Dead Silent Read Online Free Page B

trained the light on it. It ran around the top of his tongue and disappeared down the sides. String.
    ‘Bill, look at this.’ She peered at the top of his tongue and made out a knot in the string. ‘The killer tied the old man’s tongue,’ she said. ‘I’m pretty certain Leonard Lawson knew his killer.’
    ‘The attention to detail?’ asked Hendricks.
    She stepped back, looked at the whole scene again. ‘And I don’t think the killer acted alone.’ Now that the initial shock was ebbing, the detail started to amaze her. ‘It’s too complex. The staging of the body. The strobe light. The use of mirrors.’
    Outside, the wind whipped through the street, sent a can rattling along a gutter and filled the house with what sounded like a painful dying breath.
    Clay phoned Karl Stone and he picked up immediately.
    ‘Jesus,’ said Stone. ‘I got the picture. Who or what are we looking for?’
    ‘You’re on the nail, Karl,’ replied Clay. ‘Dig up an address book, scraps of paper, anything. Look for any contacts of Leonard Lawson’s or his daughter’s, Louise. Anything to report?’
    ‘He stuck the glass pane back into the door at the point of entry.’
    A narrative rolled through Clay’s mind. He? They? They came in through the kitchen door, walked up the stairs, entered Professor Lawson’s bedroom, killed him, set him up in the corner like a hunted and trapped beast, set up a strobe light, took the only picture from the wall, walked back down the stairs and out of the house. How long? Fifteen, twenty minutes? Most of the work took place post-mortem. If they’d simply killed him, they’d have been in the house less than two minutes.
    She took out her iPhone and took three photos of the wall behind Leonard Lawson’s body. She texted the images to Riley, with a message: Gina, please ask Louise what the picture was in her father’s bedroom.
    ‘What are you thinking, Bill?’
    ‘The words medieval and torture . Motive. Sex? No. Money? No. It’s a revenge killing. This is the work of a highly intelligent and sophisticated monster. Looks to me like they are sending him to hell.’
    ‘We’re looking for someone human but uniquely inhuman.’ She laughed, suddenly, bitterly and, as quickly, fell silent.
    ‘What’s so funny?’
    ‘The way the body’s staged, it’s going to be a nightmare to move.’ As she spoke, she felt lightheaded and hot, as if she’d stepped into the heads of the perpetrators. ‘From a forensic point of view. How are we going to get Leonard Lawson’s body to Dr Lamb in the mortuary without corrupting the evidence?’

7
3.00 am
    The first of her senses to stir in the darkness was hearing. The woman heard the sound of hissing and, in the loop between wakefulness and sleep, imagined a snake winding through the gloom towards her.
    Light. In two lines. One vertical, where the curtains hung with the narrowest parting, and one below her bed, at the base of the bedroom door. The door led into the hall of their flat, with the bathroom at the end of it, where the hissing came from, the hissing of jets of water.
    The woman pictured the shower head and the lines of red-hot water cascading down his body. She didn’t know how her husband stood such fierce heat.
    The bedside table held three items. An alarm clock; it was three in the morning. A bottle of sleeping tablets. A novel about a good woman escaping a bad marriage.
    Her husband coughed as the hissing jets of water died. She imagined the tropical conditions in the bathroom, the clouds hanging in the air, condensation running down the walls and mirrors, pools forming on the floor.
    But her head was muddy with Zolpidem and to challenge him – ‘Where have you been while I slept?’ – would involve talking and she didn’t want to hear his voice.
    His footsteps came closer to the bedroom door; her dread increased with every one.
    The bathroom she could face in the morning.
    Again.
    He stopped at the bedroom door and she wondered why he