Rainstone Fall by Peter Helton Read Free Book Online

tired, his mouth set in impatient contempt. By the time we got to him the bottoms of our trousers were dark and heavy with moisture and mud.
    I noticed Needham had lost a bit of weight recently yet I preferred him when he wasn’t on a diet. Diets really did make him grumpy. He missed his Danish pastries and absolutely loathed tea without sugar. Just now he took a sip from a plastic mug, pulled a sour face and splashed the remainder of the grey liquid on the ground, which probably meant it was missing that vital ingredient. He dropped the mug on to the trestle table behind him without looking where it fell and attracted my full attention by grabbing my arm hard. ‘You’re in deep shit this time, Honeysett, so no arsing about. Do exactly as you’re told, touch nothing, answer all questions in full, stay behind me. Got that?’
    ‘Got it,’ I agreed soberly.
    ‘Deeks, Sorbie, stay here.’ Needham talked to them like they were a couple of hounds.
    I followed him up to the Citroën which stood, mud-spattered and with a crumpled bonnet, just above us, nose pointing to the right. Forensics were still busy all around and a bloke with a large video camera took sweeping panoramic shots of the valley.
    The offside rear door was closed. Inside, against the window, slumped the body of a man. A blue and white face below a mess of bloody skull pressed against the pane. Blood streaks and mud nearly obscured the glass. There was a hand print in the middle of it all. Someone was moving around inside on the back seat and two technicians in moon suits, both women, were standing by the open door on the other side.
    ‘Let’s move round,’ said Needham who was quite surefooted in his boots. I slithered on. ‘Give us some room,’ he said to the techies, who stepped well back to allow for Needham’s circumference. ‘So you left the body but took the car keys,’ he said to me conversationally.
    ‘I didn’t drive the damn –’
    ‘How’re you doing in there, Prof?’ Needham called.
    Professor Earnshaw Meyers, the white-haired Home Office pathologist, was sitting comfortably on the rear seat next to the slumped corpse. ‘Just finishing,’ he said, scratching away with a fountain pen on a pad of forms on top of his fat aluminium briefcase that was lying across his knees. I stuck my head around the corner. Meyers looked absolutely ancient, with sparse white hair and parchment skin, but apparently he’d always looked like that and was nowhere near retirement age. ‘Mr Honeysett,’ he said by way of greeting without bothering to look up. We had met before. He finished scribbling, pocketed the pad and pen and slid his bum out of the car. The smells of blood, urine and faeces that came out with him nearly made me retch.
    ‘What have you got for me then, Prof?’ Needham said chummily. ‘And don’t make it too polysyllabic, I’m not in the mood.’
    ‘One dead male, aged between sixty and sixty-five, I’d say. Not particularly tall but you’ll get all that later. Trauma to the front of the skull, abrasions to the face and hands. Could have been an accident but –’
    ‘Did you run over him, Honeysett?’ Needham interrupted.
    ‘As I told Deeks –’
    ‘Go on, sorry,’ he said to Meyers.
    ‘His injuries appear to be consistent with having been involved in a vehicular accident, though his head injury suggests some kind of attack prior to that. Could turn out to be the Gobi. I estimate the time of –’
    ‘Wait!’ I said. ‘The what?’ The Gobi ? What was he talking about? The desert? Some kind of ghost?
    ‘Good Old Blunt Instrument,’ Needham supplied. ‘Did you hit him with your car jack?’
    ‘I never saw the bl—’
    ‘Sorry, Prof, you were saying about the time of death?’
    ‘About six, seven hours ago. Sometime between five and six this morning.’
    ‘You said it could have been an accident. So he wasn’t killed in the car?’
    ‘Oh no. It looks very much like he entered the car after he received his