The Killer Inside by Lindsay Ashford Read Free Book Online

Mos”. She bent down to push the pink-headed stalks aside. Now she could read it all. There wasn’t much: “RIP Moses ‘Mo’ Smith, 13.1.60 – 14.3.91.”
    As she straightened up she noticed something else. There was a rectangular patch of bare earth at the centre of the grave. All around the grass grew thick and coarse, but in the middle of Moses Smith’s plot, the ground had been disturbed. She stood staring at it in the fading light. Had someone else been buried here recently? His wife, perhaps? It seemed unlikely that burials would still be taking place when the church itself was derelict. And anyway, the patch looked too small for that. It was barely three feet long and only a couple of feet wide. Not even big enough for the wooden caskets they put people’s ashes in. So what had happened? Had someone deliberately interfered with the grave? And if so, why? Could it have something to do with Carl Kelly’s death?
    She shivered as the dying rays of the sun lit up the clods of earth at her feet. The police would have to be told about this. And if they wouldn’t listen she would come back here tomorrow with a camera. And a trowel.

Chapter 5
    There wasn’t time to go home. Megan was due to meet her friend Delva Lobelo for drinks at one of the bars overlooking the canal basin. She’d planned to shower and change, to wash the vile smell of the prison from her skin and her hair. But she’d spent longer than she intended with Dom Wilde.
    The walk back from the prison took her to the rear entrance of Heartland University’s Department of Investigative Psychology. She paused when she reached the reserved space where her car was parked. Glancing up at the windows of the building she noticed that there were still a few students in the library. What was the betting one of them was Nathan MacNamara? She knew that part of the reason she didn’t want to go back to her office to check the phone messages and emails that had no doubt piled up during her afternoon at the prison was because of him. It was getting ridiculous. It was as if he could sense her presence in the building. She was going to have to ask the admin people to intercept him if they saw him coming along the corridor. With a heavy sigh she climbed into the car. She would just have to put off checking the emails until she got back home.
    But there was one thing she wouldn’t put off. Before driving out of the car park she punched out the number of West Midlands Police on her mobile. She was halfway across the city before the switchboard managed to locate DS Willis.
    ‘A disturbed grave? At St Mary’s?’
    She could tell from the inflection in his voice that hehad her down as a timewaster. The unkempt graveyard of a derelict church was a prime target for local louts. Why should what Megan had spotted be anything other than a random act of vandalism? The fact of the grave being that of Carl Kelly’s alleged victim failed to impress him. Kelly had never been convicted of murder and he wasn’t interested in what he obviously regarded as tale-telling by a fellow inmate.
    With a grunt Megan ended the call. Put that way, it did sound pretty flimsy. But there was something about the way the grave had been disturbed; it was all so… neat . Why would some bored teenager bother to dig a perfect rectangle on the top of someone’s grave? Far more effective, surely, to spray graffiti on a tombstone or knock the head off an angel. She could almost imagine kids exhuming a body for a gruesome prank, but they couldn’t possibly have got a coffin out of a hole that size. She frowned as she searched for a parking space along the canal basin. It didn’t add up. There had to be an explanation, but it wasn’t going to come to her tonight.
    There was a large mirror at the entrance to the bar and she winced at the site of her reflection. Her long black hair was windswept and her olive skin looked sallow in the fluorescent light. She darted into the ladies and rummaged in her