The Hassle on Vicar's Gate (DI Morgan Yeoman Book 4) by Emmy Ellis

Author:Emmy Ellis [Ellis, Emmy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2020-10-08T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twenty-Seven

1989

PC Andrew Yarthing stared down at the girl’s body.

Teenager, fourteen, brown hair splayed fan-like around her head, tangled in many places, one section a ratty bird’s nest.

Bruises on her neck from strangulation, just like Ellen Forster and the other poor unfortunate victims.

Her top ripped down the middle, moved aside.

Bra pushed up, her knickers to the left.

Ellen’s hadn’t been found, and that bothered Andrew. Why had those been removed from the scene when the others hadn’t? It was a calling card, a ‘Look, it’s me again!’ So why not with Ellen?

The long, dry ditch she was in went the length of Julliard’s houses, a line of hedges cutting if off from more scrubland behind them. An ideal place to assault a girl and kill her. If the perpetrator crouched, the rise of the bank to the left would have concealed them from any neighbours looking out of their rear windows. As with the wheat field, the location was well-chosen.

Andrew had found her off the back of a missing person’s call—well, her shoe at first, hidden by the grass at the top of the ditch. The mother, Laura Worthington, had phoned in at half ten to report her daughter, Katherine, missing, assuring the desk sergeant she wouldn’t ever be late home so something must be wrong. The call had come over Andrew’s radio, and he’d taken on the job of going to the station to look at the girl’s picture which her father, Neil, had dropped in.

Andrew had driven the route from Katherine’s friend’s house, a Carol Kidson—other officers were there talking to her and her parents. He’d stopped along the way to ask some lads outside a closed Wasti’s if they’d seen a girl of her description. They had, saying she’d walked past about quarter to ten, nearly two hours ago, in the direction of home. The bin beside them choked out smoke, but he hadn’t asked them why—he had more important things to be doing.

Andrew had known, at that precise second, Katherine had gone missing between there and Julliard’s Croft. His blood had run cold, and he’d gone straight to the scrubland, convinced he’d find her.

Of course, he had, and he stood there now, sickened to his stomach that someone so young, yet again, had lost their life to a deviant bastard. Who knew what terror Katherine and Ellen had endured prior to death, the tears they’d shed, crying for mums who never came to save them. The women, they would have wanted their husbands and their mothers, perhaps their children, too.

He was waiting for other officers to arrive so he could leave the body and go to see Laura and Neil Worthington. No need to ask for one of them to formally identify their child because this girl here matched the photograph. Although her face had a bruise where she’d likely been hit—Ellen all over again—there was no mistaking her striking features. A pretty one, this, and she’d live in her parents’ memories, forever young.

A damn shame.

Three of

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