A Painted Doom Read Online Free PDF Page B

Heffernan stepped forward, stopping the trolley’s progress, and unzipped the bag so that he could have a last look
     at the dead man’s face.
    Everyone stopped what they were doing, frozen until the DCI delivered his verdict.
    ‘I’ve seen him somewhere before,’ he pronounced with a confident jollity that Wesley considered inappropriate for the occasion.
     ‘I know his face. Hang on, it’ll come to me.’ He screwed his chubby face up as he mined his memory.
    Wesley watched him expectantly. If the dead man had been a customer of the local constabulary in the past, dredging up his
     details would be a piece of cake once the DCI provided them with a name.
    ‘I know,’ Heffernan pronounced to all who cared to hear. ‘He looks just like that pop singer. Back in the late sixties, early
     seventies. What was his name?’
    The faces around him were blank. The majority of the officers there hadn’t even been born at the time hementioned. Wesley, numbered among the young, assumed an expression of polite interest, like a child whose grandparents were
     reminiscing about the Second World War.
    ‘He was in the local paper the other day. He’s moving down here and he gave some money for a new village hall in Derenham.
     I’m sure it’s him. He was quite well known – lead singer. What was his name?’
    The young officers standing around shook their heads. Laura Kruger shrugged her shoulders. It was before her time.
    ‘It’ll come to me.’ Heffernan wrinkled his brow in concentration.
    Wesley waited, willing him to remember: a name for their corpse would save a lot of time. But the boss shook his head. It
     had been on the tip of his tongue but the more he thought, the more the name retreated into the mists.
    ‘Come on, Wes,’ Heffernan said suddenly. ‘Let’s get Rach and Steve over and start interviewing the neighbours, see if they
     heard anything suspicious. Someone’s bound to have heard a gunshot.’
    ‘This is farming country,’ said Laura, stepping forward. ‘Every farmer has a shotgun.’
    ‘But he wasn’t killed with a shotgun, was he?’ said Heffernan, looking down at the body impatiently, still searching his memory
     for the name to fit the face.
    ‘No. Probably some small handgun, but …’
    ‘So the noise might have been different. Someone could have noticed an unusual shot.’
    Laura nodded. She hated to admit it but the DCI had a point.
    Suddenly Heffernan’s face lit up. He grinned at the others triumphantly, like a man who had just made a great discovery: something
     on a par with Archimedes’ bath water or Newton’s apple. ‘Jonny Shellmer.’
    All eyes were on him. Most looked puzzled. It was Wesley who asked the question everyone below forty was longing to ask. ‘Who’s
     Jonny Shellmer?’
    ‘Lead singer of Rock Boat,’ Heffernan answered, as though this were obvious. ‘Ruddy heck, it’s like working in a flaming kindergarten.
     Have none of you heard of ’em?’
    Among the blank faces, a middle-aged uniformed sergeant at the back of the group put up a tentative hand. ‘Whatever happened
     to Rock Boat, sir?’ he asked.
    Heffernan looked relieved that he wasn’t the only one who recalled the heady days of the sixties. ‘Search me. Where do flies
     go in wintertime and where do rock groups go when they’re past their sell-by date?’ he asked rhetorically. ‘Wonder how Jonny
     Shellmer ended up shot dead lying in a field full of cows.’
    ‘If it is Jonny Shellmer,’ said Wesley, wondering if his boss’s fit of nostalgia was affecting his judgement.
    ‘Well, it doesn’t half look like that picture of him I saw in the paper the other day. I noticed it specially.’ Heffernan
     shuffled his feet. ‘I used to be a bit of a fan in the old days.’
    Wesley smiled but made no comment. At least they had a name, a starting point; although he’d keep an open mind about the dead
     man’s identity. But he was the right age and he was wearing what Wesley, in his limited