Dressed to Kill by Patricia Hall

Author:Patricia Hall [Hall, Patricia]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Suspense
Publisher: Creme de la Crime
Published: 2013-05-31T04:00:00+00:00

ELEVEN

DS Harry Barnard responded to the call from Casualty with a deep sense of foreboding. He was met by a young, harassed-looking doctor who nodded bleakly to him and led him into a curtained cubicle where a slight form lay on the bed covered completely by a sheet.

‘She died half an hour ago,’ the doctor said. ‘She was brought in after being found in the street, bleeding heavily. We did our best but we couldn’t save her. Can’t you do something about these abortionists? That’s the third we’ve had this month, plus a couple we managed to save. This one’s just a kid.’

Barnard pulled the sheet away from the dead girl’s face and had no difficulty recognizing the body of Sylvia Hubbard, who had sat with him and Kate O’Donnell drinking coffee in the Blue Lagoon a couple of days before.

‘Do you have a name?’ he asked and the doctor responded only with a brief shake of the head.

‘She was barely conscious when they brought her in. There’d been a massive loss of blood.’

‘I think I’ve seen her on the street,’ Barnard said carefully. ‘I know someone who should be able to identify her for us if I’m right.’ Making a positive identification himself was a course that could lead to all sorts of complications, he thought. There were enough other people who could do the job for him.

‘She’ll be downstairs until someone claims her,’ the doctor said. ‘The coroner may want a post-mortem, I suppose, to confirm the cause of death, though I don’t think there’s much doubt myself. The trouble is that if the worst happens you’ve got no chance of tracking these butchers down. She’s probably the only person who knows where she went. And she’s not telling us now.’

‘Tell the morgue we’ll be in touch,’ Barnard said. ‘The coroner’s been informed, I take it?’

The doctor nodded and Barnard made his way out of the hospital wondering how he was going to tell Kate what had happened. She would be distraught and there was no way he was going to ask her to identify the body. He had that task down for Andrei Lubin or Ricky Smart. It was the last service they could do for the girl they had brought to Soho, exploited and then thrown away like so much garbage. The least he could do for Sylvia was to give one or both of them a hard time. But first he had to go back to the nick to clear his lines with the DCI. The second task he knew he would enjoy, the first he guessed he would not.

As the sergeant had half expected, DCI Keith Jackson went into full-scale Presbyterian mode when Barnard told him what had happened.

‘The wages of sin,’ he intoned, and when he pulled open one of his desk drawers Barnard wondered if he was going to pull out a Bible, although all that appeared was a buff file which he flicked through quickly. ‘There are a number of known suspects in the area, are there not?’ he said.

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