All the Rage (DI Adam Fawley #4) - Cara Hunter Page 0,79
applauded their work for the best part of a decade. But this is different: this time it’s close to home.
‘They’ve taken on the Parrie case – seriously?’ Her voice is a note or two higher than usual. The pitch of anxiety. And she’s breathing far too fast. This is not good.
‘Apparently his lawyers have approached them before but they’ve always turned him down.’
‘Until now,’ she says bitterly. ‘That means they’ll be looking at it all again – everything will be raked up and pored over. And then they’ll start looking at these new cases – all those similarities you keep going on about.’
That isn’t exactly fair, but how can I blame her.
‘They don’t have access to that information, Alex. Not about live cases.’
Which is true – for now.
‘And we don’t have post-mortem results yet on Sasha Blake,’ I continue quickly, before she has a chance to reply. ‘If we’re lucky, we’ll get something from that which will put paid to this Parrie crap once and for all.’
And stop the case review in its tracks before it even gets started. But what if all the autopsy does is prove that I’m wrong? Not just wrong right now, about these latest attacks, but wrong before. Wrong right from the start, when all this began.
What then?
* * *
Boddie cuts away the carrier bag and hands it to one of the CSI technicians to be tagged in evidence. She’s wearing a mask but Gislingham can see how shaken she is. As for Gis, he’s heard the phrase ‘beaten to a pulp’ a thousand times – he’s used it himself without even thinking. But he’s never seen it. Not really; not like this. From one side Sasha Blake looks almost normal, but from the other –
He swallows, glad – again – that Somer and Everett don’t have to see this. Half Sasha’s face has broken in under the weight of the beating, the eye socket shattered and slivers of bone breaking through flesh swollen and stained by river water. The Sasha he’s seen in her mother’s pictures, the Sasha they were all looking for – she’s never coming back. Boddie’s team’s ability to make the dead fit for the living to see is little short of legendary, but this – this is beyond even their skills to save.
‘That wasn’t just someone’s fists, was it?’ says Gislingham quietly.
‘No,’ says Boddie, training the light closer and bending to get a better look. ‘The cuts were made by a knife, but the blunt-force trauma was caused by something else. I assume you didn’t find any sort of weapon at the scene?’
Gislingham shakes his head. ‘Not yet.’
‘Then I’d look for something with edges to it. Something sharp but irregular. A piece of concrete, a rock – I’m sure you know what I mean.’
Gis gives an inward sigh. Something like that – it could have just been lying around on the riverbank. And if that’s what he used, what are the odds of finding it now?
‘I’m assuming we haven’t got a hope of DNA,’ he says, stifling the urge to retch. ‘The killer’s, I mean.’
Boddie shakes his head. ‘Afraid not. The water’s put paid to that. And not just DNA. Fibres, skin. Plaster dust.’ He raises an eyebrow. ‘Just by way of example, of course.’
* * *
‘Can you tell me – did he, you know –?’
Somer knows what she’s being asked. Fiona is staring at her now, with her hollowed, haunted eyes, begging to be told her fifteen-year-old daughter wasn’t raped.
‘There’s stuff online – people are saying it might be that Roadside Rapist – that he’s back. Please, tell me the truth – did he – I need to know –’
Somer bites her lip. Fiona thinks she wants the truth, but the truth won’t set her free. It’s a brutal one-way street leading only to grief.
‘No one’s told me anything,’ she says, even though she knows full well how Sasha was found. ‘It may be some time before we can be certain. But, believe me, there’s nothing to suggest it has anything to do with the Roadside Rapist. DI Fawley is absolutely convinced that man is in prison. Where he belongs.’
Fiona nods, the tears coming again. ‘It’s just that I’m not sure I could bear it, if – if her only time was like that – if that was the only –’
Somer reaches across and clasps the woman’s cold, dry hands. ‘Please – don’t torture yourself with maybes.’