Off Minor by John Harvey Read Free Book Online

it was. You know, under there.” Divine was shaking his head. “Not exactly, what you said was, you knew. ”
    Raymond shrugged, fidgeted some more. “Knew, guessed, I don’t know, what’s the difference?”
    “One means you were certain. If you knew, you …”
    “That’s right, I did. Least, I thought I did. Wasn’t just the shoe, there was this … hand, I s’pose it was, a hand, part of her hand. And the smell.” Raymond looked away from the table, where he’d been staring at his own chewed fingers, the bitten-down nails, and flush into Divine’s face. “Had to be her. Didn’t it?”
    “ Her? ”
    “The little girl, the one who went missing, ages back, you know.” Divine held his breath. “What you’re saying, Raymond, right off, it wasn’t simply you knew what was hidden in that corner was a body, you knew whose body it was.”
    Raymond stared back at him, not squirming any more, quite calm. “Yes,” he said. “Gloria. I knew her. Used to live near me. See her mornings, on her way, like, into school. Weekends, off down the shops with her nan. Yes. Gloria. I used to watch her.”

Eight
    “Here,” the pathologist said, “take one of these.”
    Resnick slipped one of Parkinson’s extra-strong mints inside his mouth, pushing it high against his palate with his tongue. It was quiet enough in the small office for Resnick to hear the tick of the old-fashioned fob watch Parkinson always wore, attached by a chain at the front of his waistcoat. Only when he had to don an apron did the pathologist remove the jacket of his three-piece suit; the only occasion he removed his cuff links, rolled his shirt sleeves carefully back up, was when his assistant was holding out a pair of flesh-colored surgical gloves.
    “Quite a mess, eh, Charlie?”
    Resnick nodded.
    “As well we found her when we did.”
    Resnick nodded again, trying not to visualize the bite marks on the body; the front of the face, one way or another, laid bare almost to the bone.
    “What helped most, of course, either it’s my damned age or this has set to be one of the chilliest winters we’ve had for years. Building like that, no heating, much of the time it would have stayed the right side of forty degrees.”
    They had identified Gloria Summers from her dental charts and by comparison of bones from an X-ray that had been taken a year earlier, when she had fallen and broken a bone in her right ankle. Resnick had asked her mother if she wanted to come to the mortuary and see the body and Susan Summers had looked at him with raised eyebrows and said, “Are you kidding?”
    “How definite can you be,” Resnick asked now, “as to cause of death?”
    Parkinson removed his bifocals and proceeded to give them an unnecessary polish. “One thing’s positive: strangulation. Without doubt the windpipe has been fractured; the other signs you’d anticipate are clearly there. Hemorrhaging in the neck, close by the hyoid bone. Some evidence of swelling in the veins at the back of the head, caused by the increase in pressure when the blood is unable to escape.”
    “Then that was what killed her?”
    “Not necessarily.” Satisfied, Parkinson set the glasses back upon his nose. “There is also a severe fracture at the rear of the skull, acute extradural and subdural hematoma …”
    “Fall or a blow?”
    “Almost certainly a blow. The way the hemorrhaging’s below the fracture. While she could have sustained a similar fracture as the result of a fall—she was only a wee girl remember—the force of that kind of accident jolts the brain hard against the skull and I’d be looking to find bleeding further forward, scarcely any underneath the fracture at all.”
    Resnick crunched the last fragments of mint between his back teeth. “So, your report, which one will you be opting for, principal cause?”
    Parkinson shook his head. “Either, or.” He put his hand into his waistcoat pocket, offered Resnick another mint. “Come the end of the