The Killer Inside Read Online Free Page A

in attending Carl Kelly’s post-mortem. It was obvious from the questions Detective Sergeant Les Willis asked that he regarded the investigation as a waste of his time. As far as he was concerned a convicted drug dealer had died by his own hand – and good riddance. Whether it was suicide or an accident really didn’t matter. Nor did the fact that the drug Kelly had injected had been smuggled into the prison. Megan got the message loud and clear: to DS Willis, that was the governor’s problem, not theirs.
    So she was the only person, other than the pathologist, to be in on the examination carried out in the hospital wing of the prison. Alistair Hodge was an old acquaintance of hers. She had watched him dissect the bodies of several murder victims, all female, but she had never seen him perform a post-mortem on a man.
    ‘I’m surprised to find you here.’ He glanced at her across the shrouded body, his broad Scots voice echoing round the bare walls.
    Megan gave him the official line about her research. There was no reason to suspect that Hodge would go telling tales to Malcolm Meredith but there was no point taking any risks: for all she knew they could be golfing pals. ‘I certainly never expected to find myself at a scene of death while I was here,’ she added. That was enough to justify her presence, if that was what he was after.
    ‘Well,’ he chuckled, pulling on a pair of thin latex gloves,‘I’ve done so many post-mortems here in the past six months I’m thinking of renting myself a cell. Hell of a place, isn’t it? Not surprising the poor bastards keep topping themselves.’ His silver-rimmed spectacles caught the light as he pulled back the sheet covering the body. ‘This one looks like a happy chappy, though, doesn’t he?’
    Once again, Megan found herself staring at the evil, open-mouthed grin on Carl Kelly’s face. She looked away. The only way to take a dispassionate look at the dead man was to hold her hand up in front of her, allowing a view from just the nose up. His eyes were large and blue and the cheeks were plump. The hair was dark brown and short-cropped, slightly spiky. He bore more than a passing resemblance to Robbie Williams. She dropped her hand and immediately her eyes were drawn back to the mouth. It seemed to exert a horrible fascination. It was impossible not to look.
    ‘Tetanic spasm,’ the pathologist said as he moved around the head, inspecting it from various angles. ‘Not uncommon in heroin addicts.’ There was a pause as he ran his eyes over the rest of the body. There were tattoos on each arm, one in blue of an oriental dragon and another in green of a bare-breasted mermaid. ‘This is interesting.’ Hodge was staring at a small purple bruise on the dead man’s left thigh. It was the mark left by the syringe that had still been in the vein when Megan, Dom and Fergus had found the body.
    ‘What?’ Megan moved closer, bending her head to inspect the bruise. The smell of tobacco smoke and rancid sweat seemed to have followed Carl Kelly from the cell.
    ‘There are no other bruises. No other evidence of injecting.’ Alistair Hodge’s eyes met hers for a second before scanning the body again.
    ‘So he wasn’t a regular user?’
    The pathologist shook his head. ‘Doesn’t look like it. Bit of bad luck, that, overdosing on your first time.’
    ‘And unlikely,’ Megan said, ‘because one of the other inmates told me he’d been a regular user in the past. He must have known what he was doing.’
    ‘Also unlikely that he’d have developed tetanus.’ He raised his head and pushed his spectacles back up his nose. ‘It takes time to kick in. Even if the needle he used was dirty, if this was the first time he’d injected in a long while…’ He tailed off, the corners of his mouth turning down as he glanced at Megan.
    ‘Could he have got the tetanus some other way?’ she asked. ‘From a cut or something? I mean, the conditions in this place are not exactly