Maxwell’s Ride Read Online Free Page A

over the old cottage hospital. A grim place where old ladies lay on trolleys in the corridors waiting patiently for new hips, and regretting having voted for Frank Dobson at the last election.
    Chief Inspector Henry Hall had never liked mortuaries. There was that indefinable smell, one that had never left him since DC, that antiseptic abattoir aroma that coated his nostrils and permeated the clothes. It was cold and metallic and sweet and sickly all at the same time. And there wasn’t a chrysanthemum in sight. Henry Hall was a graduate, a fast-track promotion candidate who’d done only six months on the beat rather than the customary two years, plodding at the time-honoured two and a half miles an hour. That changeable May morning he was in his thirty-sixth year. He’d done well; collars and commendations to his credit. The Chief Constable liked him, even the Lord Lieutenant knew who he was – and after the fifty-odd years of alcohol abuse that man had suffered, that was quite an accolade. But Hall wasn’t what you’d call a happy man. There were too many knives in his back, too many old timers on whom it grated to call him ‘sir’. Then there was his family. A wife and three kids, when he’d last looked. The eldest would be starting at Leighford High in September. Where had the years gone?
    At that moment, he was following the information given to him by Jim Astley, police surgeon, pathologist and professional bastard. Hall had been in this position before, his back to the morgue wall as the good doctor went about his business. Astley was, what, fifty-four, fifty-five, old enough, just, to be Hall’s father. Except that Hall’s father was a retired civil servant growing dahlias in the West Country. The doctor was dressed up all in green, ho, ho, bending over what used to be a person and occasionally he’d reach over to adjust his microphone or stretch to alleviate the constant pain in his back. In his weaker moments, when his wife had gone to bed with her Gordon’s and a Catherine Cookson, he sprawled on the sofa alongside the red setter and knew he was too old for all this. A dead man was reflected in his glasses.
    ‘A well nourished male,’ he was saying, for the benefit of Hall, the court and criminal posterity. ‘Caucasian, as we pathologists are obliged to say these days, mid-forties. Not overly endowed with hair.’ His eyes ran the length of the body. ‘Come to think of it, not overly endowed. Slight bruising to the arms, right and left. Forearms and upper. Large yellowing bruise on left shin. An old scar, probably a childhood injury, on the left side of the torso.’ He fumbled with his tape. ‘Nearly two centimetres long. In the thoracic region.’ Hall stood upright, waiting for the rest, like that moment in the Chancellor s Budget speech when he stops burbling bollocks and gets on to the relevant bit about screwing Joe Public with road tax, petrol, alcohol and cigarettes. ‘A large bullet exit wound, er … three centimetres left of the sternum mid-line, measuring two centimetres by … one and a half. Donald.’
    His assistant reached over and the two of them rolled the corpse onto its side and then onto its front. ‘Still showing signs of lividity,’ Astley noted, slapping the dead man’s buttocks with a fine disregard, ‘which I would expect at this stage. No signs of bruising anywhere. A bullet entry wound to the left side of the midline by … four and a half centimetres, nine centimetres below the nape of the neck.’
    Astley stood upright. ‘Take him, Donald, would you?’ He straightened, pinging off his rubber gloves and turning to Hall. ‘How are we, Henry?’
    ‘Marginally better than that poor sod.’ Hall watched as the assistant rolled his man back and slid him onto the steel trolley ready for his drawer. He was appalled to note once again that they really did tie luggage tags around cadavers’ big toes, like something in Jeffrey Dahmer’s bargain basement.
    ‘You’ve got