Left for Dead: A Maeve Kerrigan Novella (Maeve Kerrigan Novels) Read Online Free PDF

staring into space and started watching what was happening in front of me. It was a major incident, drawing in officers and resources from across the borough and beyond, and more quickly than I could have imagined. They descended on the yards like a very organised tornado, whipping the victim (still unidentified) away to hospital, gathering evidence, establishing the boundaries of the crime scene, beginning to reconstruct what had happened. Numbered markers littered the ground beside anything that could possibly be connected with our case – every scrap of rubbish, every drop of blood, every chip of glass.
    When the SOCOs got around to me, they told me to give them my uniform, yes, all of it, and I had to hitch a lift back to the nick in a paper boilersuit so I could change into my spare kit. I got dressed in record time, not even allowing myself to think about having a shower, and got another lift back to the crime scene. I went and found Inspector Saunders, who looked strung out.
    ‘Have they found ID for her?’
    ‘Not yet.’
    ‘What can I do to help?’
    ‘I could use you on the cordon. I want to push back the public to the end of the street. I don’t want anyone with a view of the yards while we’re working.’
    If I was on the cordon I would be too far away to see what was going on. I tried to think of a way of pointing that out without looking like I expected special treatment, when the inspector looked past me. Something in her expression softened.
    ‘Oh, here he is.’
    ‘Who?’ I twisted and saw a tall man in a beautifully cut suit walking towards us. With his prematurely silver-grey hair, blue eyes and jaw-dropping good looks he was instantly recognisable to me and everyone else: Superintendent Charles Godley. He was a media favourite, veteran of a hundred press conferences and the commissioner’s first pick for an awkward or sensitive enquiry. I knew he had just finished a run in organised crime that had caused serious trouble for a couple of major criminal gangs. The team’s arrest record had been the talk of the Met. I knew all that about him, and more, but I didn’t know what he was doing in Brixton at the scene of a sexual assault.
    ‘Lena, how are you?’ he asked, in a way that suggested he really wanted to know. His voice was deep and pleasant.
    ‘Sir.’ Inspector Saunders had moved to meet him. I stayed where I was, hanging back so I didn’t look too pushy. It wasn’t as if the superintendent would be interested in meeting a new PC anyway. All I had done so far was trip over the victim.
    ‘What have we got?’
    ‘At the moment, a victim with no ID. Unconscious, unfortunately, so we don’t know anything about her yet. We had reports of a fight or an assault in progress in this area and my officers came to have a look. They found her hiding behind a car.’
    ‘Raped?’
    ‘With a broken bottle. He carved her up. She’s going to need surgery, the doctor said. The doctor also said she had a possible fractured skull.’
    Godley winced. ‘Any leads?’
    ‘Not really. Any ideas?’
    The superintendent nodded. ‘It sounds a lot like two stranger rapes in Croydon that happened two or three months ago. One of the victims almost died.’
    ‘That’s why you wanted to be here.’ Inspector Saunders nodded slowly. ‘I wondered.’
    ‘I’m running the Croydon jobs. I want us to treat this one as the next in the series, if you don’t mind.’
    ‘I don’t,’ Inspector Saunders said slowly, ‘but are you sure it fits in with your two?’
    ‘Not yet.’
    ‘Have you got DNA?’
    ‘Not so far. He used foreign objects in Croydon as well.’
    ‘They might get something off the bottle.’ I hadn’t meant to say it out loud but I was so interested in the conversation that I found myself butting in. ‘It would have been easy for him to cut himself. Sharp edges, and all the blood would have made the glass slippery.’
    Godley looked at me for the first time, just for a moment, his intense