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people not knowing whether to laugh or cry. Least, after that, they’d got the Commonwealth, all them athletes in town, brilliant.
    With a lurch he remembered why he was running. He couldn’t go back inside. He couldn’t. Be Strangeways this time. Twenty-two, wasn’t he. Oh, Paula. Man, what would he tell her? Sick relative? Mate in trouble? Maybe if he turned it round. Told her Douggie needed him, being hassled or something. Make it sound dangerous so she wouldn’t try to come calling. What was he going to do if Douggie was away? The thought drenched his back with sweat. The driver started on a new tune. Oasis – You Gotta Roll With It. Aw, God, thought Dean, if only
     
    *****
     
    The socos took positions at the shoulders, hips, knees of the body. Rachel Grassmere readied the camera and gave the count. ‘On, three. One, two, three.’
    They grunted with the strain as they rolled the corpse. Janine stepped back involuntarily as the mass of guts slithered from the abdominal cavity with a sucking sound and came to rest over the corpse and on the ground. Lurid, multi-coloured coils: a shocking sight. She wished she’d taken two Fisherman’s Friends. She thought of the book Catch 22 where the young air man was complaining about the cold as he held his guts in his fingers. She took a small breath through her mouth. And another.
    She gagged then, silently, feeling the sour wash hit her throat. She swallowed hard, kept her mouth tight shut. Everything sticky with blood. So much of it. Trousers and t-shirt stiff with the stuff. The left side of his face darker where the blood had pooled after death. She was amazed there’d been any left in him.
    ‘That is nasty. Very nasty.’ Richard said.
    ‘Thank God I skipped breakfast,’ said Janine.
    She turned away, from the sight and smell, drank in the cold, cleaner air, took a few steps down the plot. He had put a lot of work in here, Mr Tulley. She was no big gardener but she knew enough to recognise the fruits of labour. Rows of cabbages and the tops of root veg at one side. Plots clear and the ground prepared for more. She wondered who he was, this murder victim? What sort of man was he, who’d planted the seeds here and picked the harvest and pottered in his shed? In the hours and days to come she would be finding out everything about him. Nothing would remain private. It would become her property: his life; to study and explore, to sift through and sort and peer into in her efforts to find out who killed him. Who had robbed him of that life, left him to bleed on the cold, winter ground?
     
     
     

CHAPTER THREE
     
    ‘Chief Inspector.’ They called her back. The deceased was now wrapped in a body bag which lay to the right of the path backed by a border of small cyclamens. The juxtaposition made her think of some modern art installation. Doc was packing his bag. Rachel Grassmere stood by the shed doorway. ‘Looks like it started in here,’ she said.
    Janine moved over and Richard followed. She peered inside, careful not to touch the doorframe and spoil any possible prints. The stench of death still tainted the air. The shed was large with potting tables on two walls and tools hanging on the third. Neat and tidy. No smashed pots or spilt compost.
    ‘We’ve blood spray to the wall either side of the door and the floor here. We’ll try for prints on the door frame, the gate, door, tap on the water butt over there.’
    She took in the splashes, ochre against the greying wood of the shed. ‘Rough wood.’ Janine noted.
    ‘Yep. Not promising anything.’
    ‘Probably a knife,’ Richard said.
    ‘Well spotted, Sherlock,’ Janine said wryly.
    Janine retraced her steps to the young PC at the gate.
    ‘Constable.’
    ‘Yes, sir – ma’am.’
    ‘What else do we know about Mr Tulley?’
    He rifled through his pages. ‘He lives round the corner, Ashgrove. It’s a big house on the corner, further up. He’s a teacher,’ he added, ‘the deputy head at Saint