18 - Aftershock by Quintin Jardine

Author:Quintin Jardine [Quintin Jardine]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Headline Publishing Group Ltd
Published: 2011-02-01T13:30:00+00:00

Forty-six

Neil McIlhenney had been in the act of reaching for the phone when it had rung, beating him to the punch.

‘Yes,’ he answered, pressing the instrument to his ear for at least the twenty-fifth time that day. He almost added, ‘Becky,’ assuming that it would be another report on the Dean murder inquiry, and on the preparation for Weekes’s court appearance the following morning.

‘Neil?’ The voice was male, and very familiar. It was also on edge. ‘It’s Bob. I’m glad I caught you; I need someone to talk to. You will never guess in one thousand years of trying where I am.’

‘You’re at a crime scene,’ McIlhenney replied, without a pause for thought.

‘How the hell did you know that?’

‘Call it intuition. Or call it knowing the difference between you calling me on something job-related and to tell me you’ve just broken par round the pitch and putt.’

‘Clever bastard. Now describe it to me.’

The superintendent frowned. ‘This has nothing to do with Aileen, has it?’

‘No. She doesn’t even know about it yet. She won’t be best pleased either, when she finds out that I’m involved in another murder investigation.’

McIlhenney gasped. ‘Only you,’ he said. ‘Only you could go on holiday and stumble across something like that. Can you tell me about it? Are you able to, where you are? I can hear all sorts of noise in the background.’

‘That’s the sea. I’m on a rocky outcrop, facing my house. The Mossos d’Esquadra CID officers are on their way here from Girona. I’ll have to wait and give them a statement. But that doesn’t stop me talking to you.’

‘Who’s the victim?’

‘We don’t know yet. None of the officers who’ve got here so far recognises her.’

‘Her?’

‘Yes. She’s maybe around thirty, Spanish, I’d guess, from her hair colouring, skin tone and general appearance, but there’s nothing here to back that up. There are no clothes, no personal belongings at the scene.’

‘So it looks like she was killed somewhere else and dumped there?’

‘That may very well be so; but either way she must have been put here when there was nobody else around. She’s been lying in the sun all day, and she could have been here overnight, unnoticed until I spotted her. There’s a medical examiner here, and if my limited Spanish lets me understand him right, he’s saying that he’s not even going to guess at time of death. The sun’s been blazing down all day, so the rocks are fucking hot. It’s like she’s been lying in a pizza oven all this time.’

‘You mean she’s covered in anchovies?’

‘Jesus, Neil, spare me the crime-scene humour. The one thing I do know is what killed her, because I’ve had a look for myself.’

Call it a premonition, call it a second flash of intuition, but a wave of certainty seemed to wash over McIlhenney as he sat there. He was a thousand miles away from Skinner, but it was as if he had been teleported to his side in an instant, and could see the victim.

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