Behind Dead Eyes (DC Ian Bradshaw #2) - Howard Linskey Page 0,1
waxworks dummy. In a final brutal act, the tops of her fingers had been snipped off with pliers to prevent the collection of prints.
Thankfully, these horrific injuries had all been inflicted post mortem. According to the report, the cause of death had been strangulation with a ligature of some kind. The victim would have had no knowledge of the gruesome things done to her to erase her identity. This might be some small comfort to her family but, since they would probably never be able to positively ID the body, tracing them seemed an unlikely prospect. In the absence of teeth, they’d had to resort to scientific analysis of the bones in order to put an approximate age to the corpse, which was estimated at somewhere between fifteen and nineteen years of age, according to the experts. This was all to do with the amount of cartilage present in the joints of the limbs, which transforms into bone as a body develops. The corpse was not yet fully matured, so they were attempting to identify a relatively young woman.
The body had been found three months ago, following a tip-off about illegal goings on at a scrapyard with suspected links to some of the region’s shadier ‘businessmen’. The officers who attended had hoped to find drugs or money, but figured they would more than likely have to settle for stolen goods or perhaps the discovery of a hot car awaiting the crushing machine. They didn’t expect to find a body. They certainly weren’t ready for one missing its face.
Predictably, the guy running the scrapyard swore he knew nothing about the body found at the back of his premises. The place was a vast out-of-town site with cars piled up all round it, so a heap of dead bodies could have been hidden in one of its messier corners without anyone spotting them. It didn’t stop them giving the guy a thorough going over.
He had no idea why anyone would dump a body at his scrapyard.
He had not been asked to dispose of it.
He had no clue as to its identity, nor did he ever hang out with known criminals.
Nobody believed him of course. Nathan Connor was a shifty and feckless loser with a minor-league criminal past, presumably granted custody of the yard for those very reasons. He would do as he was told without asking questions, but was he actually a killer? It seemed unlikely and, aside from the fact that he oversaw the yard where the body was dumped, there was nothing to link him to the murder.
Efforts to trace his employer proved frustrating. They were able to interview one other man who was described as the owner but under questioning from the police he couldn’t remember too much about the place. It wasn’t long before he was dismissed as a front man, whose name was on the door and ownership papers, with no actual involvement in the day-to-day running of the enterprise, which was ideal for laundering cash and ridding its real owners of awkward items like a body. The detectives gave up trying to get anything more out of either man and they were released on police bail. The threat of a lengthy prison sentence was not as frightening a prospect as grassing up whoever really owned that scrapyard.
Usually senior detectives in Durham Constabulary vied with one another for murder cases. They were rare in these parts and a successful conviction would be a feather in the cap that could ultimately lead to promotion. However, an unidentifiable victim meant the usual enthusiasm for a murder case was absent.
The Detective Superintendent placed responsibility for the case with DI Kate Tennant, a newly promoted outside-transfer who was the only female detective on the force with a rank higher than Detective Constable. She was also bright enough to realise she had been stitched up like a kipper. Nothing in those intervening months had altered Tennant’s view, even if she steadfastly maintained an outward conviction that her team, which included DS Bradshaw, would ultimately solve a case that saw them plodding through a seemingly endless number of box-ticking enquiries for more than three months, with nothing in the way of concrete leads.
How could they hope to solve this murder, Bradshaw wondered for the umpteenth time, if there were no witnesses, nothing from the usual public appeals, zero intelligence from sources in the criminal world and they could not even identify the victim?
‘What are you doing?’ he hadn’t noticed DC Malone’s approach until