Die of Shame Read Online Free PDF

hilarious videos someone else thought they might enjoy.
    She doubted that too many would be staring at pictures of dried blood and marbled flesh.
    The next photograph was a close-up of the victim’s face, its features ravaged. The lips gone, a yellowish trail of leakage from the nose…
    ‘All right, Nic?’ DCI Martin Ditchburn dropped a meaty hand on Tanner’s shoulder on the way to his office. Tiny, but, most important, with a door that could shut out the open-plan hubbub and provide a few precious moments of peace and normality. It was the perk of the chief inspector’s rank that everyone coveted the most. Ditchburn called back as he walked away. ‘You up to speed with that Victoria job?’
    ‘Just looking through it now, sir,’ Tanner said.
    Catching a glimpse of the smile as Ditchburn carried on towards his office, Tanner knew exactly what her boss found so amusing. Among a certain sort of detective at least, such everyday deference to seniority was seen as a little ‘old school’. Tanner knew that some found the simple use of the word ‘sir’ when addressing a senior officer unnecessary at best and ridiculous at worst, but she didn’t much care. It felt… correct. Perhaps foolishly, she expected the same from those of lesser rank than herself, but it rarely happened and only if she was in a particularly bad mood would she pull an officer up on it. Those few occasions had, she knew, been the cause of some resentment, bouts of mockery poorly disguised as banter, but Tanner had been in the Job too long to give a toss.
    Straight out of university and twenty years in.
    A little under ten more left and she was already starting to plan, because that was what she did. Thinking about what to do afterwards. There was a village in Wiltshire she and her other half had been visiting on and off for a while and she liked to imagine the two of them getting out of London and settling down in a place like that. Something part time maybe, to bring a few quid in and stop her brain turning to mush. Long walks and a decent garden to work on and no snaps of corpses waiting for her first thing in the morning.
    She dragged her eyes back to the screen, thinking that she would happily have traded places with anyone responding to an email from a suspiciously generous Nigerian prince or an advert for penis enlargement. She might even have stooped to sitting through a montage of whimsical cat videos.
    She managed half a smile. No, that would probably be going too far.
    Tanner read through the email one more time, then dialled the number of the officer who had sent it. Marion Fuller had been one of the on-call inspectors for the Homicide Assessment team the previous night, and had been dispatched to an address in Victoria as soon as the body had been discovered. She had quickly ruled it a suspicious death and now the case was being passed across to a team at Homicide Command in Belgravia, specifically the one whose DI had the lightest caseload.
    ‘Have fun with this one,’ Fuller said, once she’d answered the call.
    It was a routine handover, a process she’d been through many dozens of times, but Nicola Tanner was already starting to think that this was not her lucky day.
    ‘Who found the body?’ she asked.
    ‘Local uniform put the door in just after midnight,’ Fuller said. ‘A neighbour rang in to complain about the smell. Had done so several days running, apparently.’
    ‘Oh dear.’
    ‘Yeah, so someone’s on the naughty step.’
    ‘How long are we talking?’
    ‘A couple of weeks at least. One for the bug squad, definitely.’
    The first piece of bad news. However brilliant a forensic entomologist was, they would be unlikely to establish a time of death any more precise than a two- or three-day window. This meant that identifying a suspect based on their lack of an alibi was almost impossible.
    Tanner put her glasses on again and went back to the text. ‘In the email you say “signs of a struggle”.’
    ‘Yeah…