Broken Silence Read Online Free PDF

for us to ID? Or maybe it’s not thatstraightforward. Maybe the murderer is playing with us psychologically?’ Conrad suggested.
    ‘Could be,’ Brady said, swallowing hard as he looked at the victim.
    He had to agree, the murderer had made their job difficult, whether it was intentional, he couldn’t say.
    ‘But crucially, why spend time after she was dead doing that to her face? That says something, don’t you think?’ Brady said as he looked at what was left of the victim.
    ‘You definitely think she was strangled to death rather than a blow to the head?’ questioned Conrad.
    Brady nodded.
    Conrad stared at the telltale smudged bruising around the victim’s neck. He had worked with Brady long enough to know that when he had a hunch he was rarely proved wrong.
    ‘Her death makes no bloody sense though,’ muttered Brady irritably to himself as he staggered to his feet, wincing slightly.
    ‘No sir,’ agreed Conrad.
    ‘Come on then, let’s leave this to Forensics,’ he concluded.
    They’d find out what he couldn’t see; always did. If he was lucky Forensics would find some traces of the murderer’s DNA on the victim’s body, if not hopefully under her fingernails. But from where he was standing, it didn’t look as if she had resisted her attacker. Which led Brady to the assumption that she had known her murderer. But before he could put together a list of potential suspects known to the victim, he needed a positive ID on the body. Only when they knew who the victim was, could they start to piece together exactly what had happened to her.
    Brady took in the crime scene. Trees circled the buildingadding to the dense, suffocating blackness. He dropped his gaze back to the surrounding bushes and wild bracken growing in thick clumps in between the fallen rubble and the crumbling walls of the farmhouse. The abandoned Belfast sink lying in the corner gave Brady the impression that they were standing in what would have once been the kitchen. The size of the room was at least ten feet by twelve feet, but the crumbling stone walls and old wooden rafters that lay rotting amongst the rubble and wild vegetation made the space cramped; so much so that the victim lay on a mound of grass and weeds in the centre. Brady was certain about one thing; it was the ideal location to bring someone in secret. Conrad shifted uneasily. It was clear he had had enough; the greyish hue to his face gave him away.
    He’d get over it, thought Brady. Something worse would happen; it always did. It was human nature. Imagine the worst and someone’s already done it; at least ten times over.
    Brady hated civilisation; it gave people a false sense of security. In reality they were just animals in clothes. Animals that raped, sodomised, tortured and murdered whoever and whatever, even their own; regardless of society. He had seen it, tasted it and breathed it every day of his working life. The world was dark; the problem was people chose to ignore it and believe in a false god: civilisation.
    Unfortunately for Conrad, he was still one of those poor, deluded bastards. The job would soon beat that idealism out of him, thought Brady. It had happened to him. It happened to everyone, sooner or later.
    ‘Come on, let’s get back to the station. This bloody place is depressing me,’ Brady muttered.
    They had their work cut out and the sooner they started the closer they would be to apprehending whoever haddone this. The early hours of any murder investigation were crucial and the last thing he wanted was to give the murderer time to disappear.
    ‘Who was called in to pronounce her dead?’ Brady suddenly asked.
    ‘I believe it was Wolfe, sir,’ answered Conrad.
    Thank fuck, thought Brady. At last, something was going his way. He trusted Wolfe. He was a cantankerous old bugger who drank too much, but he knew his job. He was the best Home Office pathologist the force had ever had and hopefully it would stay that way, as long as he didn’t drink