A Walk with the Dead by Sally Spencer

Author:Sally Spencer [Sally Spencer]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Severn House
Published: 2012-10-27T00:00:00+00:00

FOURTEEN

There was a standing joke they had shared when they were up at Oxford – one of those which had been funny the first time it had been said, had quickly grown into a cliché through repetition, and finally become funny again precisely because it was a cliché – and as Crane parked his car next to the main gates of the corporation park, it came into his head for the first time in years.

‘This is like déjà vu all over again,’ he said to Liz Duffy.

Liz chuckled.

‘Now there’s a blast from the past,’ she said. Then she instantly grew more serious and added, ‘It’s not really a laughing matter, is it?’

No, Crane agreed, it really wasn’t – not when applied to a situation in which a fresh murder bore all the hallmarks of the one for which they’d already made an arrest.

Of course, the fact that Bill Horrocks had been behind bars since that morning didn’t necessarily mean that he couldn’t also have killed the second victim, he thought hopefully, as they stepped through the park gates. The corpse could have been lying there undiscovered for some time – perhaps even for days.

Then he saw the floodlights, blazing down on a spot not fifty yards from where Jill Harris had been found, and that slim hope faded and died – because if the body had been there the day before, the officers scouring the area for clues to the first murder would almost certainly have found it.

He saw Paniatowski standing at the edge of the circle of light, as rigid if she’d been carved from stone. What had happened was bad for the whole team, he thought, but as team leader, it was bloody catastrophic for her.

Hearing the footsteps approaching from behind, the chief inspector turned.

‘Thank you for getting here so quickly, Dr Duffy,’ she said. ‘The SOCO’s have already checked out the ground around the body, so you can get to work as soon as you like.’

If Paniatowski had noticed that he and Liz had arrived together, she gave no sign of it, Crane thought – but then, she had other things on her mind.

Crane looked down at the victim, who was sprawled out close to the bushes. She was wearing a short black skirt, a red top and a beige anorak, he noted. The clothes were cheap and shoddy, and did not look particularly well cared for. The girl’s hair had been bleached blonde, but whoever had done the bleaching had not made a very good job of it, and an irregular wave of dark roots ran across the top of her skull. Her tights had been torn during the struggle, and visible through one of the holes was a crudely etched tattoo of a skull.

Liz Duffy bent down beside the cadaver. It seemed wrong – in the presence of death – to admire the graceful way in which the doctor moved, Crane told himself, but there was nothing he could do about it.

‘The body was found

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