THE BEEKEEPER a gripping crime mystery with a dark twist by STEWART GILES

Author:STEWART GILES [GILES, STEWART]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Joffe Books
Published: 2017-05-17T23:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

It was Taylor’s first time at the Trotterdown mortuary. In fact it was the first time she’d had to identify a body since Danny’s. She still remembered the feeling of utter nothingness as she gazed at his face. She’d felt precisely zero, and then when she did start feeling something she’d been more angry than sad. Angry that Danny had left her alone to deal with the damage he had caused while he was alive.

Dr Jon Finch turned out to be very thin and tall. He had black hair and the most piercing blue eyes Taylor had ever seen.

“DC Harriet Taylor?” he said. “Take a seat. I have some very interesting news for you.”

He smiled and his blue eyes looked even brighter. She could not help staring at them for slightly longer than was appropriate under the circumstances.

“I get them from my father,” Finch said. “The eyes. They’re a curse some times.”

She blushed. The faint smell of aftershave lingered in the air. Taylor recognised it — Danny had worn it.

“Let’s start with the man whose other half seems to have deserted him, shall we,” Finch said. “Please excuse my sense of humour. I’m afraid a rather black sense of humour goes with the job.”

You ought to spend some time with a certain paramedic I know, Taylor thought.

“This is certainly an interesting one,” the doctor went on. He tapped a few keys on the keyboard on the desk. “Identity unknown, I’m afraid — chopped in half. It wasn’t a shark attack like they’re saying on the news. Sharks leave a lot of uneven jagged lacerations. This poor bugger’s been sliced in half a lot more cleanly.”

“I know. I saw the body. Do you have any idea how it happened?”

“A sharp piece of metal, if I were to hazard a guess. Don’t quote me, though. But I do know roughly when it happened and I do know he’d been dead for quite some time before someone cut him up.”

“How long?”

“I’d say around a week. Maybe a bit less.”

“That doesn’t make any sense. If he’d been in the water that long, how did he get chopped in half?”

“Ah, there’s the rub.” Finch clapped his hands together. “Firstly, he was only in the water a matter of hours and, secondly, he was dead before he hit the water. There was no water in his lungs and he’s almost undamaged by the water. Believe me, if he’d been in the sea for that amount of time, he’d be looking very different.”

“Are you saying somebody killed him, waited almost a week, chopped him up and threw him in the sea?”

“Well, it looks like it. But that’s just my guess.”

“OK.” Taylor was finding it hard to take all of this in. “He was killed, chopped up and thrown in the sea. Do you know what killed him?”

“His brains were bashed in. Literally. He suffered a large number of heavy blows to the back of the head.”

“Murder?”

“Looks like it. Somebody bashed him over the head, kept him around for almost a week and then chopped him in two.

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