The Harbour (Cumbria Crime Book 1) by Rachel McLean & Joel Hames

Author:Rachel McLean & Joel Hames [McLean, Rachel & Hames, Joel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Ackroyd Publishing
Published: 2023-09-20T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE

The site where they’d found the knife was a bust. An office overlooked it, and there was even a balcony. But speaking with the site manager, Nina discovered that the balcony doors hadn’t been unlocked since a suicide attempt three years ago, and there were no windows or CCTV pointing the right way.

So she headed for the lab, as requested. She knew what was expected of her: hover, and make sure Stella and her team were working on their evidence. Be annoying, if necessary.

Nina was good at being annoying.

Stella was flustered by her presence, kept looking at her and sighing. At one point she stopped work and said, “You don’t need to stay here and keep an eye on me, Nina.”

Nina just shrugged.

Truth be told, she was enjoying herself. Nina had never liked Stella Berry. And now she got to stand around asking the same questions over and over again, and it was working.

Stella and her junior colleague, Huz, had already isolated some DNA from the fibres they’d recovered from the hardware store.

“Look at this.” She beckoned Nina over to a screen, her mouth a straight line. “This is the sample under nearly a million times magnification.”

It was just lines to Nina. She nodded. Huz winked at her. He knew.

“It’s been stained and rinsed,” Stella said, “and it’ll take a while to get a really good picture, but for now I can tell you it’s male.”

“What?”

“Male. From a man. A male human. Fart a lot, forget things, you know?”

Nina forced a laugh.

“And the DNA from the body, from around the paint, that was male too.”

“Is it the same person?”

Stella shrugged. “Too early to tell. Something else, though. Over here.” She pointed to another screen.

Nina approached it. “This is them. The fibres.”

“Congratulations, NIna. Your eyes are in full working order.”

Nina looked up. This was the Stella Berry she was more familiar with. Huz had already walked away.

“Here’s the cross-section.” Stella tapped an icon on the screen and an almost-circular shape appeared. “See the central dark section?”

Nina peered in. The circle had dozens of smaller shapes within it, squashed up against each other. In the middle of it all was a darker section, about a tenth the diameter of the whole thing.

She nodded.

“The medulla,” Stella said. “That wasn’t in most of the strands, but we did find it in a few. Most of them weren’t so coarse.”

“What is it?”

“Lambswool. Natural fibre. Orange and white. I can’t be a hundred per cent certain, but… well, look at this.”

She led Nina to another screen. It showed a picture of an orange and white jumper in the distinctive argyle diamond pattern. Nina grimaced. Hideous.

“You think this is it?” she asked.

Stella nodded. “This or something very similar. Pringle used to make this, they don’t anymore but they’ll have sold enough over the years. I’m almost certain that the fibre in the hardware store came from that jumper. Given the store’s layout, I’d bet it came from whoever broke in.”

Nina looked at the jumper. No way Liddell would own one of these.

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