Vanishing Point Read Free Page A

scornfully before knocking back yet another whiskey chaser paid for as usual by Brady. ‘Bloody money is what it’s all about! It can buy you anything! Including friends in high places.’
    Brady accepted, as had Rubenfeld, that Macmillan was very good at what he did: lying. He was a politician after all. He had removed himself so far from his past life that no one would believe that he was the same Macmillan who had been raised in Blyth with a criminal for a brother who now lived in the deeply entrenched crime world of Wallsend.
    ‘You alright, sir?’ asked Conrad.
    ‘Yeah,’ muttered Brady, putting Macmillan to the back of his mind.
    He held a gloved hand over his nose and mouth as he moved in closer to what was left of the victim’s neck. Flies had already started to gorge on the brutally hacked wound where bone and flesh ended in a jagged formation.
    ‘Some kind of serrated weapon was used to …’ he faltered, unable to state the obvious.
    He turned and looked up at Conrad.
    ‘So where’s the head?’
    ‘I don’t know, sir. This was all that was washed up. The beach has been thoroughly searched, but nothing’s turned up.’
    ‘Here’s hoping for our sakes it does. Without a head it makes it damned difficult to identify her.’
    ‘They’re going through missing persons reports back at the station, sir,’ answered Conrad.
    Brady raised a questioning eyebrow. ‘Damned hard to know whether we do or don’t have a match considering all that’s left of her, don’t you think?’
    Brady knew that without a victimology, figuring out the modus operandi would be virtually impossible. To understand why she had been murdered, they needed her identity. Her family. Her friends. Her life story.
    ‘No identity, no murderer,’ Brady resignedly muttered.
    He looked at Conrad.
    ‘You know what doesn’t rest easy with me?’
    Conrad shook his head.
    ‘Whoever did this wanted her found. They wanted her to wash up on Whitley Bay beach. If she’d been dumped far enough out at sea then she wouldn’t have floated to the surface. Add in the fact that it’s easy enough to weigh a body down so it permanently disappears.’
    Brady was worried. Something about this didn’t feel right.
    ‘Why did they want her found?’
    ‘I don’t know, sir,’ shrugged Conrad.
    Brady turned back to the body. ‘See the bruising on both her arms? Someone’s held her down. There’s finger marks on the upper part of her arms but also around her wrists …’ Brady paused as he stared at what was left of the victim’s hands.
    ‘We’ve searched, but again, nothing,’ informed Conrad.
    Brady carefully picked up the victim’s left hand and closely inspected the stubs of flesh and bone where her fingers should have been.
    ‘They’ve been cleanly cut off. Different to the neck. Probably garden pruners.’
    It was becoming more apparent that whoever had murdered her knew exactly what they were doing; without the victim’s fingers or head it was impossible to positively identify her. Unless, Brady mused, she had some other identifiable traits on her body; that and a missing person’s report to match. Otherwise, Gates had tossed a dead case his way. Brady’s gut feeling told him that Gates knew this case was sunk as soon as the headless body had floated to the surface.
    ‘No clothes, no jewellery, no plastic. No formal identification. Her fingers and head hacked off …’
    He suddenly realised something was wrong. Her breasts looked unnatural. The skin looked too stretched, too taut. He carefully lifted one of her large breasts and looked at the skin underneath.
    ‘Sir?’ Conrad, asked, curious.
    ‘Fake, Conrad. See the scar tissue underneath where she was opened up to insert the breast implants?’
    He was well aware of the statistics when it came to young women and anorexia and wondered if the victim was another casualty of society’s body fascism.
    Brady let his eyes drift slowly down to her flat navel and then further to her