Where the Bodies are Buried by Christopher Brookmyre, Brookmyre Read Free Book Online

but she liked to
     hear it anyway.
    Catherine slipped out quietly, her sons’ queries still resonating despite the gravity of the development that had interrupted
     them. Whodunit. She didn’t want to go there. She avoided talking shop around the boys, but the truth was they couldn’t get
     enough of it. All the things that she feared might disturb them were the very things they most craved to hear about. Evil
     little changelings: where had they come from? What had happened to the guileless wee innocents that she used to pick up from
     nursery?
    She always thought she’d have daughters. There was no rational basis to believe this would be the case; it was simply how
     she had imagined motherhood, probably influenced by her own upbringing. She’d have little girls who liked scrapbooks and horses
     and dressing up; she’d read them Malory Towers and
Heidi,
and tell them about the games she liked to play when she was a girl. Instead she’d got two boys and was utterly outnumbered
     in her own home, the only female. No scrapbooks, no horses, just guns and swords, fake wounds and plastic dog turds. Instead
     of Malory Towers and
Heidi,
she was reading Mr Gum and Captain Underpants, and instead of her telling them about innocent childhood days on a farm, they
     were asking about dead bodies and whodunits.
    That said, she’d be more comfortable telling them about the smelly corpses than about ‘solving’ the murders. Guts and gore
     they were fine hearing about, as evidenced by the Horrible History books lining their shelves, but the squalidly mundane realities
     framing the deaths were another matter. The Putrid Present was maybe a bit much for wee boys to cope with.
    The very word ‘whodunit’ put her in mind of her one-time boss and mentor, Moira Clark, whose mantra – often restated bearing
     the added emphasis of a clout to the back of the head with a file folder – was simply: ‘This is Glesca.’
    The first time Catherine heard it was in direct response to her suggestion that a case was ‘starting to look like a whodunit’.
    ‘This is Glesca,’ Moira told her. ‘Any time you’re confused, take a wee minute to remind yourself of that inescapable fact:
     this is Glesca. We don’t do subtle, we don’t do nuanced, we don’t do conspiracy. We do pish-heid bampot bludgeoning his girlfriend
     to death in a fit of paranoid rage induced by forty-eight hours straight on the batter. We do coked-up neds jumping on a guy’s
     heid outside a nightclub because he looked at them funny. We do drug-dealing gangster rockets shooting other drug-dealing
     gangster rockets as comeback for something almost identical a fortnight ago. We do bam-on-bam. We do tit-for-tat, score-settling,
     feuds, jealousy, petty revenge. We do straightforward. We do obvious. We do cannaemisswhodunit. When you hear hoofbeats on
     Sauchiehall Street, it’s gaunny be a horse, no’ a zebra, because?’
    ‘This is Glesca,’ she answered.
    Catherine was still closing the car door as Laura pulled away, never mind waiting for her to clunk-click. The girl was keen,
     give her that, but the guy would still be dead when they got there.
    ‘What are we dragging you away from?’ Laura asked. ‘A night in front of the telly? Dinner for two and a bottle of wine with
     the kids tucked up?’
    ‘Laura, it’s ten past three.’
    ‘Christ. Sorry.’
    ‘Been there.’
    And she had, many times. It was easy to lose track of normal people’s schedules when you were on a run of shifts. You remained
     aware that you were out of synch but became vague about by how much, and would take a random stab on the basis of whether
     it was dark or light. At least it assured Catherine that she wasn’t sporting that conspicuously dragged-out-of-bed look.
    Laura, for her part, had an animated eagerness about her that suggested she really needed to cut down on the coffee. She could
     come across like a probationer as a result, despite being an experienced DI. This