Blood at the Root Read Free Page A

hardly blame him, these days, can you?” said Sergeant Hatchley, picking gingerly at the tissue over his shaving cut. It started to bleed again. “Some of these yobs’d kill you as soon as look at you. Besides, it were a bloody good match.”
    “Anyway,” Banks went on, “you’d better check with Traffic, too. We don’t know for certain whether the attackers ran home or drove off. Maybe they got a parking ticket or got stopped for speeding.”
    “We should be so lucky,” muttered Hatchley.
    Banks pulled two sheets of paper from a folder on his desk and passed one each to Susan and Hatchley. It showed an artist’s impression of a young man, probably in his early twenties, with thin lips and a long, narrow nose. His hair was cut short and combed neatly back. Despite his youth, it seemed to be receding at the temples and looked very thin on top. There was nothing particularly distinctive about him, but Banks thought he could perceive a hint of arrogance in the expression. Of course, that was probably just artistic license.
    “The night-shift attendant at the mortuary came up with this,” he said. “A few months back, he got bored with having no one to talk to on the job, so he started sketching corpses as a way of passing the time. ‘Still lifes,’ he calls them. Obviously a man of hidden talents. Anyway, he told us this was mostly speculation, especially the nose, which had been badly broken. The cheekbones had been fractured, too, so he was guessing about how high and how prominent they might have been. But the hair’s right, he says, and the general shape of the head. It’ll have to do for now. The only things we know for certain are that the victim was a little over six feet tall, weighed eleven stone, was in fine physical shape – an athlete, perhaps – and he had blue eyes and blond hair. No birthmarks, scars, tattoos or other distinguishing features.” He tapped the folder. “We’ll try to get this on the local TV news today and in the papers tomorrow morning. For now, you can start with the house-to-house, then, after opening time, you can canvass the pubs. Uniform branch has detailed four officers to help. Our first priority is to find out who the poor bugger was, and the second is to discover who he was last seen with before he was killed. Okay?”
    They both nodded and stood up to leave.
    “And take your mobiles or personal radios and stay in touch with one another. I want the right hand to know what the left hand’s doing. All right?”
    “Yes, sir,” said Susan.
    “As for me,” said Banks with a grim smile, “Dr. Glendenning has kindly offered to come in and do the postmortem this morning, so I think one of us should pay him the courtesy of being present. Don’t you?”

IV
    A lot of detectives complained about house-to-house inquiries, much preferring to spend their time in scummy pubs with low-life informers, getting the
real
feel of the Job, or so they thought. But Susan Gay had always enjoyed a good house-to-house. At the very least it was good exercise in patience.
    Of course, you got the occasional nutter, the boor, and the lecherous creep with his Hound of the Baskervilles straining at the end of its chain. Once, even, a naked child had toddled out to see what was happening and peed all over Susan’s new shoes. The mother had thought it hilarious.
    Then there were those endless hours in the rain, wind and snow, knocking at door after door, your feet aching, the damp and chill fast seeping right into the marrow of your bones, wishing you’d chosen some other career, thinking even marriage and kids would be better than this.
    And, needless to say, every now and then some clever-arse pillock would tell her she was too pretty to be a police
man
, or would suggest she could put her handcuffs on him anytime she wanted, ha-ha-ha. But that was all part of the game, and she didn’t mind as much as she sometimes pretended she did to annoy Sergeant Hatchley. As far as Susan was