The Case of the Screaming Beauty by Alison Golden

Author:Alison Golden [Golden, Alison]
Language: eng
Format: epub

CHAPTER SIX

EMILY HOVERED NERVOUSLY by the doorway to the crime lab, as if afraid of being accused of trespass. Or, as her boss sometimes called it, “lurking.” She was always hesitant to disturb Bert Hatfield when he was in one of his “beautiful mind” moods, as he called them. One wall of the lab was covered by the largest whiteboard in the office supply catalogue, and Bert had spent the first hour of this Thursday morning scribbling on it with zest and purpose.

“Er, sir?” Emily tried, tapping tentatively at the door frame.

Bert didn’t miss a beat, his marker squeaking noisily on the board. “Emily, my dear, if I’ve told you once, I’ve told you a thousand times. My colleagues call me Bert,” he explained, still writing, “and you’re my colleague.”

“Yes, sir.”

There was another animated squeak. “Oh, for pity’s sake,” he said with a reassuring smile. “With what can I help you, oh timid shrew?”

Lurking – yes, that was definitely the word – immediately behind Emily was an even more reluctant figure, a teenager in a smart, grey and black school uniform.

“Bloody hell,” Bert exclaimed, finally capping the pen and slotting it onto the board’s metal rail. “Do they still make you wear those ghastly things?”

Emily found her voice once more. “This is Fiona. From St. Aidan’s.” The silence betrayed Bert’s having entirely forgotten about this long-planned work experience visit. “It was in your calendar,” Emily added.

“Bugger,” the pathologist muttered. “Quite alright, quite alright. Come on in, Fiona. Sorry about all that.” He ushered her into the room and politely dismissed Emily, who returned to her front desk duties. “You’ve arrived on a rather auspicious day, as it happens.”

“Really?” the fifteen year-old asked. She had bright blue eyes and a quiet curiosity which Bert decided he found both pleasant and rather admirable, particularly given that his lab dealt almost exclusively with the lamentable and gruesome.

“You’ll have heard about the murder over in Chiddlinghurst?” he asked, leading Fiona around two tables stacked high with books and papers, towards his desk in the corner. In truth, there could have been almost anything under the tremendous weight of documentation Bert had accrued and, for want of a better word, “stored.” It gave the lab the feel of a much loved but very slightly shabby library whose main topic was death: manners of bringing it about, and the people guilty of having done so.

“Norah Travis,” Fiona replied crisply. “Very sad. Only twenty-seven, wasn’t she?”

“Well done for reading the news,” Bert told her. “I didn’t think young people bothered with it.”

Fiona was not, as Bert would find during the course of a memorable morning, a typical fifteen year-old. She had bent over backwards to be assigned this rather special position, writing letters and using her father’s modest influence as a human resources manager for a local pharmaceutical company. To be a pathologist had been her dream since childhood, and she had little interest in any other type of career. Hers was no morbid fascination with death, however.

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