The Trespasser Read Online Free

Sophie Miller sticks her head out. Sophie has big brown eyes and a ballerina build and makes a hooded white boiler suit look some kind of elegant, so a lot of people try to give her shit, but they only try once. She’s one of the best crime-scene techs we’ve got, plus the two of us like each other. Seeing her is more of a relief than it should be.
    ‘Hey,’ she says. ‘About time.’
    ‘Roadworks,’ I say. ‘Howya. What’ve we got?’
    ‘Looks like another lovers’ tiff to me. Have you called dibs on them, or what?’
    ‘Better than gangsters,’ I say. I feel Steve’s quick startled glance, throw him a cold one back: he knows me and Sophie are mates, but he should also know I’m not gonna go crying on my mate’s shoulder about squad business. ‘At least on domestics, you get the odd witness who’ll talk. Let’s have a look.’
    The cottage is small: we walk straight into the sitting-slash-dining room. Three doors off it, and I already know which is what: bedroom off to the left, kitchen straight ahead, shower room to the right of that – the layout is the same as my place. The decor is nothing like, though. Purple rug on the laminate flooring, heavy purple curtains trying to look expensive, purple throw artistically arranged on the white leather sofa, forgettable canvas prints of purple flowers: the room looks like it was bought through some Decorate Your Home app where you plug in your budget and your favourite colours and the whole thing arrives in a van the next day.
    In there it’s still last night. The curtains are closed; the overhead lights are off, but standing lamps are on in odd corners. Sophie’s techs – one kneeling by the sofa picking up fibres with Sellotape, one dusting a side table for prints, one doing a slow sweep with a video camera – have their head-lamps on. The room is stifling hot and stinks of cooked meat and scented candle. The tech by the sofa is fanning the front of his boiler suit, trying to get some air in there.
    The gas fire is on, fake coals glowing, flames flickering away manically at the overheated room. The fireplace is cut stone, fake-rustic to go with the adorable little artisan cottage. The woman’s head is resting on the corner of the hearth.
    She’s on her back, knock-kneed, like someone threw her there. One arm is by her side; the other is up over her head, bent at an awkward angle. She’s maybe five seven, skinny, wearing spike heels, plenty of fake tan, a tight-fitting cobalt-blue dress and a chunky fake-gold necklace. Her face is covered by blond hair, straightened and sprayed so ferociously that even murder hasn’t managed to mess it up. She looks like Dead Barbie.
    ‘We got an ID?’ I ask.
    Sophie lifts her chin at a table by the door: a few letters, a small neat stack of bills. ‘Odds are she’s Aislinn Gwendolyn Murray. She owns the place – there’s a property-tax statement in there.’
    Steve flips bills. ‘No other names,’ he says to me. ‘Looks like it was just her.’
    One look at the room, though, and I can see why everyone figures this for boy-beats-girl. The small round table in the dining area is covered in a purple tablecloth; two places laid out, white cloth napkins in fancy folds, the gas flames twinkling in china and polished silver. Open bottle of red, two glasses – clean – a tall candlestick. The candle is burned down to nothing, drips of wax stalactited on the candlestick and spotting the tablecloth.
    There’s a wide splotch of blood on the fireplace surround, spreading from under her head, dark and sticky. None anywhere else, as far as I can see. No one bothered to lift her after she went down, hold her, try and shake her awake. Just got the hell out of Dodge.
    Fell and hit her head, the caller said. Either it’s true, and Lover Boy panicked and did a legger – it happens, good little citizens so petrified of getting in trouble that they act squirrelly as serial killers – or he helped her fall.
    ‘Cooper been