Visibility

Visibility Read Online Free PDF Page B

Book: Visibility Read Online Free PDF
Author: Boris Starling
Tags: thriller, Historical, Mystery
could make out at least two separate sole designs; there might have been more, but it was impossible to be sure.
    Twigs had been snapped and leaves crushed across an area perhaps eight foot by three; large enough, in other words, to have been caused by a prone man, especially one who had been moving, perhaps struggling.
    A ring glinted dully in the gloom. Herbert picked it up. Gold, no inscription, entirely ordinary. Not the corpse’s—there had been no ring marks on his fingers. It could be something; it could have belonged to the killer. But it was probably nothing; it might have been here for days, weeks, months, years.
    Hannah appeared again, and this time she
was
holding something. In the haze, Herbert thought at first that it was a dead animal. Only when she handed it to him did he see that it was a tweed overcoat.
    The overcoat whose whereabouts he had pondered at the autopsy? He hoped so.
    He turned it over and over, noticing as he did so two things.
    Firstly, it was exceptionally heavy. It was waterlogged, of course, but even that could not account for the weight. When his hands gripped at uneven lumps inside the pockets, he realized the reason: stones, packed hard to weigh the body down.
    Secondly, the coat was torn in several places; specifically, at the collar, the left armpit and cuff, and on the right outside pocket.
    “Was the lake bed sharp?” he asked.
    Hannah shook her head. “Not especially.”
    Then the rips in the cloth would probably have come from the dead man’s struggle with his killer, or from trying to take his coat off to avoid drowning; or both. The Long Water was a lake, so there was no current which could have separated body from coat postmortem. If the victim
had
managed to get the coat off, therefore, he would have been at the end of his tether when doing so; too weak to do anything after that except slump back into the cold water, this time for good.
    Elkington, Flew, and Hare watched as Herbert laid the coat flat on the ground and began to search through it.
    There were five pockets—two on the outside flanks, one at the breast, and two inside—and each had been stuffed with stones. He pulled them out and sent them skittering across the path.
    No name tag inside the collar. Not surprising. They were not at school anymore.
    In the right-hand inside pocket, Herbert found something hard and flat. His first thought was that it felt like an identity card, but it could not have been; such cards had been abolished earlier in the year.
    When he brought it out, he saw that he had been both right and wrong.
    It was an identity card, but a university rather than a national one. It was laminated—hence still legible after a night in the water, rather than reduced to pulp—and it announced its holder as a graduate student of King’s College, London.
    More importantly, it gave Herbert a name: Max Stensness.
    “You have something?” Hannah asked.
    “We do indeed. A name. Thank you very much.”
    She punched the air in delight. “Is my pleasure. Maybe you come to dinner tonight?”
    She ran the two sentences together, as though they were part of the same thought process, and it took a second or two for Herbert to take stock of what she had asked.
    “I couldn’t possibly,” he said.
    Hare made a noise that was part cough and part snicker.
    “What else do you do?” Hannah asked.
    Flew had covered his mouth with his hand. His shoulders were heaving, and he was making small trumpeting noises into his palm.
    Herbert pointed at Hare and Flew. “You two, take the coat over to Scotland Yard, and get it logged as evidence.”
    They scurried away like miscreant pupils from a headmaster’s study, openly laughing long before they were out of earshot. Herbert noticed that Elkington had stepped a few yards away; clearly the man had some redeeming features after all, he thought.
    Herbert turned back to Hannah.
    “Well, for all you know, I could be going home to my wife and children.”
    “Do
Read Online Free Pdf

Similar Books

The Heist

LLC Dark Hollows Press

Destiny of Coins

Aiden James

Northern Lights

Tim O’Brien

A Strict Seduction

Maria Del Rey

Out of Promises

Simon Leigh

Off the Field: Bad Boy Sports Romance

Heidi Hunter, Bad Boy Team