Dear Departed Read Online Free PDF Page A

equipment and the wonderful things modern digital technology could do that Slider suspected the subject of his work didn’t impinge much on him.
    ‘Bob asked me to tell you you can go in now, sir,’ he said to Slider.
    ‘Finished your work?’
    ‘Yes, I’m going back to the van to have a look at it, but I’ll be on hand in case there’s anything more when the forensic biologist arrives.’
    ‘Do something for me,’ Slider said. ‘Take a long, slow pan around with your video camera at the crowd. All the onlookers. Try not to be obvious about it. Keep as far back as you can and do it on the zoom. Everyone who’s hanging around the scene. I want their faces.’
    ‘Yes, sir,’ Archer said. He was too polite to ask, but there was a question in his eyes.
    Slider took pity on him. ‘I wouldn’t be surprised if the murderer came back for a look. He’d want to see who found her, what their reaction was, how baffled we were. That’d be part of the fun. He might be here right now, enjoying himself watching us running round after him.’
    ‘I’ll get what you want, sir, don’t worry,’ Archer said. ‘Would you like me to make a series of stills, so you can have them to study?’
    ‘Good idea. Thanks.’
    ‘He wouldn’t hang about all covered in blood, surely?’ Atherton said, when Archer had left them.
    ‘No, but he probably wore a protective garment, which he might have discarded somewhere before coming back.’
    ‘He might even live locally,’ Atherton went along with it. ‘Went home and changed and came back.’
    ‘You do think of them,’ Slider complained. They walked back to the gap in the shrubbery and clothed up, and then, conducted by Bailey, walked along the stepping boards that had been laid to make a safe path into the scene within the shrubbery.
    The rhododendrons were massive specimens, some of them ten or fifteen feet high. They grew their leaves where the light reached them, so on the back side they presented bare trunksand branches. What looked from the path like dense vegetation was in fact a series of hollow caves. With the thick mulch of bark on the ground, there was nothing to mar the uniformity of dark brown except the odd piece of litter. Blown in by the wind? It didn’t seem likely, inside the shrubbery. Left by kids playing, more like – or by someone hiding, lurking? Slider noted a cigarette packet (B&H), a torn strip of a Walkers crisps bag, and two wrappers from chocolate bars: one Picnic and one Double Decker.
    ‘We’ll have those,’ he said to Bailey. ‘There’ll probably be some cigarette ends, as well.’
    ‘There are,’ Bailey confirmed. ‘Quite a lot scattered about.’
    ‘Take them all,’ Slider said. Smokers were so used to throwing away the butt when they’d finished that they did it automatically, either not knowing, or forgetting, that DNA could be recovered from the saliva on them.
    ‘Thank God there’s no such thing as a non-smoking murderer,’ said Atherton.
    In the heart of all this brown, in a clear space, lay the body. It was a young woman, dressed for jogging in knee-length black Lycra shorts, a sleeveless white shirt, trainers and short white socks. She was slim and fit-looking, with lightly tanned skin, and shortish, tousled blonde hair that gave Slider an unpleasant tug because it reminded him of Joanna’s. It was a shade lighter, though. Joanna’s was more bronze. The sunlight filtering through the leaves touched it here and there and made it gleam like true coin.
    She was lying on her back, one arm flung out, the other resting beside her body. Her face was very pretty, heart-shaped with a short, straight nose and full lips, parted to show good teeth. Her skin was smooth and lightly tanned, her hands well kept with short, unvarnished nails. She had small gold studs in her ears and a thin gold chain round her neck on which hung a gold disc – a St Christopher, he supposed. Around her waist was a sort of utility belt of elasticated webbing,