Dear Departed Read Online Free PDF

on which was hung a plastic water-bottle on the right, a CD Walkman on the left, and a small zip purse in the middle. The headset was hanging round her neck, the cord loose, pulled out from the Walkman socket. He noted that the Walkman had been switched off.
    The warmth of the day was lifting a pleasant, woody smell from the bark chippings and birds were singing near and far off in the park. Broken by the gently moving leaves of a birch tree, sunshine was dappling the ground and the girl. She might have stretched out for a rest to gaze up at the patch of clear blue sky above, except that her T-shirt was spatched and blotted with blood.
    ‘Multiple stab wounds,’ Atherton said, breaking the silence. ‘Would that qualify as a “frenzied attack”?’ It was what police reports and the media always called it, a cliché there seemed no escaping. Atherton used it consciously, knowing Slider hated it.
    The bark was scuffed in the immediate area, though not as much as Slider would have expected it to be. He hunkered down close to the victim, and now he could smell the clean odours of her shampoo and body lotion, and under them the reek of blood. There were defence cuts on her forearms and the palms of her hands, the blood resting in them, hardly smeared at all. There was definitely blood on the bark immediately around and under the body, but it was impossible to see how much, or to discern any spread patterns.
    ‘Is there blood anywhere else?’ he asked Bailey.
    ‘We haven’t found any so far, but it’s impossible to be sure without close examination,’ Bailey said. All I can say is that it looks as though all the action happened in this spot.’
    Atherton, looking over Slider’s shoulder, said, ‘What’s that grey mark on the T-shirt? Sort of greyish-brown, a smudge?’
    ‘I think it’s a footmark – or a toemark, at least,’ Slider said. ‘He turned her over with his foot. She was lying face down and he turned her over. It’s the sort of dirty mark that could be left by a shoe.’
    ‘I suppose he wanted to check she was dead.’
    ‘We might possibly get a partial sole pattern from it,’ Slider said.
    ‘Yes, sir,’ said Bailey. ‘We have photographed it.’
    Slider stood up and looked back towards the north side of the shrubbery. ‘I don’t understand why he dragged her in that way. Much easier the way we came in.’
    On both his previous outings, the Park Killer had dragged his victim under cover, once into a shrubbery and once into arose garden, stabbed her to death, and escaped the scene without anyone’s seeing or hearing anything. Speed had to have been of the essence. Probably that was why he had not robbed or molested either of his victims. It was getting away with murder that interested him, it seemed.
    Atherton considered. ‘The bushes give better cover on that side. If he’d lurked on the more open side, someone might have seen him.’
    ‘I suppose,’ Slider said. He looked around to fix the scene in his mind, and then again down at the body. She was out jogging, listening to her music, perhaps thinking about the rest of her day. He looked at her pretty face, all animation gone, her softly muddled hair, the yielding shape of her body against the earth, still warm and pliant, but pointlessly so now. He imagined the killer turning her over with his foot, thought how it would have felt, heavy and soft. In his country boyhood he had handled dead rabbits and knew that limpness. A dull anger filled him. Partly it was because she had reminded him fleetingly of Joanna, and he felt newly vulnerable about her. But the anger was for this girl as well, and especially. When she had got up and dressed in the morning, she had not planned to die this day.
    The world was not safe. There were people in it who would do this hideous, hateful thing. Life, which was so strong and tenacious and filled you tight to the skin when you were young, could be taken from you so easily, slip away through a hole in you like