The Headhunters by Peter Lovesey Read Free Book Online

that Sunday morning when she found the dead woman. ‘I don’t know how much you want to hear.’
    ‘Start from when you first got there,’ DC Pearce suggested, seating himself quite close to her on the edge of Adrian’s desk.
    She found it easier speaking to the young constable. She cast her thoughts back. If they wanted the entire story, they could have it. ‘I parked the car at the bottom of the High Street and walked all the way along the front, past the lifeboat station and the fishermen’s huts. I’d been on the path for some time, at least twenty minutes, and I wanted to get closer to the waves before I turned round, so I picked a section of the beach at random. After I’d been at the water’s edge a few minutes I turned and climbed up, and that was when I saw her against a breakwater. Well, at that point I didn’t know it was a person. I saw her pale skin under some seaweed and wondered what it was and went to investigate and had the biggest shock of my life.’
    ‘Against a breakwater, you said?’
    ‘Yes, they’re really massive, about ten feet tall on the side where she was. She was right up against the wood, partly hidden behind one of those posts that support it all.’
    ‘Was anyone else about?’ DC Pearce asked.
    ‘No one I noticed. I would have asked for help, wouldn’t I? I had to go up to the top and call at the nearest house that backs onto the beach. The people phoned nine-nine-nine and I waited for the police to come.’
    ‘Hold on a bit,’ DCI Mallin said. ‘Before you went up to the house, didn’t you try to resuscitate her?’
    ‘She was well dead.’
    ‘How do you know that? Did you feel for a pulse?’
    ‘I didn’t touch her. I could see.’
    ‘See she wasn’t breathing, you mean?’
    ‘It was obvious,’ Jo said, more annoyed than defensive. ‘Her skin was deathly white. There was seaweed clinging to her. Flies.’
    ‘Have you ever done a life-saving course? People apparently dead can be saved with mouth-to-mouth or chest compressions. Drowning cases offer the best hope of recovery. But I won’t labour the point. We’ve established that you did nothing. Carry on.’
    Jo’s so-called statement had long since ground to a halt. ‘I don’t know where I was.’
    ‘Waiting for the police,’ DC Pearce prompted her.
    ‘Where?’ Hen Mallin asked.
    ‘What?’
    ‘Where did you wait? On the beach?’
    ‘Of course.’ To keep up her confidence she reminded herself that this hard-nosed chief inspector was Hen to her friends. She’d also noticed that the chief inspector’s fingers were nicotine-stained. Even the police experienced stress.
    ‘Did you notice anything of interest?’
    ‘What do you mean?’
    ‘Stuff lying around.’
    ‘What sort of stuff?’
    ‘We’re asking you, Jo,’ Hen Mallin said. ‘It isn’t our job to put words in your mouth. Apart from the dead woman, was there anything you noticed along that bit of beach?’
    ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
    Hen Mallin spelt it out as if to an Alzheimer’s patient. ‘You were there, Jo. We weren’t. The place has been covered by the tide many times since that morning. Things get moved, washed out to sea, covered over. The site isn’t of much use to a crime scene investigation team now, but while you were there it was fresh.’
    At the words crime scene , Jo’s insides clenched. ‘Are you saying there was a crime?’
    ‘Didn’t you notice?’
    ‘Notice what?’
    ‘The marks on the flesh.’
    ‘I expect there would be some. It’s a stony beach.’
    ‘Bruising to the neck consistent with finger pressure.’
    A pulse throbbed in her temple and she thought she would faint. ‘No—how dreadful!’
    ‘We’re treating it as a violent death and possibly murder.’
    Gooseflesh was forming on her arms.
    ‘She drowned, as you must have guessed,’ DC Pearce said in a tone meant to make it less of a shock, ‘and the marks suggest she was held under the