Piece of My Heart Read Online Free

in Leeds. During his brief examination at the scene, Dr. O’Neill had been able to tell Chadwick only that the wounds almost certainly had been caused by a thin-bladed knife and that she had been dead less than ten hours and more than six before the time of his examination, which meant she had been killed sometime between half past one and half past five in the morning. Her body had been moved after death, he added, and she had not been in the sleeping bag when she died. Though stab wounds, even to the heart, often don’t bleed a great deal, the doctor said, he would have expected more blood on the inside of the sleeping bag had she been stabbed there.
    How long she had lain elsewhere before she had been moved, or where she had lain, he couldn’t say, only that the post-mortem lividity indicated that she had been on her back for some hours. From an external examination, it didn’t look as if she had been raped–she was still, in fact, wearing her white cotton knickers, and they looked clean–but only a complete post-mortem would reveal details of any sexual activity prior to death. There were no defensive wounds on her hands, which most likely meant that she had been taken by surprise,and that the first stab had pierced her heart and incapacitated her immediately. There was light bruising on the front left side of her neck, which Dr. O’Neill said could be an indication that someone, the killer probably, had restrained her from behind.
    So, Chadwick thought, the killer had made a clumsy attempt to make it look as if the girl had been killed in the bag on the field, and clumsy attempts to mislead often yield clues. Before doing anything else, Chadwick commissioned Enderby to get a team with a police dog together to comb Brimleigh Woods.
    The photographer did his stuff and the specialists searched the scene, then bagged everything for scientific analysis. They got some partial footprints, but there was no guarantee that any of these were the killer’s. Even so, they patiently made plaster of Paris casts. There was no weapon in the immediate vicinity, hardly surprising as the victim hadn’t died there, nor was there anything in the sleeping bag or near her body to indicate who she was. A lack of drag marks indicated that she might have been moved there before it rained. The beads she wore were common enough, though Chadwick imagined it might be possible to track down a supplier.
    Some poor mother and father would no doubt be wringing their hands with worry about now, the same way he had been wringing his about Yvonne. Had she been at the festival? he wondered. It would be just like her, the kind of music she listened to, her rebellious spirit, the clothes she wore. He remembered the fuss she had made when he and Janet wouldn’t let her go to the Isle of Wight Festival the weekend before. The Isle of Wight , for crying out loud. It was three hundred miles away. Anything could happen. What on earth had she been thinking?
    For the time being, the best course of action was to check all missing persons reports for someone matching the victim’sdescription. Failing any luck there, they would have to get a decent enough photograph of her to put in the papers and show on television, along with a plea for information from anyone in the crowd who might have seen or heard anything. However they did it, they needed to know who she was as soon as possible. Only then could they attempt to fathom who had done this to her, and why.
     
    The darkness deepened the closer Banks and Annie got to Lyndgarth. It looked as if the wind had taken down an electricity cable somewhere and caused a power cut. The silhouettes of branches jerked in the beam of the car’s headlights, while all around was darkness, not even the light of a distant farmhouse to guide them. In Lyndgarth, houses, pubs, church and village green were all in the dark. Annie drove slowly as the road curved out of town, over the narrow stone bridge and around the bend another