Unti Peter Robinson #22 Read Online Free

sighed. “A good detective always comes prepared,” she said, and returned to her car. She opened the boot, took out a torch and a pair of bolt cutters and approached the gates. She handed the torch through the fence to Gilchrist, and with one quick hard snip of the bolt cutters she snapped open the padlock, which clattered to the concrete. Then, with Gilchrist’s help, she pushed the gates open. They grated as they followed the semicircular grooves already etched in the crumbling concrete. They might not have been opened frequently, Winsome noted, but they had certainly been opened occasionally, and quite recently by the looks of the tracks.
    Gilchrist smiled at her. “Thanks for rescuing me,” he said. “I was beginning to feel I’d never get out of here.”
    Winsome smiled back. “You won’t. Not yet for a while.”
    Gilchrist turned. “Follow me.”
    As he walked toward the hangar entrance, the dog trotting by his side, his stick clicked on the concrete. Winsome could see by the way he limped that the walking stick was no affectation. What had happened, then? An accident? A war wound?
    Winsome paused in the doorway and took in the hangar. She imagined you could fit a few planes in here, at a pinch. She had no idea how many Lancasters or Spitfires there were in a squadron, or even if the hangar had been used during wartime. Her grandfather on her mother’s side had fought in the Second World War, she remembered, and he had been killed somewhere in Normandy shortly after the D-­Day landings. She doubted that there were a lot of fellow Jamaicans with him; he must have been very scared and lonely for his own ­people. A place like this made her think about such things.
    Gilchrist stood by an area of the concrete floor and the dog’s tail started wagging. Winsome went and stood beside him, taking her torch and holding it up, at eye level, shining the light down on the floor.
    On the patch of cracked concrete Gilchrist pointed to, Winsome saw a large dark stain shaped like the continent of South America. It certainly resembled congealed blood. There was a familiar smell of decaying matter, too. She squatted closer. Just around where Brazil would have been, she saw fragments of bone and gray matter stuck to the scarlet stain. Brains, she thought, reaching for her mobile. Maybe they were both wrong, maybe it was paint, or a mixture of water and rust, but now that she had seen it for herself, she could understand exactly why Gilchrist had been concerned enough to ring the police. It could be animal blood, of course, but a simple test would determine that.
    Winsome keyed in the station number, explained the situation and asked for AC Gervaise to be informed and for the forensics bloodstain analyst, Jasminder Singh, and DC Gerry Masterson to come out to check the blood at the hangar.
    THE LANE farm seemed a lot less grand than the Beddoes spread, Annie thought, as DC Doug Wilson parked behind a muddy Rav 4 outside the front porch, a cobwebbed repository for inside-­out umbrellas, Wellington boots and a ­couple of rusty shovels. The farmhouse was smaller and shabbier, with a few slates missing from the roof and a drainpipe leaning at a precarious angle, water dripping from the gutter. The yard seemed neglected, and the outbuildings were fewer in number. They looked old and in need of repair. One barn was practically in ruins. A ­couple of skinny chickens pecked at the wet ground inside their sagging wire coop. Annie doubted that Frank Lane had a Deutz-­Fahr Agrotron locked in his garage, if his garage even had a lock, and she wondered what the relationship between the two farmers really was. Beddoes hadn’t given much away, but surely Lane had to envy the newcomer’s obvious wealth? Or resent it? And was Beddoes patronizing or honestly supportive of his neighbors? Perhaps in their eyes he was merely playing at being a farmer while they were living the