Death Watch by Sally Spencer

Death Watch by Sally Spencer

Author:Sally Spencer [Spencer, Sally]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Mystery
ISBN: 9780727865441
Google: 33klSgAACAAJ
Amazon: B00GNBQI4C
Barnesnoble: B00GNBQI4C
Goodreads: 969759
Publisher: Severn House Digital
Published: 2007-01-01T05:00:00+00:00


Fourteen

The girl’s body had been discovered on a piece of waste land in Stainsworth, which was one of Whitebridge’s more dilapidated districts, and had been scheduled for urban clearance if and when the government ever got around to making the money available. A dozen narrow terraced streets fed into the land – streets which had once been home to mill workers like Charlie Woodend’s dad, and now housed families living mainly off unemployment benefit and other handouts from the state.

Whenever Woodend drove through the area, he looked at the crumbling buildings and almost invariably found himself harking back to a period which had been poorer and harder, yet also seemed to him to have been more honest and more decent. But no such thoughts entered his head that night.

By the time Woodend and Rutter arrived at the scene, several official vehicles – patrol units and unmarked CID cars – were already parked on the road next to the land. There were street lights every few yards, but none of them was working, and the only illumination at the roadside came from the rotating light on the waiting ambulance, which cut an eerie and ever-shifting orange swathe through the darkness.

Further away, in the centre of the patch of waste land, there was light – a small island of it, provided by hastily erected police emergency lighting.

A spotlight on failure, Woodend thought miserably. On my failure!

He stepped out of the car, and noticed immediately how cold the air had suddenly become. He turned up the collar of his jacket, then looked around him. A number of dark menacing figures with pointed heads were standing at intervals around the periphery of the land, and he walked up to the nearest of them.

‘Where’s the path, Constable?’ he asked.

‘It starts just past the next lamp post, sir,’ the constable replied.

It wasn’t much of a path – barely a couple of feet wide – but the beam from Woodend’s torch showed that it was free of weeds, which indicated it was fairly heavily used.

The walk from the pavement to the point at which the emergency lighting had been erected was a short one, but to Woodend’s leadened legs, it felt as if it were an epic journey.

A sheet had been laid on the ground, in the centre of the circle of light. It had been placed there to cover the girl – perhaps to give a little of the privacy in death that she had been denied in the last moments of her life – but from the indentations on its surface, it was possible to see exactly where she lay.

‘She looks so tiny,’ Woodend thought bitterly.

A number of flattened yellowish objects lay crushed into the ground around her, and it took Woodend some seconds to identify them as chips – or ‘French fries’, as the Yanks he’d known in the War had called them. He wondered what they were doing there, then wondered why he was wondering, then recognized that he was simply putting off the moment when he looked at the girl.



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