The Body of a Woman Read Online Free Page B

particulars.’ He knew that Littlejohn’s sharp ears could pick up their asides. Anything jokey over the mortuary slab had to be of the pathologist’s own sardonic honing.
    Littlejohn looked up now, electric saw in hand. ‘Splendid idea,’ he said lightly. ‘Get me a Saturday Telegraph while you’re at it, there’s a good lad. And have them put it in a carrier bag for you, otherwise all the supplementary bits drop out.’
    He swung the magnifying spotlight closer over the chest aperture.
    â€˜Which brings me - if you others are quite ready for it - to the innards.’

Chapter 4
    Saturday, 12 June
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    Yeadings might not know her name, but she had known his. He was widely remembered in Mardham because of the murder inquiry two years before when briefly the dozy little Buckinghamshire town hit page one of the tabloid press. The invasive police presence had been at the same time vaguely unnerving and yet a reassurance. She had been reminded of a nature film where a school of sharks swam with silent menace through a shivering mesh of smaller fish: immediate danger suspended but the threat ever present.
    By sight the main four members of CID had become familiar to her, three continually darting into crevices after titbits while their chief finned blandly around soaking up the atmosphere. She had watched him one morning gazing wide-eyed, into the pastry cook’s window, savouring the smell of fresh-baked bread like any hungry schoolboy; and again leaning chummily with the old codgers on the river wall, wreathed in a communal blue haze as they puffed out pipe smoke against the midges. He had seemed the sort of big, slow-smiling man you could too easily find yourself opening up to.
    The morning he had appeared in the shop he was still driving the same green Rover and had parked it by the kerb to come in for chocolates. Briefly she’d wondered who the lucky lady they were intended for was, but mainly, while she made up his order, she had questioned whether she dared speak to him of a personal worry which nagged at her.
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    What decided her against it was Rita’s being present, with
her sharp ears and her even sharper taste for fabricating scandal out of nothing. And perhaps not exactly nothing in this case.
    But anyway the opportunity was lost because the instant he had paid for the chocolates her customer was off. Later that was something Leila would regret.
    She stayed on at the shop a further half-hour until Maggie arrived to relieve her. That was a drawback in running a small-town business, this reliance on part-timers for staff. Housewives were dependable up to a point but their families came first; whch meant she was never entirely free herself. As well as retaining a financial interest and keeping the books, she was obliged to stand in as dogsbody to cover gaps caused by ailments, music lessons and the dentists’ appointments of other women’s children. Which stung her the more because she was childless herself.
    She was fond of her teenage stepson and stepdaughter. In a curiously detached way they, she believed, returned their own, but inadequate, kind of fondness. There was a time when she had hoped that the arrival of a baby would bring new warmth and closeness to weld them all into a real family; but in that she’d failed, never becoming pregnant despite various efforts at medical intervention.
    It hadn’t seemed to trouble Aidan. But then why should it? He had proved himself twice over, had already done with breeding and moved on to alternative interests almost totally scientific and academic, leaving her shamed as infertile and deficient. It didn’t help one’s self-esteem.
    Within her husband’s professional circle she sensed herself regarded as a social accoutrement and little else, hardly a person in her own right and certainly an intellectual lightweight: almost like something inadvertently picked up on a shoe.
    Once, she sadly thought,