MAXWELL’S HOUSE a thrilling murder mystery with plenty of twists by M.J. Trow

Author:M.J. Trow [Trow, M.J.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: JOFFE BOOKS crime thrillers and mysteries
Published: 2024-02-28T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 11

Jim Astley’s wife had gone to dry out again. Jim Astley himself was back in the mortuary, in his dark green apron and cap, probing and prodding what had once been Timothy William Grey.

Chief Inspector Henry Hall had left his dwindling team back at the incident room and was propping up the wall behind Astley’s back.

‘What have we got, then, Jim?’ he asked.

Astley grunted, apparently wrestling with something gristly. ‘As far as I can tell,’ he said, ‘it seems to be a carbon copy of the Jenny Hyde business. Minus the potential sexual interference, of course.’ Hall forced himself to go closer. He never relished moments like this, the remains of a human being picked over by a vulture in green. But he knew it had to be. It was the only way to get results. And he had precious few of those at the moment.

It had got so he hated going into work of a morning. The smell of the incident room was enough. He’d nod curtly to his staff, down now to six men and two women, and disappear inside his inner sanctum, emerging only for the weekly pep talk. It had got less convincing each time and he knew it. He knew too that they knew it. The noise was less, the hubbub over. Eight people just didn’t fill the space of thirty and one of the eight was only part-time. One by one, the leads ran out, the options closed. Avenue after avenue proved to be yet another cul-de-sac. And now everybody avoided everybody’s gaze. ‘Scaling down’, it was called in the force. You couldn’t keep X officers together on one case for long. There wasn’t the manpower and there wasn’t the cash. First he’d lost five to a spate of burglaries, then an armed robbery took three of his best lads. By the beginning of September his little force was decimated and the successful arrest of a rapist the week before had only diminished it still further because of the mountain of paperwork. It proved to have nothing to do with Jennifer Antonia Hyde. They pulled the plug on that one too.

And now? God knew certainly. And Dr James Astley knew a bit. As for Chief Inspector Henry Hall, he felt he didn’t know diddly any more.

‘Strangulation,’ Astley was saying, pulling the mask away so that Hall could hear his pearls of wisdom, ‘by ligature. Look here, to the left of the cartilage, a distinct knot.’ He was right. A large blue area discoloured the dead boy’s neck up to his jawline. Hall looked down at the face. Tim Grey was the colour of old parchment, his lips peeled back from his teeth, his eyes sunken in. The dark hair, never tidy in life, lay like a black thatch above the pale forehead.

‘But this time,’ Astley held up the boy’s right hand, ‘he went down fighting.’ Grey’s knuckles were cut and scraped. ‘It’s my guess he hit a tooth,’ he said. ‘There’s a particularly jagged cut in the index finger .

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