The Art of Murder Read Online Free PDF

clever one … Right, you can get busy, Turner,’ he said, snapping back to the task at hand. ‘I want you to check up on Silver Cabs. See if Mr Hedridge was telling us the truth about last night. I also want you to go through the entire guest list. Trace any connections between Kingsley Berrick and the names featured on that list, and then any links between Hedridge and those who were there last night. No matter how tenuous.’
    ‘Well, sorry I criticised your interview technique, I’m sure,’ Turner mumbled to himself as he walked off down the hall.
    By the time Pendragon emerged through the main doors of the station it was dark outside, and it felt as though the temperature had dropped at least another five degrees. It wasn’t worth bothering with a car; a fresh layer of snow had fallen, making the roads even more treacherous. Instead, he turned up his collar, plunged his hands into his pockets and headed through the gate on to Brick Lane.
    The human tide had turned. All those people who had headed west into the city for their daily labours were now on the homeward journey, back to husbands and wives, curries and fish and chips, TV and Sky Sports, the pub and the bottle of chilled Pinot Grigio in the fridge, phone calls to Mum and Dad, a snooze in front of the box or ten pages of a paperback before bed, a freezing cold quickie under the duvet perhaps, and then sleep; ready for tomorrow’s action replay.
    The Milward Street Pathology Unit was only two hundred yards away. It was a single-storey red-brick building totally devoid of character. Thrown up in the 1950s, it was a monument to post-war austerity. Inside it was a little less austere. The hallway was painted a warm cream shade, and contained a cluster of chairs, a table with some two-year-old magazines on it, and a plastic palm in the corner. Pendragon strode along, ignoring his surroundings. He had been here on dozens of occasions, and almost every time the visit had involved his staring down at a corpse and receiving distinctly unpleasant information as to how the recently living person had become a dead one.
    Jones saw him enter the lab and nodded before turning back to the latest arrival on the dissection table. The lab was a stark affair: whitewashed walls, scrubbed surfaces, and the irremovable stink of offal. Visible through an open door stood a wall of morgue drawers – the ‘sunbeds’ as the staff called them.
    Jones looked up from the corpse. ‘You’re tired, Pendragon,’ he observed.
    The DCI shrugged and stared down at the almostsurreal form of Kingsley Berrick. He was naked, his body split and clamped open, red and grey, as dead as a carcass hanging in a butcher’s window. He looked just like a thousand other corpses, except for the void where his face had once been, now backed by a circle of steel – the dissection table upon which his corpse lay.
    ‘It’s certainly a strange one,’ Dr Jones said. ‘I suppose you want the hows, wheres and whens.’
    ‘The whos and whys would be good too,’ Pendragon responded.
    ‘Yes, well, that’s your department. I’ve found a few answers to the obvious questions, though.’ He pointed with a scalpel inside the huge hole in Kingsley’s head. ‘This all started post-mortem. He was killed by a needle thrust into the nape of his neck, here.’ The pathologist turned Kingsley Berrick’s body on to its left side and indicated a red dot on the back of the neck. He then rolled the corpse back and matter-of-factly lifted the dome of the dead man’s head to reveal the brain. He removed this from inside the cranium.
    ‘I’ve had a good poke around,’ the pathologist went on. ‘It’s normal weight and in average condition for a man of Berrick’s age. But look here.’ He held the grey mass in his left hand and nudged a piece of tissue at the base of the organ. ‘A hole,’ he said. Placing the brain on a dish, he parted some folds. They could both see the red of a recent wound extending from the