04 The Misper by Kate London

Author:Kate London
Language: eng
Format: mobi, azw3
Tags: Thrillers, Mystery & Suspense, Crime, Fiction & Literature
ISBN: 9781838954482
Publisher: Atlantic Books, Limited
Published: 2023-08-14T23:00:00+00:00

Sarah pulled over to let Poppy have a run around. She didn’t have enough time before the post-mortem to turn round and drop the dog with the minder. The spaniel bounded about, sniffing at the tussocks and wagging her tail. Sarah leaned against the car and took in the view, down across the hills towards the town. It lay like Camelot in the distant valley, its tall Norman church tower rising through the low-lying fog.

The mortuary was a small modern building a forty-minute drive north of Middleton on country roads. The route was through a gently rising and falling plain: single houses and farms dotted among the curves of hedges; a level crossing where the cars patiently queued as the local train hurried through, beeping its horn; a stream winding alongside the road, leaving and rejoining.

Nearly two hours from Alnbridge, this was the furthest end of the constabulary.

Sarah had asked the sergeant at the scene if he could organise an officer to assist at the PM as exhibits officer and PC Simon Landry was waiting for her in the car park. He was tall and athletic, late twenties probably, with a serious air. She guessed she’d been lucky to get him. They moved through into the building and in the waiting room she talked him quickly through the routine. They wrote up some of the labels together and jotted the bag numbers down in the exhibits book.

‘If you don’t know what to do, ask me.’

‘Of course.’

I must be getting old, Sarah thought: Dr Julia Houghton, the pathologist, seemed unbelievably young. She had long wavy hair with blonde highlights, wore bright red lipstick and had a toughness about her that inspired confidence.

Houghton broke the ID tag and unzipped the bag.

The girl lay, nameless, in the cool mortuary light. She had long brown hair that was thick with river mud. Her clothes were torn and stained by mud too: tight-fitting jeans, a T-shirt, a once blue puffer jacket and black New Balance trainers with what had once been pink laces. The mortuary assistant cut the clothes off and Landry put them into unsealed plastic exhibits bags then in brown paper bags for the drying room. The girl was stick thin. Her ribs and the twin crests of her pelvis protruded. Now that she was naked the damage to the body seemed worse than it had at the scene. Down one side was a livid bruise. Her right forearm and her right shin were fractured. The tibia of her right leg poked through the torn skin.

‘Any idea if that’s all after death?’ Sarah asked.

‘It’s consistent with her going into the river upstream and travelling on the current before she’s snagged by the weir. But I can’t tell you what’s post-mortem. If she went into the water alive, she could have broken those bones while she was still living, just by hitting a rock. The current is very strong and there are always submerged obstacles. Injuries like that would have contributed to her drowning. Or they could have happened after death.

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