A Dark Redemption Read Online Free PDF Page A

and unconcerned. He turned back, finally ready to look at her face. He stood next to Karlson, smelling the man’s sweat and fear, the reek covering his own. He tried not to look at her chest, the gaping hole, white shards of bone poking out like stalagmites, but the wound had its own terrible gravity. He heard Karlson curse under his breath and turn away.
    Behind him, a scene-of-crime officer was setting up his video camera, his colleagues drawing out strange containers of powder and unguent, miraculous dispatches from the frontiers of science. One man was unpeeling a roll of sticky tape, the horrible screaming sound filling the room as he cut it into strips in preparation to ‘tape’ the body; a slow and painstaking job intended to capture any rogue hairs or fibres caught on the skin. The man looked up at Carrigan and shrugged. The SOCOs wanted them out, they had work to do, evidence to collect. They didn’t even see the girl, she was only a surface from which information could be gathered, conclusions drawn.
    Carrigan bent down again, ignoring them. He put his mouth to the dead girl’s ear. They heard him whisper something to her but not what he said. They looked at each other uncomfortably. This was hard enough without the senior investigating officer talking to the dead, but Karlson and Jennings only shrugged; they’d learned to ignore the idiosyncrasies of their DI. Carrigan surveyed the girl’s body once more then leant back in and froze.
    ‘Karlson, over here,’ he said in a dry, raspy voice. He stood over the body as the sergeant looked at the cavity in her chest.
    ‘What?’ Karlson said. ‘I can’t see anything.’
    ‘Exactly,’ Carrigan replied, pointing through the ribs at the empty space underneath. ‘It’s not there.’
    Karlson stared at him, confused, then looked back down at the body.
    ‘Her heart,’ Carrigan said. ‘It’s gone.’

3
    This was it. Her last day. She could feel it in the way people walked past avoiding eye contact. People she knew. It was like being made to wait outside the headmistress’s office while everyone shuffled by, whispered to each other, glanced, giggled, and went on about their business while you sat suspended between your life as it was and whatever awaited you behind the door.
    She stared at the posters on the wall opposite her, trying to stop thinking about what was coming. Couched behind glass they seemed like museum exhibits, not bulletins from the inner city. The slashed face of a teenager, the scar like a centipede crawling up his left cheek; below him locations where knives could be handed in. The eyes of a drink-driver watching the stretchered bodies of his victims being taken away from the smouldering wreck. The appeal for vigilance on the Tube.
    It wasn’t working. She couldn’t stop looking at the door to the super’s office. Waiting for it to crack open and unleash her fate. She stared down at her shoes, remembering she hadn’t had time to polish them, thinking about last night, coming home after getting the super’s request for this meeting, sitting down on the green cushion, opening a bottle and then what? She woke up fully clothed in her bed, half an hour to make the meeting. She didn’t remember a thing. The bottle was almost empty and her shoes looked terrible. It was acceptable for a man to come in looking dishevelled but for a woman it could only count against you; the higher-ups hadn’t yet managed to divorce the notion of sex from that of capability.
    She watched the clock, the slow spin of seconds accruing into minutes and hours. She ran her fingers through her hair, trying to untangle last night’s knots. She wondered if he’d finally decided to press charges. How happy her mother would be at this turn of events.
    ‘Detective Constable Miller!’
    She jerked up and saw Superintendent Branch leaning out of his office, entirely filling the space left by the door, looking exasperated. She must have zoned out. Christ!
    Her smile was