Midnight Murders Read Online Free PDF Page B

easel. She’d drawn a childlike picture of children at play. No figure had arms or legs of the same proportion and all their mouths were fixed in upturned grins. In the left-hand corner were the outsized figures of a man and a woman. The woman’s face bore the same determinedly bright smile as the children, but the man’s face was devoid of features.
    â€˜Isn’t he happy, Ali?’ Spencer pointed to the matchstick-like figure.
    â€˜He wouldn’t be,’ Alison retorted. ‘He’s a man, and everyone knows men have to do the work and bring in the money.’
    â€˜So he carries all the responsibility.’
    â€˜Isn’t that what it’s like for you, Spencer?’ she questioned artfully.
    â€˜No, Alison, it’s not.’ A warning note crept into Spencer’s voice. ‘I’ve only myself to consider.’
    â€˜You must get lonely then,’ she persisted.
    â€˜Your picture’s coming on.’ He ignored her final comment. ‘I like the touch of the flowers on the ground matching those in the children’s hands.’ He moved on to Lucy Craig, a plump, nervous seventeen-year-old, who had cracked under the pressure of studying for her A Levels.
    â€˜Look, Mr Jordan.’ Despite Spencer’s prompting, Lucy could never bring herself to use his Christian name. ‘There’s a police car driving on the lawn. It’s churning up Mr Herne’s turf. He won’t be pleased.’ She glanced at Spencer, but he was watching Trevor. Head down, Trevor was diligently smudging pastels, evincing no interest in what was happening outside. Spencer wondered how much truth that lay behind the maxim, “Once a policeman, always a policeman”.
    Constable Michelle Grady stood twenty yards from the hole Dean had dug in the flowerbed. The stubby heels of her walking shoes had sunk into the turf, and her uniform was hot, prickly and stuffy in the warm spring sunshine, but she didn’t move an inch from her post. She’d heard a number of stories in Police College about rookies allowing crucial evidence to be destroyed at a crime scene, and she was determined that no one would be able to accuse her of negligence.
    Her trained eye had spotted flecks of earth amongst the blades of grass, some distance from the pile of earth Dean had heaped up. She smiled at the thought of pointing this out to her superiors, then imagined Sergeant Peter Collins’ voice, loud in contempt.
    â€œ Of course the hole must have been dug out more than once you stupid woman. If it hadn’t, the damned body couldn’t have been buried there in the first place.”
    She rocked back on her heels. She must be careful not to state the obvious. Sergeant Collins wasn’t the only superior officer in the station with a sharp tongue.
    She wrenched her heels out of the soil and stamped up and down. Waiting was the worse part of every day – waiting for her superiors – waiting for the serious crimes squad – waiting for the pathologist. Didn’t anyone care about the poor victim lying at the bottom of the hole?
    â€˜There’s no need to stamp your foot, Constable. Whoever’s down there isn’t going to complain about being kept waiting.’ Dan Evans, an inspector in the Serious Crimes Squad, appeared behind her.
    â€˜Inspector.’ She nodded. Dan Evans was a mountain of a man who’d been an international weightlifter. At six-foot-four, heavily built and twenty stone, he towered over everyone in the station. Before he’d joined the force he’d been a farmer, and she knew his family still worked land around Carmarthen, which explained his lilting Welsh accent and his exasperatingly slow speech.
    â€˜When you’ve dealt with as many cases as I have, you learn to take your time. Rush and you’re apt to make mistakes.’
    â€˜I can’t stop thinking about that poor woman… ’
    â€˜How do you know