A Bleeding of Innocents Read Online Free PDF Page A

say he must be lying.’
    Liz’s blood ran momentarily chill in her veins. She nodded at the corpse. ‘You mean, he may have pulled – that – on to him to erase an inconsistent blood-spot pattern?’
    Dr Crowe gave an undergraduate shrug. ‘Couldn’t say, Inspector. All I can say is that if he did it would have had that effect.’ The sudden amiable grin was engaging. ‘My business is facts. Suppositions are your field.’
    After the body was removed the mood lightened perceptibly. By now the first eastern palings of the false dawn were dimming the stars: in an hour it would be light enough to start a search of the woods around the car park. Liz organized a torchlight sweep of the immediate area and radioed in for more help as it became available.
    It was not that she expected to find the shot-gun in the long grass. Whatever had happened here that wasn’t likely. If Page murdered his wife he had thought it out, planned it in detail, and executed it with care, and he wasn’t likely to blow it by throwing the gun away afterwards. He could have taken as long as he needed to dispose of it, only leaving the scene to flag down a vehicle when he was confident it could not be found. On the other hand, if someone else murdered Kerry Page then he – conceivably she – left the scene while Page was running for help and there would have been time enough for an orderly withdrawal.
    But if a search was unlikely to find the murder weapon it might provide information about the murderer. How he had reached the little scenic car park set in its copse of trees between the secondary road and the water-meadows of the River Arrow; if he had left the same way; if he’d had a vehicle, what kind of vehicle it was. There might be signs of more than one person. The murderer might have smoked while he was waiting for his victim. When he saw what he had done perhaps he staggered away to be sick among the trees. None of these possibilities was a likelihood but they had to look, they had to look thoroughly, and they had to do it at the earliest opportunity.
    â€˜And we’ll need divers to drag the river,’ said Shapiro, mentally ticking off a check-list. ‘I’ll get that moving. Why don’t you go and talk to the boy?’
    â€˜The husband? All right.’ But Liz was surprised. David Page was the only suspect they had so far, she’d expected Chief Inspector Shapiro would want to conduct that interview himself.
    There was a sly quality to his grin. ‘He’s just a kid. Talk to him kindly and he might tell you things he’d only tell his mother.’
    Liz remembered that he was her superior and resisted the urge to blacken his eye. She said sweetly, ‘Rather than his grandfather, you mean, sir?’
    Officially, David Page was bereaved next-of-kin. A woman constable was sitting with him in the interview room, supplying him at intervals with cups of hot sweet tea. He had his hands round one when Liz introduced herself, his elbows braced on the table-top to stop him shaking and spilling it. He clutched it as if the warmth in his cupped palms was the only bit of comfort he could find. He did not appear to be drinking much. Two other cups, their contents gone cold and scummy, stood almost untouched on the table.
    â€˜She was so – kind,’ he said, the words jerking out of him.
    She had heard worse epitaphs but it struck Liz as an odd thing for a man to say about his murdered wife. Beautiful, perhaps, or sweet: ‘She was so lovely, why would anyone want to kill her?’ Alternatively, she was so alive, how could she be gone? Or she was so headstrong, so wilful, it was only a matter of time before something happened to her. But kind?
    But perhaps that was why he’d married her. He was younger than her – not much, three years, though it may have seemed more. Page was twenty-six but Liz saw now why Shapiro described him as a kid. Knowing