The Borgia Ring Read Online Free Page A

bring in your own blend if you prefer, Chief Inspector.’
    ‘Don’t worry, I will,’ he said, and handed the cup back to Turner. ‘Dispose of this … please.’
    Hughes smiled and perched on the corner of his desk. ‘So, what’ve we got?’
    ‘The man could have been killed just before he gate-crashed the rave, ma’am, and certainly no earlier than one-thirty according to Jones.’
    ‘But how on earth did he end up there?’
    ‘Sheer fluke. Inspector Grant interviewed the owner of The Love Shack. He’s being very co-operative, of course. A couple of my boys have been all over the house and the outbuilding. The club, if you want to call it that, was originally an air-raid shelter. It was extended in the seventies and used as a storeroom. A couple of years back, the owner was talked into converting it into a music venue. Got in some cowboys by the look of it … an old chimney has been widened and connected up as two air-vents. Whoever pushed the body into the opening on the roof probably thought it was a disposal chute. They could never have dreamt the corpse would end up in the middle of a packed dance-floor.’
    ‘So …’
    ‘So I’m heading over to Pathology, to see what Dr Jones has come up with.’ Pendragon was pulling on his jacket and following Hughes to the door. At the end of the corridor they could see Turner with two constables. The sergeant was doing a passable impersonation of Pendragon refusing the machine coffee. They were all wearing big grins. Turner glanced around, saw Pendragon and Hughes and immediately straightened up. The uniforms slipped away. Superintendent Hughes turned to Pendragon with a barely discernible smile. ‘Not a bad mimic really, is he?’

By 9.15 the streets were aglow with orange light. It was obvious the day was going to be another hot one. The thermometer hadn’t moved below 25 degrees all night and now it felt like a summer morning in the south of France. Even the usually grey surroundings of Mile End Road sparkled today. Amazing what a bit of sunshine could do, Pendragon thought as they pulled out of the station and turned on to the main road.
    Turner drove and they sat in silence. Pendragon watched the sun-bleached shop fronts and the stained, graffiti-covered walls, metal garage shutters and broken guttering flash by. He thought how odd it all looked; as if London had suddenly been shifted a couple of thousand miles south. The strains of ‘Summertime’ played in his head. Traffic was light. Within a few minutes they were passing through a narrow entrance into a car park. A rectangular sign on the wall of a squat brick building read ‘Milward Street Pathology Unit’ under the Metropolitan Police crest, blue on white.
    They found Dr Jones outside the front entrance. He was drawing hungrily on a cigarette, the ash falling into his fulsome beard. He barely reached Pendragon’s shoulder.
    ‘Banned from my own building,’ he said as the two policemen strode up to the doorway.
    ‘Quite right too,’ Pendragon responded. ‘Funny. I wouldhave thought opening up corpses all day would have put you off the fags.’
    Jones gave a dry laugh then coughed. ‘Fuck, Pendragon! It’s precisely because I cut open dead people that I don’t give a toss. You end up in a place like this either way. Come on, I’ve been here since before dawn with this one.’ He squashed the cigarette underfoot and shouldered open the door.
    The pathology lab was like any other, anywhere. There were two rooms. The smaller one was the morgue. It was lined with steel drawers from floor to shoulder-height. The other had blinds at the windows, workbenches arranged in an L-shape along two walls, racks of test tubes and sundry pieces of chemical equipment. Two stainless-steel dissection tables with drain-off trenches and power hoses stood along the back wall. Between the tables were two trolleys. On top of these, a set of shiny steel dishes. Overhead, a stark fluorescent strip. The concrete floor