Wages of Sin Read Online Free PDF

satisfactory.’
    â€˜But within the privacy of this room, you and I know that you are a man’s man, Peach, happy working in the rough camaraderie of a male ambience. I’m sure if I explain the matter tactfully to DS Blake—’
    â€˜No need to do that, sir, I assure you.’ Peach held up a hand magisterially, demonstrating his penchant for traffic control. ‘I wouldn’t dream of causing embarrassment. We must move with the times.’ He stiffened his back, moving into the martyr mode which Tucker had rarely seen in him, and said in a lofty, neutral voice, ‘I shall be happy to resume working with DS Blake.’
    â€˜Well, I suppose that would cause the minimum of disruption. It’s good of you to look at it like that, Peach.’ Tucker stood up and offered his hand. ‘Welcome back to CID, Percy.’
    Percy Peach got out quickly, once his forename was used again. As he went down the stairs from Tucker’s penthouse office he dropped his martyr’s mode and punched his fist into the palm of his hand in triumph. It was good to be back.
    It didn’t take Peach long to get rid of his uniform. He shook himself like a dog coming out of cold water when he was back in his smart grey suit.
    And he felt the old, familiar excitement returning as he approached the scene of a serious crime. He could scarcely conceal his eagerness as he put the regulation white plastic bags over his shining black shoes and prepared to go through the break in the plastic tapes and into the shed where the mortal remains of Sarah Dunne had been found.
    There was a light in here now, a strong beam from the naked bulb illuminating the scene which darkness had made even more fearful for Tommy Caton and Jamie Betts. The heat from the bulb seemed to accentuate the smells of the place as well as throwing it into pitiless detail. The smell from the body mingled with the smell of the rot at the base of the shed, as if the decaying timbers of the hut sought to emphasize the human decomposition they had entombed.
    Jack Chadwick, the Scenes of Crime Officer, exchanged the briefest grins of greeting with Percy Peach. It was over a year since they had last worked together, but they behaved as if it were yesterday. Peach went and stood wordlessly for a moment, looking down at the corpse with its awkwardly posed limbs. Beside him, DS Lucy Blake crouched and looked closely at the dead face, as if drawn by the invisible bonds of gender into a final, useless intimacy.
    â€˜It’s a suspicious death, I suppose,’ she said hopelessly. It was a last gesture to the dead girl she had never known: there would surely have been less pain in a death from natural causes or suicide, whatever the mental anguish involved.
    â€˜It’s murder,’ said Jack Chadwick quietly. ‘She was strangled.’ He lifted the scarf the police surgeon had already loosened away from the throat with his ruler, showing the ugly red-black marks of constriction around the young throat.
    The unmarked face looked more frightening with the contrast of the livid marks in the white flesh of the unlined neck. But Peach had eyes only for the wounds. ‘No signs of thumb or finger marks, Jack,’ he said gloomily, as if he were accusing Chadwick of making things difficult.
    â€˜No. The police surgeon reckoned she was probably killed by simple and rapid tightening of the scarf, though he gave us the usual guff about having to wait for the PM report.’
    The pathologist arrived at that moment and the policemen went outside to look at the approach to the hut, affording the dead girl a privacy she could never appreciate whilst the forensic examiner took rectal temperatures and conducted his minimal brief examination on the site before the body was removed for the detailed science of the post-mortem investigation. Lucy Blake remained in the hut; she had still not managed to become blasé about death in the approved,