Free The First Apostle by James Becker Page A

the big American fridge and found ham, bread and mustard, and made himself a couple of sandwiches and a pot of coffee to wash them down. When he’d finished eating he loaded the plates into the dishwasher and crept upstairs. Outside Mark’s bedroom he stopped and listened at the door. He could hear the sound of gentle snoring, so he knew the tranquilizers had done their job. He smiled briefly, then retraced his steps.
    Bronson had looked around the house that morning, but he wanted to check the property again. He was still worried about the “burglary,” and was sure he must have missed something, some clue that would reveal why the property had been broken into.
    He started in a methodical way, in the kitchen where the door had been forced, and then worked his way around the rest of the house. He even checked the garage and the two outbuildings where Mark kept the lawn mower and other gardening tools. Nothing appeared to be missing, and he could find no other sign of damage or forced entry anywhere in the house. It just didn’t make sense.
    Bronson was standing in the hall, looking up at the staircase where Jackie had fallen, when he heard the crunch of car tires on the gravel drive. He peered out the window and saw that a police car had pulled up outside the house.
    “You are Signor Hampton?” the officer asked in halting English, stepping forward and extending his hand.
    “No,” Bronson replied, in fluent Italian. “My name’s Chris Bronson and I’m a close friend of Mark Hampton. You’ll appreciate that the death of his wife has come as a severe shock. He’s asleep upstairs and I really don’t want to disturb him unless I have to.”
    The officer, seemingly relieved at Bronson’s command of the language, reverted to his native tongue. “I’ve been sent here to give Signor Hampton the results of the autopsy we carried out on his wife.”
    “That’s no problem,” Bronson replied. “Come on in. I can explain everything to him when he wakes up.”
    “Very well.” The policeman followed Bronson into the kitchen, sat down at the table and opened the slim briefcase he was carrying. He extracted a buff folder containing several typed sheets of paper, some photographs and diagrams.
    “It was a tragic accident,” he began, and passed two pictures across to Bronson. “The first photograph shows the staircase of the house, taken from just inside the hall. If you look here”—he took a pen out of his uniform jacket pocket and pointed—“and here, you’ll see two slippers on the stairs, one close to the bottom and the other nearer the top. And this one shows the victim’s body lying on the floor at the foot of the staircase.”
    Bronson braced himself to look at the image, but the picture wasn’t anything like as bad as he’d feared. Again, the photograph had been taken from just inside the hall, and had probably been intended only to show the position of the corpse in relation to the staircase. Jackie’s face was not visible, and Bronson found he was able to study the picture almost emotionlessly.
    “Reconstructing the sequence of events,” the officer continued, “it seems clear that she ran up the stairs but lost her footing near the top and her slippers fell off as she tumbled down the staircase. We found a small patch of blood on the banister rail with three hairs adhering to it, and the pathologist has matched those to Signora Hampton. The cause of death was a broken neck, caused by a violent sideways impact to the right side of her head with a blunt object. It seems clear that when she lost her footing on the stairs she hit her head on the rail.”
    Bronson nodded. The conclusion seemed logical enough based on the available forensic evidence, but he still had some unanswered questions.
    “Were there any other injuries on the body?” he asked.
    The officer nodded. “The pathologist found several bruises on her torso and limbs that were consistent with an uncontrolled fall down the