Everyone Lies Read Online Free PDF Page A

any conclusions, yet, but he’d been reminded of one sad truth: there is nothing that an addict won’t do for a fix. Post-mortem reports catalogued repeated STD infections; fallopian tubes so blocked and inflamed with infection that the victims must have been in constant pain; papillomas; internal scars; old bruises overlaid with new; whip and ligature marks from S&M ‘games’; healed fractures. He felt sick with it.
    The traffic lights changed for a second, and then a third time from green, through amber, to red, and he couldn’t bring himself to go back to his reading. Time for coffee.
    Fennimore had a house in the Lakes, but during term time he rented a flat near Union Terrace Gardens, which he hardly ever used; he had smuggled a day-bed into his office, and often slept over. The placed was heaped with papers, books double- and triple-stacked on his shelves, and a dozen or more plastic storage boxes stuffed with case papers and journals, these crammed into corners, under his desk and behind the door.
    The café had been closed for hours, but there was a small kitchen on the third floor, squeezed into a broom cupboard next to the south-east stairwell. There was no sign of Security, but he heard occasional booms as doors were opened or slammed shut. Access to the kitchen was restricted to staff, and entry controlled by a proximity card reader. He waited for the electronic lock to give the tripletone beep which confirmed his ID, then shouldered the door open. It was a surprise to find Josh Brown at the kitchen counter, brewing coffee.
    Josh seemed as startled as he was. ‘Professor Fennimore.’
    ‘Josh.’ The student had left a stack of books and papers on the coffee table; a copy of Fennimore’s own book Crapshoots and Bad Stats among them. ‘Working late?’ he asked.
    ‘Case law,’ Josh said.
    ‘You could read up on that at home,’ Fennimore observed mildly.
    ‘Too many distractions.’
    Josh Brown had attended the first years’ 9 a.m. lecture that day, and clearly he stayed as late as he was allowed, so distractions of a romantic kind seemed unlikely. Fennimore’s own flat overlooked a quiet shopping street which was usually deserted by 7 p.m., but he avoided it until the necessity of sleep could not be ignored. Home – even a home away from home – was a place where thoughts you could suppress in the workplace all came crowding back. But Fennimore had lived long enough to amass a wealth of painful memories and regrets; Josh was just twenty-three.
    He had been working on his thesis for five months, perfecting lab techniques he’d missed studying for his first degree. But he was a will o’ the wisp – both there and not there – everybody knew him, yet nobody knew him well. He was about five-ten, his hair was gel-spiked, like most of his peers, and, like them, he wore urban fashion – hoodies, T-shirts and loose-fitting denims – but it was as though it was all an effort to fit in; his clothes, his self-effacing quietness worn like camouflage.
    The coffee machine wheezed and spat, and Fennimore realized that he was staring. ‘Your thesis is on the influence of advances in DNA technology on cold case clear-up, isn’t it?’ he asked, jerking his chin towards the books and papers.
    ‘This isn’t for my thesis – it’s just for interest.’
    His brief, uninformative answers piqued Fennimore’s curiosity. ‘So …?’
    ‘I’m looking at the Sally Clark case.’
    ‘Sally Clark. Convicted of the murder of her two infants.’
    ‘Wrongly convicted. They died of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome – cot death.’
    A lot of students would not have corrected him on that. Fennimore suppressed a smile. ‘Well … you know … a lot of people claim cot death …’
    ‘She was cleared – the prosecution messed up the stats.’ Josh had a hard-to-place accent, but emotion injected a hint of Essex in the vowel sounds.
    ‘You think?’
    Josh stared at him. ‘The entire prosecuting argument was based on a