Maxwell’s Flame by M. J. Trow Read Free Book Online Page A

He’d never seen shock before, but he saw it now. Her mouth hung open, her eyes were wide. Every muscle in her body felt like iron.
    ‘Lydia?’ Harper-Bennet’s voice had a curious sound to it, as though he didn’t trust it in the darkness of the corridor. He followed the woman’s stare ahead of her. There was an open door, apparently into a store room. And there, behind a collapsed pile of buff-wrapped stationery, a woman stared back at the pair. It was an odd moment because the woman’s eyes were dull and half-closed. Her mouth was open too, like Lydia’s, but there was a dark brown something caked around her nose and lips. In the strange light from an aperture in the roof, her hair was plastered to her forehead. And there was no doubt about it. The woman was dead.
    Anywhere can become the scene of a crime. In fiction, of course, it’s the west wing or the library of a country vicarage. But that’s just English cosies. In the States, it’s somebody’s swimming pool or a drug-ridden alley in the Bronx. What makes an ordinary, everyday store room into a murder scene is that someone chose to hide a body there. And from that moment, the scene is transformed. From the moment the body is found, it is changed, changed utterly. A terrible beauty is born, as Yeats said, except that Yeats wasn’t talking about a corpse.
    Father Jordan Gracewell had never seen so many policemen in his life. And he certainly never expected men in white boiler suits and surgical gloves. There was an ambulance and umpteen squad cars, big and white. There were yards of fluttering tape marked continuously with the word ‘police’, but there was no flashing blue light, no scream of tyres. In fact, the Kent Constabulary had excelled themselves in the speed and efficiency of their response. From the time the call had come from Gary Leonard that a suspicious death had occurred at the Carnforth Centre, eight minutes had elapsed until the first officers had arrived. They were both armed, though no one knew it but them, and the scene of crime officer had followed minutes behind.
    So it was not until nearly midday that Chief Inspector Miles Warren stood in that darkened corridor in the centre’s sub-basement, surveying somebody’s handiwork. He’d been considered too short for the police at one time, but he either fiddled the measurement somehow or the force was desperate, because here he was, a man in mid-life who had never known a crisis. Or if he had, he never showed it. His lads called him ‘Stony’ because none of them had ever seen him smile.
    ‘What have we got, John?’
    Inspector John MacBride was losing his hair already. It was curly and blond, but it had been steadily deserting him ever since he’d left school. He didn’t really like Stony Warren, if the truth were known, but he knew the man knew his job and that would have to be good enough.
    ‘Mrs Elizabeth Striker,’ he told his superior. ‘Married. Age thirty-eight. She was on a course here.’
    Warren looked behind him. Uniforms. Cameras. No bloody doctor.
    ‘Do we have a police surgeon in this county?’ he asked anyone who cared to listen.
    ‘Dr Anderson was telephoned nearly two hours ago, sir,’ someone said. ‘His wife took the message.’
    ‘Really?’ Warren was unimpressed. ‘That’s about as helpful as somebody taking the piss. John? Care to chance your arm on this one?’
    Warren believed in giving his subordinates experience. Anyway, it took him off the spot. Stony only took chances on his own terms. He saw no reason to expose his inadequacies so early on a case.
    ‘Cause of death is likely to be a fractured skull,’ MacBride conjectured. ‘She was hit from behind, I’d say, though how often I don’t know.’
    ‘Murder weapon?’
    McBride shrugged. ‘Nothing yet. I’ve got men out in the grounds.’
    Warren had seen that on the way in. Ragged rows of uniformed coppers on their hands and knees in the shrubbery, like some strange primeval ritual.