Desperate Measures Read Free Page B

one of them. There were about a dozen girls selected for the fast stream, about half of them doing science.
    The exams made her terribly anxious, a tightening across her back, churning in her stomach and a clammy sensation across her forehead. She gripped the pen so hard that the indentations remained on her fingers for hours. Once, half way through the first chemistry question, she tore a hole in the paper.
    They were in France when the results came out and she had rung Uncle Marty who had opened the letter and read out, ‘Four As: biology, chemistry, physics and maths.’ Four As! She had her place in Manchester.
    The relief was like someone releasing her from an iron lung or something and she’d spent the rest of the holiday having fun with the friends she’d made from the village where the gîte was, in a haze of Gauloises and cheap wine, holiday romance and Pernod.
    There were three weeks after they got back from France to get ready for student life. She was going into halls for the first year. She’d never been north and imagined it to be pretty grim but when the training was done she would be able to work pretty much anywhere, even abroad. Doctors were always in demand.
    Mummy and Daddy drove her up one fine Saturday afternoon. She felt sick with excitement as they carried clothes and records, her books, sheets and blankets and her castor oil plant up to the room.
    Once lectures had started, it didn’t take long for that excitement to be replaced with the crushing realization that if swotting for exams had been hard going at school then studying medicine was ten times worse. Until she met Don.
     
     

Day One – Tuesday
     

Chapter 5
 
    A cordon had been set up to protect the crime scene and the surrounding area. Janine could see the tape, the uniformed officers checking cars and advising residents who needed access.
    She could see her sergeants, Shap and Butchers and Lisa, her detective constable talking to the handful of people watching from the opposite pavement. Shap and Butchers looked like a double act, behaved like one often enough. Shap was wiry, sharp and cynical while Butchers was a big man with a belly to match, more of a plodder but meticulous in his police work. Lisa was the one who looked out of place, a striking looking black woman with coffee coloured skin and shiny black curls. She could have been a model, but Janine knew that the young woman was dedicated to the job, keen to learn and make progress.
    Janine parked the car and pulled on her protective jumpsuit, collected her mask and gloves and overshoes. It wasn’t the most flattering, or the most comfortable outfit, but it was essential if she were to avoid contaminating the scene.
    The address was a large detached villa. A notice board by the front wall identified it as a doctor’s surgery – and gave the telephone number and opening hours.
    Janine showed her ID to the officer guarding the crime scene and ducked under the tape across the driveway entrance.
    Ahead she could see the forensics team were already busy. A CSI was taking photographs, documenting the victim and the surroundings. Others were erecting a screen to shield the body. Close by she saw Richard talking to Dr Susan Riley the pathologist and went to join them.
    ‘Susan, Richard,’ Janine said.
    Richard nodded hello and gestured to the victim. ‘Donald Halliwell, sixty-four. General practitioner. The cleaner found him,’ Richard said. ‘She arrived at half-past six and he was here, like this. Keys just there.’
              Janine looked at the man on the ground. Grey-haired, clean-shaven, wearing a charcoal grey suit, his blue striped shirt now soaked with blood from the wounds visible on his chest. He lay just outside the door to the building, his feet, in brown leather brogues, facing the road. A yard away from him were a bunch of keys on a leather fob.
    ‘Did the cleaner touch anything? Go inside?’ Janine asked.
    ‘No, called 999 straightaway,’