The Edge Read Free Page B

Acting-DCI Salmon, you’ve all been through the farmhouse, so you know the layout. I want you to see it happen. How was it? How many involved? – a single frenzied attacker assaulting the parents, killing the father, then the children before they could wake? Or more than one killer, fanning out to work room to room? And the woman escaping, running barefoot through the yard. Who pursued her, stabbed and mutilated her body? Possibly raped her, then left her displayed like a sacrificial victim on an altar? What kind of mentality was that?’
    Salmon wasn’t sure the superintendent was dealing with this in the best way. OK, so it was a massacre and the woman’s death was overkill. It had knocked them all of a heap, but visualising the crime could clutter you up with a lot of wrong impressions. It was bald facts that counted, material evidence that would bring the villains finally to book. He harrumphed deep in his throat and the Boss’s eyes swivelled on to him.
    â€˜If he did rape her …’ Salmon began.
    â€˜We’ll hope for DNA. There’s one thing not to be known outside this office: even if he didn’t penetrate the body himself, it appears he used a broom handle.’ Yeadings was being atypically crude. ‘Then surely he’d have masturbated. Traces on his hands. He’d have touched other surfaces. But we can leave that to SOCO.’
    His face was grey, locked into grim lines. ‘I don’t need to say that catching this monster must be given greatest priority. A family at home, wiped out, overnight, in a matter of minutes.’
    â€˜And a little girl visiting,’ DC Silver added in a low voice. ‘Where does she fit in? Did the killer or killers know she didn’t belong? Did they even look to see who it was?’
    â€˜That’s important,’ Beaumont put in. ‘How intimately was the Hoad family known beforehand? Was it planned, or a random break-in? Would the killer know by now that one of the family had escaped? Sir, what are we doing about the missing son?’
    â€˜Enquiries are being made with neighbours and through his school,’ Yeadings said tightly. ‘Something should soon be coming
in on that.’ He looked at his watch. ‘Time we met up with the extended team,’ he warned.
    They made their way down to the Incident Room. It was already crowded, with uniform and plain-clothes officers seated at tables and on windowsills. Latecomers had filed in to stand propped against the walls or sit cross-legged on the ground. When the conversational buzz ceased, Yeadings resumed, his voice depersonalised.
    â€˜Exit Wounds: a firearms subject you should be familiar with. On entering a human body, the bullet creates a neat round hole, like a mouth’s small O of surprise. Once inside, the ravages begin, splintering bone, ripping cartilage, pulverising soft tissue. When it emerges from the body’s denser pressure there’s an explosion into open air, so the surrounding damage is extensive. Exit wounds look mightily more severe than what happened at the start.’
    Yeadings paused, looking round. None of that was news to the extended team. But he’d a specific point to make about this massacre of apparent innocents.
    â€˜What we found at Fordham Manor Farm,’ he went on, ‘horrific as it is, should be seen as a single, extensive exit wound. Faced with that, we must work back to the point of entry, which eventually may prove far less momentous by contrast. And finally our objective must be to discover the first cause and the motive. Bear in mind that in any fatality the killer is the person, not the weapon.’
    He was aware of a slight, restless movement in mid-room; the tensing of shoulders in barely smothered protest that he was making a lecture of it.
    â€˜I know that this is only partially a firearms case. The principal weapon was a knife, possibly knives. But the image remains true. Overall, we