The Veteran by Frederick Forsyth Read Free Book Online

see slight indentations made by the dog’s teeth, a slick of canine saliva. But what else might it yield? With tweezers, he lifted it into a plastic evidence bag and called Fingerprints. Yes, I know it is a Sunday, he said again, but this is a rush job.
    During the day the searchers filled eight binliners of rubbish from the patch of waste ground and sere grass alongside Mandela Road and the examination of it lasted into the night.
    But nothing turned up that could have come from the wallet which, as Mr. Whittaker had stated and Burns had confirmed, was completely empty.

DAY SEVEN
    MONDAY
    He lay huddled and fearful in the near darkness, a single flickering night light at the end of the room casting strange moving shadows towards the ceiling. Down the length of the orphanage dormitory he could hear the other boys murmuring in sleep and occasionally a whimper from a bad dream. He did not know where he would go, what he would become, now that Mum and Dad were gone. He only knew that he was alone and frightened in this new environment.
    He might have dozed but he came awake again when the door opened, and there was an oblong of light from the passage outside. Then she was bending over him, gentle hands tucking the sheet and blankets tighter round him, soothing his sweat-damp hair back from his face.
    “Now, now, lad. Not asleep yet? Now, you go to sleep like a good boy, and God and all his angels will look after you until Auntie May comes back in the morning.” Thus comforted, he slipped away into the long, warm darkness of the endless night.
    It was the duty staff at the ICU in the Royal London. She had tried the Dover nick, but Burns had earlier given the ICU his personal number for emergency calls.
    “D I Burns? Royal London. I am sorry to have to inform you that the patient you were interested in—the unidentified man in intensive care—he died at ten past six this morning.”
    Jack Burns put down the phone facing another full day. He now had a murder case. At least it would go straight up the priority ladder. There would be a post-mortem and he would have to attend it. The two animals in the Ville would have to be brought back to Highbury and recharged.
    That meant that the Clerk to the Magistrates would have to be informed, and the defending solicitor, Lou Slade. Procedures, more procedures, but they had to be done and done right. There could be no question of Price and Cornish walking away on a technicality discovered by a clever-dick lawyer. Burns wanted them inside grey stone walls for years and years to come.
    The Royal London has its own small mortuary and pathology department, and it was here that the PM took place at midday. It was conducted by Home Office pathologist Mr. Laurence Hamilton.
    Odd birds, forensic pathologists, was Burns’s private opinion. They did a job that disgusted him. Some were effulgently cheerful, given to light banter as they cut and sawed a body into bits. Others were more professorial, regarding what they found with boyish enthusiasm, as a lepidopterist finding an amazing new butterfly. Others were dour and spoke in monosyllables. Mr. Hamilton was of the first variety. For him, life could not be better nor his job more wonderful.
    Jack Burns had attended several in his career, but the smell of ether and formaldehyde almost always made him gag. When the disc saw bit into the skull he turned away and looked at the charts on the wall.
    “Good Lord, he’s taken a beating,” said Hamilton as they surveyed the pale and bruise-covered body lying face up on the slab.
    “Kicked to death. Last Tuesday,” said Burns. “Just took him six days to die.”
    “Unfortunately ‘death by kicking’ is not quite the result I shall have to produce,” said Hamilton genially.
    He began to cut, dictating what he found to his theatre sister and the microphone linked to a tape recorder that she held out to him as he moved around the table.
    It took a good hour. There was a lot of damage and Mr.