The Body of a Woman Read Online Free

to the lab.
    â€˜Nothing as yet, sir. She looked to be heading for a really wild night out. Likely its survivors won’t be stirring yet, let alone sobered up enough to count heads and find her missing.’
    Survivors, Yeadings considered. Like himself Mott had assumed she was bound for some mega-rave. Recall of her outlandish appearance struck him as even more bizarre by the light of day. She’d dressed for a decidedly exotic brand of nightlife. So where could such have been provided?
    Obviously at some distance from where she was found, because no one would choose to dump a corpse in their own back yard.
    But if the body was discovered without noticeable rigor in Shotters Wood at 11.28pm, she’d not had time to deck herself out and travel far. Bizarre parties of the kind he suspected were unlikely to get going much before midnight. Maybe these ‘survivors’ - ravers, musicians, smack merchants, whatever - would at most have noticed that she hadn’t turned up. Which meant they’d be in the clear, with nothing more to survive as yet than the usual after-effects of alcohol and amphetamines.
    So, in mentioning fellow revellers, was Mott already considering collusion in a ritual killing? Even black magic - an arcane satanic ceremony requiring a sacrificial victim?

    Certainly the corpse’s masking brought to mind some kind of Comus rout. But in that case the ceremonies would surely have been more protracted and the corpse not released until dawn.
    Â 
    Professor Littlejohn was prompt on the job. When the team arrived they found the body naked under a partly turned-back sheet, toe-tagged and spotlit, ready waiting. Either refrigeration had been minimal or thawing had been started early.
    Yeadings had a word with the pathologist as he stood shaking talc into his latex gloves to ease them over his bony fingers. Then he went over to where the merciless lights shone brightest. The team’s other three shuffled aside, making room for him to stare down on the dead face.
    That should have been his first sight of it, but, even distorted by a hideous death and shorn of its dark, hennaed hair, it was one that, with sudden shock, Yeadings realised he knew.
    He couldn’t put a name to her, but he had watched her, alive, for several minutes; spoken with her. She wasn’t any chance customer of PARTY FUN but the older saleswoman there. She was the dark-haired one who had served him, fastidiously, with Sally’s chocolates; was possibly the shop’s manager.
    He moved the sheet to expose the hands. Any jewellery had been removed and bagged, together with the clothing, but on the left-hand fourth finger a paler indentation showed where she had previously worn a ring. Somewhere there could be a husband who had woken up a widower this morning.
    Yeadings stared at the scratched black enamel on the fingernails. He remembered the earlier butterscotch shade glinting through the translucent gloves as the manicured hands lifted each chocolate singly and nestled it into tissue paper in the little gilt casket. Now the slender wrists were rubbed almost raw by the chafing of bonds.

    It shook him, the pathos of it. Alive she had seemed so elegantly in charge: a breathing, likeable person reduced now to the official police description - “the body of a woman”.
    He turned to Mott. ‘Have we a name yet?’
    Apparently they hadn’t. He let Littlejohn drone out her physical particulars into the mike clipped on his rubber apron: ‘Body, female, between twenty-five and thirty-two years of age; height five feet six inches; weight one hundred and thirty-three pounds; well-nourished but slender; in apparent good health - apart, as DS Beaumont might say, from being dead.’
    Perhaps the killer had done well to replace the mask because, whatever else Littlejohn was to find, she had died from garrotting with a sharp ligature. The features were cyanosed and distorted, eyes staring, purple