Secret of the Dead Read Free Page B

caused her premature death, then he could clear its ‘suspicious death’ status and leave it in the hands of the Coroner.
    Before that though, he had to summarise an account of his investigation and that was currently proving difficult because of the sheer lack of information. The sections detailing who she was or where she lived were still blank. Everyone who had attended the scene and viewed the corpse, himself included, had initially thought that the body was that of a young teenage girl, but the autopsy had revealed that the petite form was that of a woman aged between late teens and early twenties. And the fact that she had grey-blue eyes, shoulder length light brown hair, a good set of teeth and the initials ‘J.J,’ together with a pink butterfly, tattooed upon the lower part of her neck, between her shoulder blades was the sum total of everything they had in terms of identification. There was nothing on the body, or in the cellar where she had been found, which revealed who she was. The Scenes of Crime Officer had done his best to fingerprint the cadaver at the mortuary but it had been the ends of the fingers which rats had nibbled first, making the process extremely difficult. Except for the recent tattoos, all he had to go on to establish her identity, were three items. He looked at the clear plastic exhibit bags at the top of his pending tray. First there was the torn photograph. He’d found that, together with the Christmas card, in the rear pocket of her jeans. The half-picture featured the head and shoulders of a man who looked to be in his early thirties, clean shaven, with thinning dark hair. He thought the face seemed familiar. The Christmas card appeared to be an old one, folded and heavily creased. Inside, it had been simply signed ‘Mr X.’
    Hunter wondered if Mr X was the guy in the photo.
    Then he’d found the worn brass key in one of her front pockets, which he guessed gave access to her home, though looking at the state of the key, and given the circumstances of her discovery, he thought that address was more than likely a sub-let room in a run-down rented house.
    He had done a lot of leg-work these past two days and realised zilch for his efforts. He’d reacquainted himself with ex-colleagues and a number of local junkies from his drug squad days, but they hadn’t been able to help with either finding her home or giving her a name. And he had uniform trying to track down any dossers who used the derelict pub, but they had so far come up with nothing. He’d decided that if he hadn’t got anywhere by the end of the day, he was going to speak to his contact at The Barnwell Chronicle and ask her to run a piece as a last-ditch attempt to identify the body.
    The thwacking sound and the sudden appearance of a newspaper landing on top of his paperwork made Hunter jump. He looked up to see his colleague DC Grace Marshall, her slim frame dressed in a light grey trouser suit striding past. He had been so absorbed in the drafting of his narrative that he neither heard nor saw his working partner breeze into the office.
    Barry Newstead followed in her wake, looking rumpled as ever. He had his jacket slung over his shoulder, allowing Hunter the view of a white shirt straining over his ample belly. The tail of one side had escaped from the waistband of his trousers and it was open at the collar, from where the two ends of a striped tie dangled at an odd angle from its untidy knot.
    As he switched his gaze from one to the other, Hunter couldn’t help but smile to himself. They were so far apart when it came to dress and style, and yet complemented each other with their ebullient character and respective work ethic.
    “You’re a bit of a dark horse, Detective Sergeant Kerr!” Barry arrowed a finger towards the newspaper on Hunter’s desk, and shot him a wink as he sucked in his stomach, squeezed himself around his desk and lowered himself onto his chair.
    Hunter snatched up the copy of the local weekly