Free Falling by Emma Kavanagh Page A

in her hair, twigs. It was matted, pulled at, as if something had tried to make a nest there. A curtain of blood, swathing her left ear, crawling down her chin, and he wondered if it had been a blow to the head that had killed her. Her left arm was flung out, white shirt hidden against the snow.
    The forensic team inched around her, struggling to erect the protective tent on the precipitous bank, pure snow churning to mud. The whine, flash and click, CSI lowering the camera, her face grim.
    “Jesus.” DI Nate Maxwell’s words were soft, barely audible.
    “Yeah.”
    It wasn’t a great place to dump a body. She would be found. In an hour or a day, hard to say in weather like this. But it seemed that they had made little attempt to hide it. More like they had made a nest for her, had lain her where she would be comfortable rather than leaving her on ice hard ground.
    Tom watched Libby, thought again that Libby was watching him. She looked like Cecilia. A little. Or maybe she didn’t. Maybe it was the snow and the blood and the death making him think of his wife. They had the same lips, full, wishful. Hair that waved, thick. Cecilia was darker. Or maybe this was just what happened when you went to a murder the day after your wife died and then didn’t.
    The CSI was leaning in closer now, zooming in on Libby’s face. Click. Snap. This way. Beautiful.
    A line of disturbance ran through the bracken, just to Libby’s left. Where someone would have walked, climbing their way down the embankment. Tom leaned over, chin out, assessing. Tough climb with a body. Especially when you could have dropped it, pushed her off the side, achieved pretty much the same result. But that hadn’t happened, someone had struggled down the bank. They had carried her to where she would rest.
    “How long before they get her out of here?” asked Tom.
    The DI shook his head. “They’re saying 24 hours. Maybe more.”
    Tom stared at Libby. Thinking that Death doesn’t always come where he’s expected. That sometimes your world shifts, and your brain begins to work, and already, without you even meaning to, it’s reordering your life, moving parts to fill up the sudden vacuum. And then, just as suddenly, stability reasserts itself, and everything goes back to just the way it was before, and you’re left feeling just a little bit out of time, like maybe you woke up in the wrong universe today. But it’s only because Death changed his mind. He visited somebody else instead.
    The DI cleared his throat. Shook his head. “Sorry, Tom. Tough one, this.”
    Tom still didn’t look at him, could hear the ragged edges to his voice, so let his gaze travel down the steep bank, onto the river, a knot of ice. “Yeah. Different when it’s someone you know.”
    The DI nodded, slowly, stubble grazing against his shirt collar. “Her father, good friend of mine. Jim, you know Jim?”
    “By reputation. I’ve heard good things about him.” Tom glanced down at his feet, almost invisible, the white suit buried in the snow. Not looking at Libby. Someone’s daughter now. And now, instead of Cecilia, he’s seeing Ben. “My father. He knew him.”
    “Of course. He would have done. I, I was there. This morning. Had to, ah…” DI Maxwell gestured towards Libby, still not looking at her. “Had to break the news.”
    Tom nodded, that sudden sickening thought of a heavy knock on the door. What it would be like to hear someone form those words. Your child is dead. Shaking his head, trying to concentrate.
    He looked at where Libby lay, the way her body had been half-hidden, brambles haphazardly uprooted, arranged across her torso, her legs. Falling snow doing the rest. The river ran past, sluggish, banks capped with ice. An inch or two away from her toes.
    “You see him much?” The DI had folded his arms across his chest, feet scuffling at the snow.
    “Boss?”
    “Your Dad. Get to see him often?”
    Tom shook his head. “No. Not much.”
    He scanned up from