Maxwell's Chain by M.J. Trow Read Free Book Online

its mistress, with a matted coat and studded collar. It too had been stabbed repeatedly and the blood was caked around its flanks.
    Hall nodded to Alyson, steadying her by the shoulders before letting her stumble off up the dune, looking for fresh air when she was, in fact, surrounded by it. ‘Isn’t it odd,’ he remarked to no one in particular, ‘how a human body just makes us pick up our brushes and cameras. A dead dog makes us feel sick.’ Maxwell would have agreed and he would have reminded all and sundry that they set up the RSPCA forty years before the NSPCC. The moral? A dog is not just for Christmas; it’ll get you life.
    ‘I put it down to Old Yeller ,’ said Meredith. The film was being endlessly reshown on the Movies for Wimps channel.
    ‘I put it down to not being professional,’ Hall said, looking up the hill to where Alyson was being comforted by a WPC in uniform. He never watched any movie channels. ‘Could someone make sure that whoever the fainting violet is is taken off live duty and sent for a bit of retraining.’
    ‘Oh, come on, guv…’ the SOCO leader began,and stopped as the blank glasses turned to him. To hide his confusion, Meredith bent to the dog’s body. ‘That’s weird,’ he said.
    ‘What?’ Hall hunkered down beside him.
    ‘There’s blood on his mouth, as well.’
    ‘He bit someone, do you think? Or is it from the lungs?’
    ‘Bit someone, let’s hope.’ He swabbed the dog’s canine tooth and capped and labelled the swab. ‘And…hang on…look, just there. It’s hard to tell in this light, but is that a thread, caught in his teeth?’
    Hall peered closer, but couldn’t be sure. He’d been on the dunes now for nearly five hours, feeling like something out of Bloody Omaha. Life’s a beach and then you die. ‘Somebody bag this dog’s head,’ he called. ‘It’s priority. Take the body to the morgue with the girl.’
    ‘Jim Astley’s going to go ballistic,’ Meredith said.
    ‘So, what’s new?’ said Hall, letting the cold and lateness of the hour strip him of his usual professionalism. ‘He goes ballistic if you wish him happy birthday. It’s how he knows he’s still alive. Stuck in there with bodies and Donald. It’s enough to drive anybody nuts.’

    One by one, the team withdrew from the murder site, leaving just some fluttering police tape to tellthe world that they had been there in the first grey light of another winter dawn. The depressions that had held the bodies slowly filled up with shifting sand, as the dune healed itself. No one was there this time, to take pictures of nothing happening. Even a camera wouldn’t have seen the mobile phone, two dunes away, sink with infinitesimal slowness, deeper into the sand, its battery dying, its messages hidden forever in the oblivion of its grave.

    Jim Astley did indeed go ballistic. People in the corridors of power had expected him to move on, move up, move out years ago, but the old curmudgeon was still there, seeing himself as a latter-day Simpson or Spilsbury. Unlike them, however, he didn’t get the headlines, but like medical men the world over he had delusions of grandeur and it was his arrogance, more than anything else, that kept him in post. True, he couldn’t crouch in awkward crime scenes any more and recently his glasses had fallen into a few too many patients, but, by definition, they tended not to complain very much. Now he had been dragged out of his nice warm house, away from a nice full English. His lab at Leighford Mortuary was full of sand and the smell of wet, slightly decaying, dead dog. The girl he could deal with later, Hall had said, which wasdamned good of him, really. The dog was the one holding the clues.
    ‘I think he bit someone, Jim,’ Hall said from his end of the lab. He wasn’t squeamish, as DCIs went, but he knew better than anyone the need to give Astley room to work – not possible elbow to elbow. ‘There’s thread caught in his teeth. We need to source