Still Midnight Read Online Free PDF Page A

easier.
    An older cop, with the crime scene log on a clipboard, approached her.
    “DS Alex Morrow,” she said, and he wrote it down. “London Road.”
    “Thank you, ma’am. DS Bannerman and DCI MacKechnie are over there.” He pointed around the corner to the front of the house. She could see a huddle of heads beyond the low garden wall.
    “MacKechnie’s here?”
    He seemed surprised too. MacKechnie meant it was a big case. A career case, but not her case, she remembered with a grind of her jaw.
    “You first here?”
    “Aye.”
    “Taped off all entrances?”
    “Aye. Alerted the Firearms Unit and they’re just pulling out now.”
    “Gunmen gone, then?”
    “Aye. They’ve searched front, back, and sides.”
    “Shots fired?”
    “One, sixteen-year-old girl’s hand blown off.”
    “ ’Kin hell.”
    He hummed in agreement.
    “Residents?”
    “All over there giving statements.” He gestured straight down the road to the tape where the cars were blinking. Gathered beyond them were a crowd of people dressed in combinations of overcoats and pajamas, slippers and shoes, and cops with notebooks talking to them one at a time. Everyone who lived inside the taped-off area would have been pulled out of their houses until the FAU had secured the area.
    “Well done,” she said, “good job,” aware that she was making up for her rudeness to the driver by being nice to him. She knew it wasn’t how to develop allies; you have to be nice to the ones you’ve insulted. He looked pleased anyway.
    “Where’s the path?”
    He used his pencil to point her along the center of the road and around the corner.
    Morrow dipped under the tape and picked her way carefully, keeping her eye on the tarmac for missed evidence. She stopped and looked up. The house was on her right: a small wall on the pavement and then elevated ground, a bit of grass and then bricked over. A series of cars were parked there: a Nissan people carrier, an Audi, a new Mini, and a small blue van.
    In the road next to her, marked with big white evidence cards, lay two cigarette ends. She bent down and squinted at them: the brand was Silk Cut. They had burnt out where they lay, the log of ash sitting on a strip of tar-yellowed paper. They were five feet apart, as if they had been thrown out of either window of a car. She looked back to the cop who had stopped her car.
    “You—why aren’t these bagged up?”
    “Said to wait until the photographer had a picture, ma’am.”
    They should have bagged them. It was raining and any DNA on the stubs would be lost. Bad scene management. Morrow was secretly glad.
    She carried on to the corner, could see the residents better now: three Asian men standing together, young, talking to uniformed cops. An elderly white couple were there as well, both in overcoats with pajamas underneath. A scowling housewife, young, alone, hair a sleepy tangle, stared at her. Morrow glared back: let us apologize for the inconvenience caused by saving you from armed raiders.
    Morrow looked over at the house. There were two entrances to the garden: a wide metal gate leading straight up to off-road parking and a small ornamental one, open onto the path up to the front door. She turned the corner and saw a puddle of fresh safety glass on the pavement. Above it on the wall a few bricks were caved in.
    Despite herself, her interest was piqued. She could feel it happening: facts, disjointed, irrelevant, being card-indexed and filed away in her mind, the familiar private landscape of deduction. All the niceties of politics, personal or professional, eluded her always, but she could do this. It was the one absolute certainty for Alex Morrow. She was good at this.
    She looked up and saw them standing just outside the ornamental gate, arms folded, waiting for Firearms to leave the property. DS Grant Bannerman and DCI MacKechnie stood flank-to-flank, shoulders almost touching, looking back up to the front door as they listened to two animated