Through a Narrow Door Read Online Free Page B

her, which meant she’d have to go around the side. She glanced once more at the ground in front of her, bending down to check the grass more thoroughly . Although she could make out flattened areas where someone had trod – probably the father, and maybe even one or both of the uniformed officers responding to the call – she could make out no tread patterns that might prove useful, and satisfied that she wouldn’t be causing any damage, carefully stepped out to the opposite side of the path and made her way around the far side of the shed.
    The entrance stood open. She wouldn’t call it a door, as such, for there was no handle or latch, and it comprised barely two planks of wood crudely nailed together. A piece of string had been looped through a natural hole in the wood, and she could just make out a rusted hook screwed into the other side of the entrance, where it could be tied off. The gap between was very narrow and, as she suspected, it looked dark and gloomy inside. She moved forward, careful to keep her hands in her pockets (the policeman’s mantra at any crime scene) and peered inside. To enter, she’d probably have to turn sideways and edge in like a crab.
    She could smell dust and compost, and a not unpleasant aroma of antiquity, and at first could see only the usual junk associated with such places. Wheelbarrows, old and disused,the latest and newest model to the fore. Standing around the walls, long, tall, poking things: rakes, hoes, spades, forks. On the uneven flooring, bags of fertilizer, a big bale of string and … with a start, she suddenly saw him. He was sitting on a sack stuffed with something hefty.
    Hillary took a deep breath, and waited for the usual wave of pity to pass over her. She blinked as her eyes accommodated themselves to the gloom. He was a big lad, but not fat, with dark hair and what she thought might be blue eyes. He might be as old as an under-developed sixteen, or as young as a well-developed thirteen, it was hard to tell. He was dressed in dark blue tracksuit bottoms and a T-shirt. The logo was hard to make out, mostly due to the fact that he had a pair of garden shears sticking out of his chest. The dark stain of blood had pooled into his lap, but very little had made it to the floor. And from that alone she surmised that his heart must have stopped beating almost instantaneously. She hoped so anyway, the poor little bugger.
    He looked … surprised, Hillary thought. At least there was no sign of horror or awareness on that young face, still filled out with puppy fat. She backed out of the opening, motioned Tommy to take a preliminary look as well, and glanced around.
    Directly behind her was the straggly line of trees. Mock-orange blossom, she thought. The usual ubiquitous elder. No thorn trees though. Through the gaps in the branches, she caught sight of a scruffy paddock, more thistles and dock than grass. And another strand of rough trees just beyond that. It had the look of derelict land, a real rarity in this day and age, when any piece of land going to waste was promptly built upon.
    ‘I can hear a car, guv,’ Tommy said, dragging his gaze away from the murdered boy and looking back towards the gate.
    ‘Let’s go,’ Hillary agreed, taking the same careful route back. Back at the barred gate, she smiled as a slight anddignified figure stepped carefully on to the grass path. Doctor Steven Partridge must be approaching his mid-fifties by now, but he looked and dressed like a thirty-something reject from Howard’s End . Today he was wearing impeccable cream-coloured trousers with a crease that could slice bread, and a white, probably silk, shirt. Gold glinted discreetly from cuffs and the watch on his wrist. His hair was carefully dyed a becoming dark brown, and was smoothed back with some kind of aromatic hair oil.
    He looked up and spotted her, and smiled with genuine pleasure. ‘Hillary. So it’s one of yours.’
    ‘Yes, ’fraid so,’ she agreed ruefully, and,