Blood Atonement Read Online Free PDF Page A

know.’
    He looked up. Heather. She’d sneaked in unnoticed.
    She was staring at the exercise book.
    ‘The missing girl’s diary,’ he explained.
    ‘Anything of interest?’
    He shrugged. ‘Don’t know. Seems like Katie Drake was
    a bit of a lush, but at some time in the last few weeks of her life had a Damascene conversion and went teetotal.’
    ‘Think it’s relevant?’
    ‘Could be, I suppose. In her diary, Naomi speculates it
    might be work-related. Have we spoken to her agent?’
    Andy Drinkwater’s done it, yeah. Said apart from one
    voice-over she hasn’t had any work for the best part of a year, and none pending.’
    ‘So much for that theory’
    A bloke?’
     
    ‘Naomi’s diary appears to rule that out, too. Said she
    hadn’t been out in years. I’m assuming she’s employing
    teenage hyperbole.’
    It was Heather’s turn to shrug. ‘It could be that she
    simply decided to clean up her act.’
    ‘You may be right. Have they tracked down the next of
    kin?’
    ‘She was adopted. Unofficially, probably by family or
    friends, Barnes thinks.’
    Barnes? he thought. She’d always referred to him as
    Nigel. He’d been aware that the pair of them had something going on, not that he cared. There had been enough things for him to worry about — like walking without
    agony — without worrying whether the two of them were
    going to swap body fluids. They clearly hadn’t. Or not for long, at least. Foster had heard she’d shacked up with an old flame, a copper from Murder South. Might explain why she seemed a bit different since he’d returned to work.
    More passive, less feisty.
    ‘How was he?’ he asked
    ‘OK.’ A smile played on her lips. ‘He’s doing the pilot
    for some TV show. About digging up the dead.’
    ‘Who’s interested in watching that?’ he sneered.
    ‘You really don’t watch TV much these days, do you,
    sir?’ Heather said.
    He shrugged and turned back to the window. The street
    below was closed, silent and empty. They had knocked on
    almost every door within a mile radius. So far, they had one lead, a white van seen entering the street around four o’clock the previous afternoon by two independent
    witnesses, who both watched it pull up somewhere near
    the Drake house. Neither had seen it go and so far they
    had no other witnesses who saw it leave. A team was
    spooling through hours of CCTV coverage to see if
    there was any sight of it. But the clock was ticking and each second that passed reduced the chance of Naomi Buckingham being found alive.
     
    The smell in the morgue had not changed, Foster thought, as he and Heather made their way to the post mortem suite that evening. The stench of death always won
    through the masking scent of deodorizer and disinfectant.
    He’d not missed this place: the tiled floor that echoed
    every footstep; the sterile, gleaming stainless-steel equipment; the unnerving quiet; and the cold that eventually seeped into your soul. But it was here he hoped the hunt for Katie Drake’s killer and her daughter’s abductor might begin in earnest.
    Inside, a technician was preparing to stitch Katie
    Drake’s corpse back together. Edward Carlisle signalled
    for him to hold on as he took the two detectives through what he’d discovered.
    ‘The cause of death was asphyxiation,’ the pathologist
    told them.
    ‘She was strangled first?’ Foster replied, unable to hide his surprise.
    Carlisle nodded gravely. ‘Without doubt,’ he said. He
    gestured towards the woman’s neck. ‘In situ, the wound
    and blood from it hid a light ligature mark on her neck, but you can clearly see it above the cut.’
    Foster leaned in and noticed a faint red weal above the
    gaping wound across the neck.
     
    ‘The hyoid bone is broken and there is severe damage
    to the thyroid and cricoid cartilage. The assailant was very strong, almost certainly a man.’
    At the very least that ruled out any notion that Naomi
    Buckingham had been physically responsible for