Chill Factor Read Online Free PDF Page B

were lying on the bathroom floor, with a short-sleeved shirt. There was a sprinkling of water in the bottom of the bath, and the towel hanging over the cold radiator was damp. At a guess he’d showered and changed before meeting his maker, which would be a small comfort to his mother. In his bathroom cabinet I found Bonjela, Rennies and haemorrhoid cream. Poor sod didn’t have much luck with his digestive tract, I thought.
    I gravitated back into the master bedroom. That’s wherethe clues to Mr Peter Latham’s way of living and dying lay, I was sure. Find the lady, I was taught, and there were framed photographs of two of them on a chest of drawers, opposite the foot of the bed. I stood in the window and looked down on the scene outside. Blue and white tape was now ringing the garden and the street was blocked with haphazardly parked vehicles. Neighbours coming home from work were having to leave their cars in the next street and Jim, the PC, was having words with a man carrying a briefcase who didn’t think a mere death should come between him and his castle . I gave a little involuntary smile: he’d get no change out of Jim.
    The first photograph standing on the chest of drawers in a gilt frame was one of those wedding pictures you drag out, years afterwards, to amuse the kids. It was done by a socalled professional, outside a church in fading colour. The bride was taller than the groom, with her hair piled up to accentuate the difference. She looked good, as all brides should. This was her day. Wedding dresses don’t date, but men’s suits do, which is what the kids find so funny. His was grey, with black edging to the floppy lapels of his frock coat. The photographer had asked him to turn in towards his new wife, in a pose that nature never intended, and we could see the flare of his trousers and the Cuban heels. Dark hair fell over his collar in undulating cascades. He’d have got by in a low budget production of Pride and Prejudice. It wouldn’t have stood as a positive ID but I was reasonably confident that the groom and the man lying on the kitchen floor were one and the same. So where was she, I wondered? The second picture was smaller, black and white, in a simple wooden frame. It showed a young girl in a pair of knickers and a vest, taken at a school sports day. She’d be ten or twelve, at a guess, but I’m a novice in that department. Some men would find it sexy, I knew that much. Her knickers were tight fitting and of a clingy material, with moderately high cut legs; and a paper letter B pinned to her vest underlinedthe beginnings of her breasts. It was innocent enough, I decided, but she’d be breaking hearts in four or five years, that was for sure. Maybe a niece or daughter. At either side of her you could just see the elbows and legs of two other girls, and I reckoned that she’d been cut from a group photograph . A relay team, perhaps. As with the other picture, I wondered if this young lady might come bounding up the garden path anytime now.
    “Boss?”
    I turned round to see the SOCO who was standing in the bedroom doorway, still dressed in his paper coveralls. I hadn’t put mine on, because the case had looked cut and dried.
    “Yes!” I replied, smartly.
    “We’ve finished in the kitchen,” he said. “We just need the knife retrieving.”
    “I’ll have a look before anybody touches it,” I told him.
    “Oh. We, er, were hoping that you’d, er, do it.”
    “Do what?”
    “Well, retrieve it.”
    “You mean…pull it out?”
    “Mmm.”
    “That’s the pathologist’s job. He’ll want to do it himself.”
    “Ah. We have a small problem there. He’s on his way back from London and his relief is nowhere to be found, but he’s spoken to Mr Wood and he’s happy for you to do it if we take a full record of everything.”
    “I see. What does it look like for prints.”
    “At a guess, covered in ’em.”
    “Good. What do you make of those?” I asked, nodding towards the