The Blissfully Dead Read Free

them what she’d found.’
    ‘OK. Is she still around? I’ll want to talk to her.’
    ‘Yes. She’s downstairs in the manager’s office.’
    ‘Good.’ He nodded for Gareth to continue.
    ‘I already asked Ms Shillingham for details of who was staying in the room. But nobody was checked in. The room was supposed to be empty.’
    Bang went the chance of this being an easy case, a nice stat to make the clear-up rate look better.
    Gareth fell quiet, as if he had nothing more to say – not till Patrick had looked in the room, witnessed the scene. He was aware that he was stalling, delaying the moment when he would have to see the body, the source of that bloody smell. Recently he’d begun to wonder if he was losing the stomach for this job, if he should quit, do something different. But what else would he do? The only other job he’d wanted was to be a rock star, to go on tour supporting his heroes, The Cure. That was one dream that would never come true.
    He motioned to Carmella. ‘Come on, then. Let’s take a look.’
    Being careful not to touch anything, he entered the hotel room. Immediately, the chemical sting of perfume made him sneeze, and as he opened his watering eyes he saw her. The victim. He heard Carmella catch her breath behind him.
    She was laid out on the bed, naked and spread-eagled in an X-shape, each limb pointing towards a corner of the bed. She had light brown hair; pale, freckly skin; downy hairs on her arms. A strip of pubic hair, shaved legs and armpits. Patrick felt his breathing deepen and the anger that fuelled him, that kept him doing this damn job, bubbled and simmered as he realised how young she was. Somewhere between thirteen and fifteen. A child, though doubtless she would have recoiled to hear herself described as one.
    Her eyes were open, staring at a future that would never come. What had this girl’s dreams been? To travel the world or have a family ? Be a doctor or pilot or footballer’s wife? However modest her ambitions, they were over. She would never go to university, get her first job, give birth, grow old. This was it. A life truncated. A full stop.
    Patrick stepped closer, trying to ignore, for the moment, the injuries, the mortal wounds, his eyes refusing to focus on them. He wanted to see the victim, to get to know her for a moment. To make this personal.
    The girl was fleshy, with large breasts and a soft stomach, wide thighs. He guessed she had a BMI of about 26 or 27. It was a body that hundreds of years ago would have been considered perfect, the ideal of womanhood, but not now, in the days when emaciation was the look most young women craved. He studied her face. She wasn’t pretty, not in a conventional way, anyway. Her nose was a little too large, her eyes too close together. It crossed his mind that this would make the media less interested, that her face wouldn’t sell many newspapers, which could be both positive and negative for the investigation. The last big case he’d worked, the so-called Child Catcher case, had been a media shit storm from the off. Unlike his colleague DI Winkler, Patrick wasn’t the kind of cop who craved attention. In fact, despite his youthful desire to be a singer in a band, he abhorred it.
    He closed his eyes for a second and made this young woman a silent promise. He would do everything he could to find the person who had done this. The man – in this case, it surely had to be a man – who had ended her young life.
    There were marks on her throat that made it evident she had been strangled. But that was far from the most striking thing. There were cuts, short and shallow, all over her body, including her breasts and inner thighs, tiny trickles of blood patterning her skin. One of her outstretched hands was twisted and bloody, as if it had been stamped on. Her lips were puffy and smeared with dried blood too, like they had been punched or, perhaps, bitten. As he stepped closer he noticed that her skin was shiny in patches