Blood Sinister Read Free Page A

‘Ha! I see they haven’t knocked the cheek out of you, anyway. You know who we’ve got here?’
    ‘I do indeed.’
    ‘There won’t be many tears shed for her in the Job, I suppose. Sad loss to journalism, all the same.’
    Slider raised his eyebrows. ‘I didn’t think you read the
Grauniad
.’
    ‘
Indy
man, me,’ Cameron admitted. ‘But she wrote for that occasionally, and the
Staggers
, which I read sometimes. Got to keep an open mind. I always liked her pieces, even when I didn’t agree with her.’
    ‘
Someone
didn’t agree with her,’ Slider said, and – there being no more excuse for ignoring it – for the first time looked directly at the corpse.
    What had been Phoebe Agnew was sprawled on her back, one leg slipping off the edge of the bed, toes touching the carpet. Her arms were flung back above her head, and her wrists were tied together and to the bedhead with a pair of tights. Her auburn hair, long and thick and loosely curling, was spread out around her like a sunburst, vivid against the black cloth, seeming to draw all the life and colour out of the room. It was amazing hair in any circumstance, but if, as Atherton had told him, she was around fifty, it was doubly so, because the colour looked entirely natural.
    She was wearing a large, loose, oatmeal-coloured knitted sweater and was naked from the waist down; a pair of grey wool trousers and scarlet bikini briefs lay on the floor at the foot of the bed. Slider flinched inwardly, and felt a stab of pity for the woman, so exposed in this helpless indignity. It was always the worst bit, the first moment of acknowledging the person whose life had been taken from them without their will. There she lay, mutely reproachful, beseeching justice. A body is just a body, of course, but still it wears the faceof a person who lived, and was self-aware, and who didn’t want to die.
    The nakedness seemed worse because she was not young: there is an arrogance to the nakedness of youth which defies ridicule. In life she must have been good-looking, perhaps even beautiful, Slider thought, noting the classical nose, the wide mouth, the strong chin; but no-one looks their best after being strangled. The face was swollen and suffused, the open eyes horribly bloodshot; her lips were bluish, and there was blood on them, and in her left ear; and round her neck was the livid mark of the ligature. The ligature, however, had been removed.
    After all these years, the first sight of a corpse still raised Slider’s pulse and made him feel hot and prickly for a moment – almost like a kind of violent teenage embarrassment. He took a couple of deep breaths until it subsided.
    Atherton looked away, shoving his hands into his pockets. Tall and elegant, gracefully drooping, he looked as out of place in this room as a borzoi in a scrapyard. ‘Wonder why they took one ligature and left the other,’ he said.
    ‘Maybe the one round her neck was traceable in some way,’ Slider said. ‘Time of death, Freddie?’
    ‘Well, she’s cold and stiff, so that puts it between eight and thirty-six hours, according to the jolly old textbook. It’s not over-warm in here, and though she looks reasonably fit she’s no spring chicken, so I’d put it in the middle range, say twelve to twenty-four. Not less than twelve, anyway.’
    ‘So we’re looking at sometime yesterday, probably evening or afternoon,’ Slider said. ‘And I suppose the cause of death was strangulation?’
    ‘I wouldn’t like to commit myself until I’ve got her on the table. There are no other apparent injuries, but I’m not blessed with infra-red vision, and it’s getting dark as Newgate Knocker in here. These hypoxia cases are notoriously tricky, anyway. But she certainly has been strangled.’
    ‘There doesn’t seem to have been a struggle,’ Slider said. ‘No furniture overturned or anything.’
    ‘She may have been drugged, of course,’ Cameron said. ‘Which is why I reserve judgement on the cause of