Through a Narrow Door Read Online Free Page A

He nodded at Tommy and Janine who’d arrived on the scene to listen to his initial statement.
    Once inside, Hillary could see that a patrol car had pulled into the allotments themselves, and was parked up on a wide grass road, which followed the line of the hedge around the perimeter of the lots. Inside the car, she could see two heads, one in front; one in back. ‘Janine, perhaps you can go and get an initial statement from him. Tommy, with me. Has the medical examiner arrived yet Constable?’
    ‘Not yet, ma’am.’
    ‘Thank you. You’d better stay here and look out for him, and SOCO. It’s an easy spot to miss.’
    ‘Ma’am,’ he said placidly. For a man who couldn’t have been called upon to attend the scene of many homicides, he was reassuringly calm and matter-of-fact. Hillary appreciated the type – content not to make promotion, but do the job well, collect his pay cheque, and go home to his wife and kids and garden – or whatever hobby he favoured. She wished there were more like him.
    It was not hard to spot the actual crime scene now, for it had been efficiently sealed off with blue-and-white ‘POLICE– DO NOT CROSS’ tape. There were seven allotments in all, five of which had sheds. The strips of land all looked to be thriving, with rows of about-to-be-dug new potatoes, and cheerfully flowering scarlet runner beans running up wigwams or rows of staked sticks, depending on the owner’s preference. The allotments, she noticed gloomily, were tucked well out of sight, being bordered on the road side by the thick hawthorn edge, and down at the bottom, by a more straggling row of native trees. Witnesses were probably going to be non-existent in this isolated and well-hidden spot. It was the allotment tucked in the far right-hand corner that drew her eye.
    A young lad was dead inside there, or so the constable had said. How young? She felt her stomach clench at the thought of a dead child. Of all the nightmares coppers faced in their careers, dead children were the worst.
    Tommy stood beside her, worriedly chewing on his lower lip, no doubt thinking the same. Hillary gave a mental shrug and told herself to get on with it. She glanced at the ground and sighed. It was dry and hard, no doubt due to the recent two days of bright sunshine. So, probably no chance of footprints or other useful evidence. The wide grass road lead straight down to the allotment, but she could see no signs of a vehicle passing this way. So the killer didn’t arrive by car. Or if he or she did, they parked on the road. She made a mental note to ask the uniforms to appeal for witnesses to any car parked nearby at the relevant time.
    She walked to the edge of the pathway, brushing up against the hawthorn, and indicated to Tommy to do the same. ‘We’ll walk down there and take a peek. Careful, SOCO won’t appreciate too much disturbance.’
    ‘Guv,’ Tommy said, carefully placing his big, heavily clad feet in her own smaller footsteps. The hedge behind him was a mass of white flowers that gave off a rather sickly smell, and Tommy felt his gorge rise. He swallowed hastily and told himself not to be a muffin. Since working with Hillary Greene this would be his fifth murder case, and he was notabout to blot his copybook now by upchucking on the broad bean plants.
    Hillary paused a little way from the shed and regarded it carefully before going inside. Most of the other sheds were the standard, tiny wooden shells that you either bought flat-packed and put up yourself, or had delivered, more or less ready-made and simply plonked down wherever it was required. But this shed was different. It was bigger and more raggedy somehow. It had the look of being cobbled together from odd planks of wood. Definitely a Heath Robinson sort of affair, it smacked of parsimony. Couldn’t they afford a proper shed? Was the victim’s family that hard-up? There was one small window, covered in grime and set slightly off kilter. There was no door facing