Staying Power by Judith Cutler Read Free Book Online Page B

as lovers as closely as she peered at him now. And yet by focusing on details, she could lose sight of the man. Which she must do: she must shut down emotion, open the intellect, however hard it was to do now the theorising was over and she was here in person. Perhaps Graham might have been right.
    She dragged her eyes back to the corpse.
    The bruising and marks she’d expected, the discoloration, the blood-suffused face and eyes. What she hadn’t expected, but what explained the bloodstains she’d seen from the towpath, were the score-marks, much deeper than she’d guessed, across his body and arms: what the pathologist would later define variously as abrasions and lacerations. They ran diagonally across his body, top left to bottom right, like the hoops of red tape she’d worn in infant school sports teams. There were similar ones on the left arm; those on the right were much less deep.
    â€˜So why on earth would he do that to himself?’ Duncan asked. ‘Oh, yes – little doubt about it. Something like a kitchen knife – but a very sharp one.’
    â€˜Maybe a Stanley knife, Sir?’ Kate put in.
    He glanced up at her and nodded. ‘Good idea. Look, you can see the start and end of each slash.’ He demonstrated against his own arm and trunk. ‘And he’d have to change hands to do the other arm. The question is, of course, why?’
    Which might have been the question Alan himself was asking, frowning over, as Duncan made the incisions in the scalp, pulling the facial skin forward and downward in a last grimace.
    It was certainly the question on everyone’s lips after all the measuring and recording, opening and probing. Why? They knew the how of strangulation, after a day neither eating nor drinking, of fixing a rope to a parapet over which he’d then clambered to let himself make the final drop. They knew that.
    But not why.
    â€˜Are you quite sure it was suicide?’ Graham insisted.
    Duncan shrugged. ‘Look, you know I didn’t find any external or internal marks to indicate that anyone might have man-handled him – dead or alive – to that spot. Your SOCO people have probably got film even now in their cameras of the marks he made on the parapet when he was shinning over. There are probably fibres from his rope on his clothing. That’s for the forensic science team to discover.’ His shrug said he had done his part.
    â€˜But he had everything to live for,’ Kate said.
    â€˜In my experience, if what you are living for fails, then you might as well die. Right, ladies and gentlemen, as a precaution I shall wait until all those samples have been checked before issuing my final report but you shall have the preliminary one in the morning.’
    Dismissed, they started to troop out, Kate in their midst. But just as she was about to speak to Harvey, Duncan called her back.
    â€˜I couldn’t help but be intrigued by what you were saying,’ he said. ‘No doubt all your colleagues know why he should have wanted to live, but it was, of course, news to me.’ He looked down at his hands. ‘Could you give me ten minutes to scrub and maybe we could take the smell of this business from our nostrils with a cup of coffee.’
    From the corner of her eye she could see Harvey’s neck stiffen. ‘I’ve an idea we may have to take a rain check on that – there’ll be a meeting back at work,’ she said.
    â€˜Could I have a phone number – in case anything comes up?’ he pursued, all dimples and twinkling eyes.
    OK, he’d asked for it. She flashed her dimples, too. ‘The same number as DCI Harvey,’ she said. And then, for the hell of it, for the
irony
of it – for how often did a woman get asked by one man to join him for a coffee when he was still red with the blood of the last one – she grinned. And added her extension number.
    Jesus, that she should find such a