In Too Deep (Knight & Culverhouse Book 5) Read Online Free Page A

said, smiling. ‘There is a witness, by the way. The woman’s four-year-old daughter. She’s too upset to interview at the moment, but she went to a neighbour’s and told them what had happened. The neighbour says the woman’s called Tanya. He doesn’t know her surname but says her husband is called John. We can have the house searched for ID once the front door area’s been cleared by SOCO.’
    ‘No other witnesses?’
    ‘Not that we’ve found. Uniform have spoken to a few neighbours and the first they heard was when the first response car turned up. I’m not quite sure how you manage to bludgeon a woman half to death on her front doorstep without anyone seeing or hearing you, but there you go.’
    ‘The mind boggles, Dr Grey,’ Culverhouse said. ‘So she’s up at Mildenheath General now?’
    ‘Yep. Specialist brain unit. Lucky she lives in Mildenheath, really. Otherwise she’d be on for a long helicopter ride.’
    ‘You know, Dr Grey, you never cease to amaze me,’ Culverhouse replied. ‘That’s the first time I’ve ever heard anyone say they’re lucky to live in Mildenheath.’

7
    M ildenheath General Hospital was a place Wendy had seen quite a lot of in the past couple of years. Aside from the usual work-related visits, it was where her brother, Michael, had been taken following a drugs overdose, where she’d been told she’d miscarried her baby and where her colleague Luke Baxter had died.
    She wasn’t keen on hospitals at the best of times, but the positive attitude of the staff at Mildenheath General always gave Wendy hope, though how they managed to remain cheerful despite the constant pressures they were put under, she had no idea. As was the case with most areas of the public sector, the government were continually provoking, intimidating and constricting what they were able to do, their budgets shrinking and workloads growing by the day. Regionally, quite a few hospitals had reduced their services or merged them into other hospitals. For some there had even been talk of closure, and Wendy was sure it wouldn’t be long before that option was touted for Mildenheath.
    Mildenheath’s accident and emergency department was one of the busiest in the region, primarily due to its location near two major motorways and an airport, as well as being on the edge of the growing urban sprawl of Mildenheath itself. There were other hospitals within easy driving distance, but Mildenheath had the unfortunate advantage of being closest.
    One of the hospital’s most impressive facilities was that of the specialist brain injury unit, which was what Wendy was attempting to find as she wandered the corridors of the hospital, trying and failing to follow the confusing and contradictory signage.
    Culverhouse had gone into the office to assemble the investigation team and get things moving on a practical level, leaving Wendy to speak with the doctors and try to ascertain what had happened based on the medical facts. Depending on what was uncovered in the early stages of the investigation, it could be necessary for a uniformed officer to be stationed on the ward for the protection of the patient, so the young male officer who’d first arrived at the scene, PC Stuart Easton, had accompanied her to the hospital. Based on what Wendy had seen in terms of the aftermath of the attack and the apparent ferocity of it, she felt pretty sure that the attacker had meant to kill Tanya, and her experience told her that anyone determined enough to try to bludgeon someone to death on their own front doorstep wouldn’t let something like failure stop them from trying again.
    For now, though, that would have to wait. PC Easton had been summoned by the A&E receptionist to deal with an unruly customer in the waiting area — something a number of Mildenheath’s beat officers spent a large portion of their weeks dealing with.
    Finally, after a lot of corridor wandering, Wendy found her way to the specialist brain injury unit on the