Trial by Fire Read Online Free

wood into sections for searching, throwing ideas and instructions over his shoulder, and Amanda would remember them all, watch, and learn. She was only there to learn, would never miss a single scrap of knowledge or let past her sharp blue eyes the slightest opportunity for making a quiet contribution.
    She would be as she always was, his calm, efficient shadow, earning trust. It never occurred to her to wonder if she actually liked Bailey, or any of her colleagues. Amanda's concentration was streamlined. Her own feelings were irrelevant, suspended as Bailey arrived and greeted Dr Vanguard as an old friend. Both their cars were parked crooked, and she wondered why, on such respectable salaries, they drove such shabby vehicles.
    The team assembled like the cast of a play, Bailey leading and Vanguard following, as daylight grew sharper, the signal for a hot day. More speed, said Vanguard. The sooner we get her out the better. Police Constables Bowles and Peters rose stiffly from camp chairs as the rest arrived in single file, not deviating from the footpath, as Bailey had told them.
    Photographers, exhibits officer next with bags, labels, gloves, tweezers, strolling behind the ambulancemen, who were the only ones talking.
    Às I said, Fred, it ain't really my turn to do this shift.'
    `Never mind,' said Fred. Ordinary grumbles in the mist.
    The searchers, combers of undergrowth, pickers of detritus, carriers of bags, would follow, foot soldiers behind cavalry.
    Vanguard never seemed to mind the dirt. He who had waded into stinking Thames mud to recover half-submerged limbs, who had pulled a leg away from a hip joint in a cesspit, found this dry earth relatively innocuous. He knelt by the grave and began uncovering the form beneath the soil with all the care of an archaeologist, sweeping away handfuls of leaves with systematic energy until the shape emerged. The photographer recorded each stage of the process. The others watched from either side as the figure came into focus, lying straight with legs uncrossed, face turned flat against the earth as if refusing to watch what was being done.
    She was recognizably female in limbs if not yet in detail, and as Vanguard's hand dusted the face, Amanda could not suppress the rising nausea, glanced at Bailey, and maintained calm against her shiver of disgust. The face was discoloured green and black, alive with bright white maggots twisting in the cavities of empty eye sockets, active in the distended nostrils, full of hideous and indignant movement in the eyes and lipless mouth where their destruction had exposed teeth bared in an obscene grin.
    Bailey wondered why they had attacked the face first, what dreadful lack of mercy; render to earth what must be rendered, but first distort, make unrecognizable what was once so human, may have been beautiful. No greater damage than the face; apart from the half-chewed hand without fingertips, the limbs were intact, stained like green marble, but whole.
    No doubt the larvae would have found the other orifices, liquid, vulnerable private parts.
    Amanda turned her head away as pathologist and assistants lifted the body on to the plastic sheet laid ready to receive it. She was ashamed for the woman's nakedness, knew disgust and contempt for one found in such condition, almost an acute dislike for the dead, resented her own squeamishness and the constant struggle to suppress it.
    Thank God Vanguard would not be taking his vaginal and anal swabs here: they would be spared that sight until the thing was finally devoid of all humanity on the postmortem table. In the haze of her own disgust, holding her breath to avoid the stench, feeling her skin itch as if the larvae had attached themselves, Amanda shook her senses, forced herself to look harder.
    She was not there to feel pain, noted the gash on the forehead, the gaping throat. Well. They would soon know better. The exhibits officer collected larvae from the face, put them in a bag without a word,