The Reckoning Read Free Page B

house looks pretty filthy from here. I bet it’s ripe in there.’
    I sent up a small silent prayer of gratitude that I had grown up with an older brother who liked to torment me. Presumably I was supposed to respond with girlish horror. Derwent could try all day and he’d never manage to get a reaction like that from me. I smiled instead, as if the DI had made a witty, brilliant joke, and followed him to the blue tent. It was more than my life was worth to kick up a fuss about putting on a paper boiler suit over my clothes and paper booties on my feet, but I was aware that I looked ridiculous and it was no consolation that everyone else did too.
    Someone had pushed the front door so that it was almost shut and I looked at it closely, imagining it as it would have looked to a passer-by on an ordinary day. The paint on the door was dark brown and peeling away. Just above the letterbox, someone had scraped the word ‘Nonce’ into the door, getting right down to the wood. The letters were thick and straggling, but easy to read. It must have taken them a while to do it. I wondered what it would have been like to stand in the hallway of the house and listen to someone carve the five jagged letters that spelled out what he was. He would have been afraid to stop them. He would have been afraid all the time.
    With good reason, it seemed, because stepping into the hallway was like stepping into a nightmare. The overhead light was on, a harsh incandescent bulb in a dusty lace shade that was incongruously delicate, and the glare picked up the detail of what had taken place there. The walls were papered with a stylised pattern of flowers in tones of pale brown and cream, décor that had to date from the 1970s. The bottom foot or so was grey with rising damp. Here and there the paper bubbled away from the wall, puffed out with moisture. Apart from that, and a scuffmark or two, it had survived reasonably well. At least it had until someone had dragged something blood-stained the length of the hallway, a reddish-brown smear halfway up the wall that was feathered around the edges. Hair produced that effect when it was soaked in blood, I happened to know. The bloodstains told a sorry story to anyone who could read them. He had answered the door – God knows why – and the first thing they had done was to beat him until he bled. And that was just for starters.
    I followed the trail past a malodorous sheepskin coat hanging on the end of the stairs, down to a doorway on the left side of the hall. It led into the front room, a small space made smaller by the clutter stacked on all sides and the number of people standing in it. The white suits made everyone anonymous but I picked out Dr Hanshaw immediately. He was taller and thinner than anyone else in the room, for starters. He was also leaning at a perilous angle to get a better view of what lay on the floor. I couldn’t bring myself to look down – not yet, anyway. The room stank of blood, of human waste, of full ashtrays and dirty clothes and damp. It was hot and the windows were tightly closed. There was no air in the room, and no escape from the smell.
    Palmer had lived in something approaching squalor and it was hard to tell what had been moved by the intruders and what was part of his normal surroundings, but his sister had said the place had been ransacked. It looked as if he had moved none of his mother’s belongings after she died, just overlaid them with his own detritus. Small, ugly ornaments and arrangements of dried flowers fought for space with empty beer cans and mugs stained brown from tannin. The gas fire dated from the same period as the wallpaper, which was probably the last time it had been serviced. Out-of-date TV listings magazines, a brimming ashtray and dirty plates were stacked on either side of a red armchair that occupied prime position in the room. The rubbed, greasy patches on the back and the arms of the chair suggested it was his favourite place to sit. He