Dusty Death Read Free Page A

difficult to be certain of anything beneath the mud and dust and mortar which had clothed that mysterious figure, amidst the bricks and the plaster and the broken tiles. Percy Peach felt he could still smell the stink of death and decay upon himself from his visit to the site, though he had showered in the station since his return.
    â€˜Ten years or more ago, you say. I don’t suppose you recall any local missing person from that time.’
    â€˜I wasn’t around here then, sir.’ Peach was less scathing than he would normally have been in the face of Tucker’s fumbling after the truth. He did not point out how many thousands of people went missing in Great Britain every week. Chief Superintendent Tucker knew that well enough. He was simply groping after somewhere to start. Percy Peach said, ‘I was just a DS then, sir. Not even working in Brunton.’
    â€˜No. But it was on my patch. I was a Detective Inspector here at that time. All those clearance areas were environments for crime. All kinds of people on the fringes of society operated there, once the last official residents were cleared out.’
    Everyone knew that. The flotsam and jetsam of society moved in; the down-market prostitutes, looking for somewhere to offer a quick knee-trembler; the druggies on the way down; the squatters who had missed out on legal accommodation. But for once Peach wasn’t irritated by Tucker’s stating of the obvious. He felt the man floundering, wondering where to start on this. He had experienced similar sentiments himself an hour earlier, when he had stood and looked at what had once been human, and watched the Scenes of Crime team commencing its work on that squalid, foetid site. He said quietly, ‘I’ve begun to set up a team, sir. We aren’t certain it’s murder yet, but we certainly have to treat this as a suspicious death. Hopefully we’ll get some accurate estimate of how long ago it occurred within the next twenty-four hours. The National Forensic Laboratory at Chorley has agreed to give this one priority.’
    â€˜We had a lot of trouble with those slum clearance areas.’ Tucker repeated himself, casting his mind back to those harsh days when he still involved himself directly in the investigation of serious crime.
    â€˜I’ll get on with it, then. I’ll report back as soon as we know a little more.’ Peach picked up the big photograph and put it carefully back into its folder. ‘By the way, sir, one of the only things we are certain about at the moment is that the body is that of a female.’
    It was the first stage in giving an identity to this thing. The first move towards the translation of the shape in that picture into something which had been vital and human, with emotions and opinions and a personality.

Three
    It was still scarcely half past three, but the arc lamps were on to enable the Scenes of Crime team to go about their work.
    The lamps gave a sense of theatre to the scene, with the brightly lit square of uneven ground cordoned off by the plastic ribbons as the stage. The audience consisted of a motley group of children, housewives and pensioners, standing outside those tapes and cast into early darkness by the brightness at their centre. A thin drizzle was beginning to descend upon the place as Detective Sergeant Lucy Blake arrived there.
    The scene, with its acrid smells of decay, its thousands of fragments of cheap, shattered bricks, its soot and its crumbling mortar, could scarcely have been more drab or depressing. Lucy wondered as always at the random and dejected-looking crowd which always assembled on the periphery of a Scenes of Crime search. Most of them, she supposed, had never seen anything as dramatic as what had occurred at the centre of this brilliantly illuminated stage.
    Yet what
had
actually happened here? DS Blake put on the plastic coverings offered by the constable at the entrance to the site and trudged forward