The Reckoning on Cane Hill: A Novel by Steve Mosby Read Free Book Online Page B

crazy.’
    ‘Charlotte—’
    ‘ Charlie ,’ she spat at me. ‘I’m Charlie Matheson. Get my fucking name right.’
    And there it was – the outburst of anger. I’d interviewed numerous people with psychological problems over the years, and the flare-up immediately ticked every single box on my internal list of warning signs. I’d seen this behaviour a hundred times before.
    Yes , I thought. You’re right, whoever you are .
    I do think you’re crazy .
    ‘Okay, Charlie.’ I stood up. ‘I think we’re done here for the moment.’
    ‘I lived at 68 Petrie Crescent with my husband Paul. We married on the third of February, in a church in Hardcastle. I kept my maiden name. We went on honeymoon to Italy. We spent a week each in Venice, Florence and Rome.’
    I opened the door.
    ‘I’ll see what I can do.’
    ‘I want to see Paul. I need to see Paul.’
    ‘I’ll see what I can do.’
    As I stepped out into the corridor and closed the door behind me, I took a deep breath.
    Thank you again, Pete .
    Thank you very much indeed .

Mark
    The accident report
    Back at the car, my hangover kicked in harder. The afternoon sun was coming through the windscreen at a painful angle, right into my eyes.
    Through the windscreen .
    Just like Charlotte Matheson. The real one, at least.
    There was a bottle of water and a half-used strip of paracetamol capsules in the glove compartment. I fumbled for both. Then I flipped the sun visor down and logged into the department’s computer system on my tablet.
    I swiped through to the search screen. While it was nice of Pete to give me the paper files, I found technology easier to deal with. The connection was fast, and a minute later I’d downloaded the entire file on the real Charlotte Matheson’s accident. I transferred it to the current case file, then scanned through the details.
    They seemed basically to fit with what she’d told me. There had been a car accident, late at night on the ring road to the north. The weather had been bad, and it looked as though she’d lost control on one of the corners and gone over an embankment and down the far side. Bang. She hadn’t been wearing a seat belt for some reason, but there had been no obvious suspicious circumstances.
    I didn’t have my seat belt on ... I went through the windscreen .
    So she was right about that.
    I didn’t die right away. Not long. But I was on the grass for a while. Flickering in and out .
    That part didn’t fit. The real Charlotte Matheson had been dead when the police and ambulance crews arrived on the scene. There were photographs on file showing the car lit up from within, angled up from the tree it had struck. One headlight was still working, a splay of light revealing spits of rain and the body further down the embankment. Matheson had gone through the windscreen, which had done catastrophic damage to her head and upper body. One photograph showed the blood over the bonnet and on the grass. Another, illuminated further by torchlight, revealed a muddy swirl of hair, and injuries to her head that resembled a shotgun blast. She would have died instantly. No flickering in and out for the real Charlotte.
    The file contained no photographs of her in life, but the post-mortem shots had been included. Her body, even more brightly lit in the autopsy suite, was a vivid sight. The head was crumpled in and partly flattened, with a jagged split bisecting the face, so that the bruised eyes looked like split plums lying eight inches apart. The glass had torn off swathes of skin – a world away from the careful scars of the woman in the hospital – and there was a wound to one shoulder so deep that the arm had been nearly severed.
    For very obvious reasons, this was not the woman in the hospital. But at first glance there was a definite similarity in body type and age, and from what I could tell, the hair, brown and curly, was identical. In life, Charlotte Matheson would have at least slightly resembled the woman I’d