Bad Blood Read Free Page A

scenes were concerned he could be labelled a misanthrope, believing only himself and his team had any right to be present and hating all other invaders. Especially interfering detectives. Savage got out and retrieved her protective clothing from the boot.
    ‘You might as well start with them, Jane,’ Savage said, pointing to the builders sitting on the front garden wall as she suited up. ‘I’ll risk Layton’s wrath.’
    At the house, the youngest of the builders nodded a greeting as Savage went down the passage to the side. The other two stared into their mugs, one of them shaking his head and muttering something under his breath.
    Round the back, a patio stretched the width of the plot. Or rather, it once had, because one end was now a mass of broken slabs and concrete, the spoil from a large hole creeping across the postage-stamp-sized lawn beyond. Beside the hole, Layton and Andrew Nesbit, the pathologist, knelt, peering down into the mud. Layton stood up as Savage neared, tipped his battered Tilley back with the finger of a blue-gloved hand and pointed at the brown goo.
    ‘Bloody mess.’ Layton scratched his roman nose with the back of his hand and shook his head. ‘Builders don’t wear ballet shoes, do they?’
    Nesbit glanced round and smiled, his eyes sparkling behind his half-round glasses. He raised his bushy eyebrows, looked at Layton and then turned back to the hole.
    ‘Mondays, Charlotte,’ he said. ‘What is it about Mondays?’
    Savage walked over and peered at the puddle forming down in the excavation, a grey sludge-like liquid which oozed from the surrounding soil.
    ‘The thing on the right is a dog,’ Layton said. ‘The builders found the animal first. But that wasn’t why they called us.’
    Savage could see a set of tiny bones and a pointed skull. A leather collar had rotted to almost nothing but the buckle and a little brass name tag. Next to the skeleton, a large translucent plastic storage box, the kind you shoved under the bed or stacked up in the garage full of junk, lay close to the concrete foundations for the boundary wall. A snap-on lid concealed the contents, something pale and indistinct pushing up against one side, promising nightmares for weeks to come.
    ‘According to the ID disc the dog’s name is Florence,’ Layton said. ‘Don’t know if she is named after the place or the character from the
Magic Roundabout
. Whatever, I’d say the animal was buried a good few years ago. The crate was probably only buried within the last few months.’
    ‘The lid?’ Savage asked.
    ‘The builders removed the top of the box. I put it back so the photographer could take some pictures. Andrew?’
    Nesbit reached down, long fingers inside his nitrile gloves feeling around the edge of the lid, clicking the plastic back, lifting it off.
    Savage gasped at the tangle of flesh and bones inside, the tiny hands clutching at a red house-brick, the torso curled round in the box, foetal-like. The child’s skull had plenty of skin left on, hair twisted in long, curly strands, teeth bared in a mocking grin. The flesh on the limbs and body hung loose, looking stiff and like starched clothing or light brown paper. The child was naked, but there was a bundle of rags up one end of the box. That fact alone spoke volumes to Savage. It was unlikely this was a terrible accident, somebody trying to cover up an RTC for instance; not when the infant had been stripped. She considered the skin again, which was the colour and consistency of filo pastry. The corpse reminded her of mummies she had seen in a museum and she said as much.
    ‘Desiccated,’ Nesbit said. ‘The body was kept somewhere hot and dry after death and that caused the effect you are looking at.’
    ‘So how long?’
    ‘Very difficult to know at this stage. Maybe we will find some entomology or something else organic to help us establish the time of death. All I can tell you for sure is that she was buried here a good while