A Consequence of Sin by Frederick James

Author:Frederick James
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Frederick James
Published: 2021-02-22T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Cavendish wished he could prowl the estate, speak to other witnesses, and get a sense of the crime scene. All those familiar rituals that he hadn’t thought about in ages seemed like long lost friends as he skulked away from the estate like the unwelcome interloper he was. Now he understood the frustration of the bereaved who wanted action and were cast aside and told to let the professionals do their job. Even in the case of his wife, while he wasn’t allowed on the case directly his colleagues kept him closely in the loop.

There was also a nostalgia factor. He hadn’t been around a crime scene since he left the Met, so there had been no opportunity to miss it. Seeing the mounting level of activity around Amber’s corpse reminded him of those days. Not that being around a murdered soul was a pleasure, but there was a satisfactory element in assessing the scene, understanding the language of death and evidence, reading the signs and starting to assemble the story of the victim’s last moments, building the trail that could help you bring the murderer to account. Cavendish liked to think that a homicide cop was the last friend a murder victim ever made. Sometimes he thought a copper could get to know the deceased better than the people that loved them in life, or that hated them. You learned who they were, the secrets that shamed them, and anxieties they concealed. You found out what people really thought about them. Most of the time, not always but more often than people would believe, you could bring the people that stole their lives to justice.

Amber’s crime scene had reawakened some of those sensibilities. To be certain, Cavendish felt a particular fondness for Amber and had done so from the beginning, which might explain why, from the instant his feet hit the gravel of the drive he felt his instincts sharpen, observing everything he could, filing the images even if he couldn’t digest them yet. Recording the way the house guests were milling about. Nervous? Guilty? Curious, or not curious enough? Was Marvin Lance as torn up as he acted, or was he just acting well? Could Cavendish trust Lance’s observation about the bruising on Amber’s neck? If she was passed out, how did she get in the pool? Was she killed in the pool, or put there after? Why was she in her underwear, instead of being dressed or naked? If she had been killed by a blackmail victim, it seemed unlikely the killer would only half-undress her. If the goal was to give the crime the look of a rape/murder he would strip her naked. Likewise, if it was a sex crime then she would have been left naked. It wasn’t unknown for a sex criminal to dress his victim after the fact, but if that was part of his modus operandi, the killer invariably dressed her fully. Of course, in either scenario the murderer could have

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