Someone You Know Read Free

gesturing that Lucy should lead the way. ‘I’m sorry for the loss. Did you know her well?’
    â€˜I’d met her in one of the care homes a few times,’ Lucy said. ‘Her mother’s an alcoholic; Karen would be taken in anytime her mother went on a particularly long bender. She was a nice girl.’ Lucy’s placement with the Public Protection Unit of the PSNI meant that she primarily worked cases involving vulnerable persons and children. As a result, she spent quite a bit of time in the city’s Social Services residential units, in one of which Karen Hughes had been an occasional inhabitant.
    â€˜How do you like the PPU?’ he asked, as they walked. ‘It’s a strange posting for a young DS. I’d have thought CID would have been the obvious place for someone like you.’
    What did he mean,
someone like me
? Lucy thought. Young? Female? Catholic? All of the above?
    â€˜I’d rather work with the living than the dead,’ Lucy said a little tritely, though she knew it was not entirely true even as she said it. The dead motivated her as much as the quick. More perhaps.
    Burns nodded. ‘I’m afraid in this case that will prove a little difficult. There’s no doubting which she is.’
    They had reached the body now, which lay across the tracks so that the girl’s neck was supported by one of the metal rails. It could easily have been mistaken for a suicide attempt, had it not been for the knife wound that had severed her windpipe. A handful of SOCO officers continued to work the immediate scene. One documented the area with a hand-held video, while a second used a digital camera to take still shots.
    The girl lay on her back. Her clothes were as described in the Missing Person’s alert that Lucy had released just three days earlier. She wore a white hooded top, too long for her, over flower-patterned leggings. The top was soaked in blood now, but the material near the hem still retained the original white.
    Lucy couldn’t really see the face too clearly. Part of it was smeared in the girl’s own blood, the rest covered by the loose straggles of her hair. She could make out, on one side, the soft swell of her cheek, still carrying puppy fat. A smattering of freckles was more vivid now, against the pallor of her skin.
    Her hair had also become stuck to the blood that was already congealing at the edges of the wound at her throat. Lucy didn’t look too closely at it. No doubt she’d be treated to all manner of post-mortem pictures over the coming days without having to look at it here, too. She resisted an urge to push Karen’s hair back from her face, instead gently touched it with the tips of her gloved fingers. ‘Jesus,’ she said, softly.
    She tried to dissociate the memories of Karen alive from the scene before her as she examined the body. ‘She used to wear a cross and chain around her neck,’ Lucy said. ‘It might have been lost when her throat was cut.’
    â€˜Any other identifying features?’ Burns asked. ‘Or do you want to wait until she’s cleaned up?’
    Lucy lifted the girl’s left hand. She noticed that the tips of each of her fingers were scored with deep gashes.
    â€˜Defence wounds,’ Burns said, watching her. ‘She must have tried to grab the knife as he was slitting her throat.’
    â€˜He?’
    â€˜Most likely,’ Burns said.
    Lucy turned the dead girl’s arm. She wore a number of leather wristbands and friendship bracelets. Lucy recognized them. She pushed them up the girl’s arm, exposing the skin of the wrist, finding what she was looking for: a series of criss-crossing scars in broken lines traversed the girl’s lower arm.
    â€˜That’s Karen Hughes, all right,’ Lucy said, tenderly laying the girl’s hand back onto the grey gravel.

Chapter Three
    B urns walked back up the tracks with them to Lucy’s car. The