Kiss of Death by Adam Croft

Author:Adam Croft [Croft, Adam]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Black Cannon Publishing

20

Caroline closed her car door and sat in silence for a few moments. Although she’d met many families who’d been touched by tragedy, there were always some that lived long in the memory. She had a feeling Sophie and Luke would do so too. A young couple in their prime, making their wedding arrangements and planning the rest of their lives together, snatched from them in the most sudden and unexpected way.

She’d often heard people say how cruel it was to see a loved one die of a long illness, and that was something she’d never understood. Of course it was cruel. It was horrendous. But it gave you one advantage over the alternative: time to prepare. Sophie hadn’t had that. She’d watched her future husband leave for work in the morning, looking forward to seeing him again at teatime, where they’d no doubt talk more about their plans for the future. He’d never come home, and she’d never got the chance to say goodbye.

There would have been so many things she would have wanted to say to him, if only she’d known. If only she’d had time to prepare. She’d never have been ready — no-one was — but there was comfort to be had in the knowledge that nothing needed to be left unsaid. If you couldn’t choose when to go, Caroline thought the best alternative was to at least know it was coming.

She’d had her own experiences, of course. Although she’d been told a few months earlier that her cancer treatment had been successful, she knew there was always the chance it would come back. And even if it didn’t, she still had the knowledge of how it felt to see her own death on the horizon. She’d never been told she would die, of course. It had always been serious, but treatable. But whereas death had never been a consideration or possibility at any point in her life before that, it had suddenly taken on a very real identity.

She started her car and began the journey to Faith Pearson’s former home, where her flatmate, Aimee Clifford-Parks, would be waiting for her. She was barely a minute into her journey when her phone rang. Pressing a button on her steering wheel, she answered the call on the car’s bluetooth system.

‘Caroline Hills.’

‘Boss, it’s me,’ Dexter said. ‘We’ve got post-mortem results back for Barbara Patchett.’

‘Alright, good. Anything interesting?’

‘Not really. Acute pulmonary oedema and a heart attack due to severe coronary with cardiac tamponade.’

‘Excellently read, Dex. Now tell me what it means.’

‘I asked them that too. In short, she had a heart attack caused by fluid building up around the heart. That meant it couldn’t deal with the blood supply to her lungs, so more fluid built up in the tissue.’

‘I see,’ Caroline replied. ‘It doesn’t sound all that suspicious, though, does it?’

Dexter paused for a moment before speaking. ‘Not on the face of it. But we’re expecting toxicology results to follow, so we should have a better idea then.’

‘You thinking poisoning?’

‘That’s my hunch,’ Dexter replied.

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