Fatal Quest Read Online Free PDF Page B

sheet, and the sergeant looked down at the victim.
    The girl’s face was frozen in a death mask which seemed to combine horror with panic, but even that could not entirely disguise the fact that she must have been quite pretty in life.
    â€˜What can you tell me about her?’ Woodend asked.
    â€˜She was probably sixteen or seventeen,’ the doctor said. ‘Whoever killed her did a professional job – her throat was cut with a single slash, rather than being hacked at. And if you asked me what the killer used, I’d put my money on it being a cut-throat razor.’
    Shades of Jack the Ripper, Woodend thought, remembering what the other doctor had said the night before.
    â€˜Yes, my guess would be a razor,’ the doctor repeated. ‘Which is a rather old-fashioned sort of weapon to employ, don’t you think?’
    It was, Woodend agreed. Modern criminals preferred to use flick knives, or – when they could get their hands on them – guns.
    â€˜The girl was healthy and well nourished,’ the doctor continued. ‘It’s true there’s evidence of contusions on her legs, but I don’t think that’s something you should be particularly concerned about.’
    â€˜Why not?’
    â€˜Because it’s not the kind of bruising you’d expect from a deliberate beating. My guess would be that it’s evidence of some kind of sporting injury – most probably hockey.’
    Hockey! The more he learned about this girl, the more of an enigma she became, Woodend thought.
    â€˜Was she a virgin?’ he asked.
    â€˜Yes, she was.’
    Not a prostitute, then.
    But despite some of the evidence pointing that way, Woodend had never really thought that she was.
    â€˜Was she sexually interfered with in any way, before – or after – she died?’ he asked.
    The doctor shook his head. ‘Absolutely not. There’s not a trace of bruising around her private parts.’
    The knowledge that she’d at least been spared that humiliation should have made her death a little easier to take, Woodend told himself – but it didn’t.
    â€˜I’d like to look at her things, now, if that’s all right with you,’ he said.
    â€˜No problem at all,’ the doctor replied. ‘I’ll get one of the porters to take you to where they’re stored.’
    The porter was an old man with a pronounced limp, and as he led Woodend slowly down the corridor, he chatted away about the experience of working in the morgue during the War.
    â€˜At the height of the Blitz, with all them bombs dropping on London every night, we had so many bodies in this place you could hardly move for them,’ he said. ‘If I’d have been of a mind to, I could have done in the missus and got clean away with it, because the doctors were so run off their feet that they’d never even have noticed it wasn’t natural causes wot had laid her out.’
    Woodend grinned. ‘But I take it that you
weren’t
of a mind to?’ he said.
    â€˜No, I wasn’t,’ the porter agreed, shaking his head seriously. ‘With all that was going on, you see, I was far too busy. An’ besides,’ he added, almost as an afterthought, ‘I’d have missed her cooking.’
    The room in which the dead girl’s effects had been stored was at the end of the corridor. There was only one piece of furniture in it – a metal table close to the door – and around the walls there were cardboard boxes stacked to waist height.
    â€˜Some of these boxes have been here for years,’ the porter said. ‘We all know nobody’s ever going to claim them, but we have to keep them anyway, just in case anybody does.’
    â€˜What about the personal effects that I’m interested in?’ Woodend asked.
    â€˜They’re over there,’ the porter said, pointing at the table. ‘All neatly laid out for you.’
    Neatly, but