The Death Pictures Read Online Free Page A

cliché, but I’m worried the guy could strike again,’ Adam continued. ‘He did something very odd in the house, which makes me think this is just the start. I need a broadcast to warn women and to get out the description we’ve got to see if anyone recognises him. Can you get something on air for me?’
    Dan paused, could imagine Lizzie interrogating him about the story. Who can we interview? What pictures can we show? He knew what she’d want, but didn’t know how to tell Adam.
    ‘Dan? You there?’ The phone buzzed with the detective’s anger. ‘We’ve got to get this bastard.’
    ‘Yes, I’m here, mate,’ Dan replied. ‘We can probably help you, but there’s one problem. We have a policy of not doing too much crime. There’s so much of it about we could easily fill the programme every day and leave the viewers scared witless. We just tend to do the major stuff, and only then if we can talk to the people who are really affected. And in this case, that’d mean talking to the victim.’
    He heard a hiss of breath over the humming of the phone line.
    ‘Is she up to talking, do you think?’ Dan continued. ‘We could make her anonymous. I know it sounds daft, but we’d need to hear from her what effect it’s had.’
    Silence, a couple of clicks on the line. Dan could imagine Adam squeezing the phone in his grip.
    ‘She’s in a dreadful way,’ the detective said finally. ‘But she’s trying to be strong. She’s already talking about not letting him beat her and saying she’ll help us all she can. I think she might be up for it. I’ll have a chat when I go back in to see her. I’ll call you later.’
    She seemed swollen with her suffering. Her face red, blotched, streaked and stained from the tears. Her head hung loose, lifeless, as though she couldn’t find the strength to support it. Her eyes were narrow lines from the endless tears and flinching as she revisited her torment, again and again. One of her hands hung over the stark, sterile white of the hospital sheets, a fiery diamond lightly gracing the wedding finger, a glittering contrast to her hunched darkness. Her fiancé had been traced, was on his way down from Birmingham and he dreaded the man’s reaction when he arrived, dreaded her seeing it too. He’d find a different woman to the one he’d loved.
    Adam could sense the freeze spreading inside her, the shrinking of feeling before it, the blossoming of fear and mistrust in its wake. He’d seen it before, with Sarah, seen what it did to her. A life tainted in one sickening, uncontrolled, attack. She could act a smile now, years on, but she could never feel it.
    Rachel would be the same. She would survive, physically recover, allowing friends and family to enthuse about how much better she was looking. They’d all try to instil life back into her. But it was what it did to you inside, the severing of the fragile bond with humanity. No one would ever know that but Rachel. She and the small band of fellow sufferers who’d been violated by a man’s sexual rage.
    Adam turned away again, looked out of the window, west, to the sun settling on the springtime fields of the Tamar Valley. Shadows stretched ever longer over the amber glow of the patchwork land. He hardly registered its beauty.
    He clenched a fist, breathed out slowly through tightened lips, allowed himself to enjoy a fantasy he knew would stay with him until the case was over. It was how it had been with the other rape investigations. Tracing, chasing, tracking and cornering this man, not the metallic clunk of the handcuffs, but instead his fist planted in the rapist’s face, his knotted knuckles, beating, pounding, time and again, then the hard leather heels of his shoes stamping, pummelling, feeling the dull crack of a skull and smelling a spurt of blood, grinding him into oblivion.
    He would get him. Adam almost whispered it to himself. He would. Twice before he’d faced these cases, renowned as some of the most difficult