Blood In My Eyes: A Jaw-Dropping Scottish Crime Thriller (DS Hutton Crime Series Book 8) (DS Thomas Hutton Crime Series) by Douglas Lindsay

Author:Douglas Lindsay [Lindsay, Douglas]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Long Midnight Publishing
Published: 2022-08-07T16:00:00+00:00

23

Now the scene where we stand with the corpse, getting the feel for the dead. Janice Butterworth, civil servant. Unmarried, no children, mother deceased, father devastated, the rest of his life in ruin. There’s no getting over the loss of a child.

We brought him in to make the formal identification. He was in bits before he got here, and then he collapsed further. Sat in a seat right there, by the wall, ten feet from his daughter’s corpse, sobbing. Occupational hazard for Fforbes. She left us to it, sat on the other side of the room at a computer, writing her report. She wasn’t finished, but obviously she wasn’t going to go rummaging around inside the man’s daughter’s viscera while he sat there in pieces.

Constable Hanratty, trained in the arts of grief counselling, has gone off with the bereaved to see him home, and make sure he does not spend the rest of the day alone. That can be tricky sometimes. Kallas and I remain, now in the mortuary equivalent of 4-4-2, us on one side of the corpse, Fforbes on the other.

And Jesus fucking Christ, the brutality to the face is horrendous. I mean, holy fuck. This guy must’ve been really, really pissed off about Universal Credit. I almost said that when we got here, but thought better of it, in itself unusual.

‘You lied to Mr Butterworth?’ asks Kallas.

‘Oh, yes,’ says Fforbes. ‘I feel that was for the best.’

She told him that the first blow would have killed her. If it comes to it, Tatum goes to court, and he pulls any sort of bullshit manoeuvre which results in the requirement of a trial, then the truth will out. But today, for now, for that poor man, that lie was one that really mattered.

‘Do you know which of the blows will have killed her?’ asks Kallas.

‘Not yet.’ Fforbes pauses, obviously hesitating before saying something she does not normally like to say. ‘I am not sure I will ever be able to tell. He stabbed her fourteen times in the face in quick succession. I suspect she will have been dead by the end of the attack, but I cannot say for sure. At any rate, two things are certain. One is, it was the stabs to the face that killed her. One might assume he only stopped when he was sure she was dead. And the second is that she would not have lived too much longer in any case. Her lungs are riddled with cancer. It matters little now, anyway, whether or not she had started on the path to treatment, but I suspect not. Had this level of lung deterioration been detected, she would not have had to wait for treatment, regardless of the current circumstances in the NHS. This would have seen her straight to the front of the queue, albeit the treatment might not have lasted long.’

‘There’s no reason why Tatum would have known this,’ I say.

‘Presumably not,’ says Kallas, ‘but I see the road you are going down.

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