sound blessedly turned off. What sound there was in the pub came from piped music and conversation. It was,