The Veteran by Frederick Forsyth Read Free Book Online Page A

Hamilton spent time on the old wound, the right femur and hip shattered long ago, held together with steel pins, which had caused the man to limp for the rest of his life.
    “Looks as if he was hit by a truck,” said Hamilton. “Terrific damage.” He pointed out the scars where the bones had come through the flesh and the neater one where the surgeon had opened the victim to get access to the damage.
    Everything else, and there was much, stemmed from the previous Tuesday: crunched left hand, stamped into the pavement, smashed front teeth, three cracked ribs, broken cheekbone. Burns checked the right fist, but Carl Bateman had been right. There was no damage. Puzzling.
    “Cause of death?” he asked at length.
    “Well, Mr. Burns, it will all be in my official report.” Of course. He would be a major prosecution witness at the trial. “But between you and me, massive axonal damage to the brain. The neurosurgeon did all he could, but he would not have seen this. It doesn’t show on a scan. Assisted by general trauma due to multiple injuries which, though not individually life-threatening, would have had a collective effect. I’ll put him back together for the relatives. Are there relatives?”
    “I don’t know,” said Burns. “I don’t even know who he was.”
    He spent the afternoon covering all the formalities for the next day: the Clerk to the Magistrates, Pentonville prison. Lou Slade was suitably regretful. His legal aid had come through and he had spent the morning trying to find a barrister to take the case. Like Burns, he had run into the August syndrome; half the people he rang were away. But he thought he had a young junior from King’s Bench Walk who would take it. At least with a murder he would now excite more interest. It is an ill wind ...
    “I still have to defend them,” he said.
    “Don’t try too hard, Mr. Slade,” said Burns and put the phone down.
    There was bad news in the afternoon, but it was superseded by the good news. Chivvied by Detective Chief Superintendent Parfitt to hurry up, forensics came back with their results.
    There was nothing in the way of blood or fibre samples on the clothes of Price and Cornish to link them physically with the dead man. The blood on the tee shirt was uniquely from one source, and that was its owner. Price.
    Burns was philosophical. If the men had wrestled body to body there would have been fibre traces passing from fabric to fabric. Price and Cornish would have been too stupid to be aware of the extraordinary advances in forensic technology of the past twenty years. Clues showed up nowadays that could never have been seen when Burns was a copper on the beat at Paignton.
    But the limping man had been felled by a punch and a kick behind the knee. On the ground only toecaps had hammered into his body and after twenty-four hours the boots removed from Price and Cornish had been scuffed and dust-covered by a day’s extra use, and yielded nothing that would stand up in court.
    But the call from Fingerprints made up for it all. There was the dog saliva and three sets of prints. One matched those of the dead man, clearly the owner of the wallet. One set matched those of Mr. Whittaker, who had dutifully agreed to have his prints taken after making his statement. The third set were those of Harry Cornish. Burns was so excited that he stood up, phone in hand.
    “You’re sure? No chance of error?”
    “Jack, I need sixteen points of similarity for a perfect match. I’ve got twenty-one. It’s over a hundred per cent.”
    The technician from Fingerprints would also be a crucial trial witness. Burns thanked him and put the phone down.
    “Gotcha, you bastard,” he told the potted plant.
    There was still one remaining problem and it nagged him. Who was the dead man? What brought him to Edmonton? Was it just to put cheap flowers on the grave of a woman long dead? Did he have family, perhaps away at the coast like his own Jenny? Did he have a job and colleagues?