Free The Ring of Death by Sally Spencer Page A

foreigners.
    â€˜He was living locally, but originally he came from Oxfordshire, and had recently been a serving member of the armed forces,’ Paniatowski said.
    Mike Traynor raised his sweaty paw in the air for permission to speak, and Paniatowski nodded to him.
    â€˜Was there anything unusual about the crime?’ Traynor asked.
    â€˜We like to think that murder is always unusual,’ Paniatowski told him. ‘We’d be in a pretty poor state of affairs if it wasn’t.’
    But she was thinking, ‘Does he know anything the others don’t know? Has his snitch on the Force leaked the fact that Adair was naked, and was positioned on his hands and knees?’
    â€˜Yes, murder is unusual,’ Traynor agreed reasonably. ‘What I meant was, are there any particularly unusual circumstances surrounding this murder?’
    Did he know? Did he bloody know ?
    â€˜What is it you’re expecting, exactly?’ Paniatowski asked. ‘Evidence of witchcraft, perhaps? Nazi memorabilia scattered all over the area? Singed grass where an alien flying saucer landed?’
    â€˜Well, no,’ Traynor said uncomfortably, as the reporters on either side of him sniggered quietly. ‘I just wondered if maybe . . .’
    He didn’t know a thing, Paniatowski thought, with relief.
    Not a bloody thing.
    â€˜There are other aspects to the case which are unusual,’ she conceded, ‘but I’m certainly not prepared to release the details yet. Are there any other questions?’
    All the other reporters had their eyes fixed on Mike Traynor, waiting to hear what his comeback would be.
    Traynor himself seemed to be blissfully unaware of their interest – or of his own humiliation – and instead appeared to be casually lighting up a cigarette.
    But that was only on the outside. Inside, he was boiling with rage.
    He would fix this bitch good and proper, he promised himself. He would fix her if it was the last thing he ever did.
    The houses which made up Palmerston Terrace had been erected hurriedly, in the previous century, to accommodate the families who had abandoned the countryside in order to work in the booming cotton industry.
    Each house had been built with two rooms upstairs and two rooms down. The focal point of these dwellings had been the kitchen, in which a blazing fire – kept burning even during the summer months – served both to warm the cottage and heat the oven in which most of the cooking was done. The front room – the parlour – was reserved for weddings and funerals, until the family grew to such an extent that it was no longer possible to cram any more kids in the bedrooms upstairs, at which point it became an extension dormitory. There was a back yard which contained the washhouse and the cottage’s only tap, and a smaller building which the authorities referred to as the ‘sanitary closet’ and the people who actually used it called ‘the lavvy’.
    Over the years, the houses had been modified somewhat. Most of them now had an inside bathroom – at the expense of one of the upstairs bedrooms – and electric stoves had replaced the old coal-fired range. But the exteriors of the cottages had changed little, and any of the original inhabitants, staring up at them from the cobbled street, would have felt quite at home.
    No. 32 Palmerston Terrace was where Andy Adair had spent the last few months of his life, and so had ceased to be merely one house sandwiched in the middle of a row of identical houses, and had become the focus of interest of the police investigation.
    Not that there seemed much of anything to be actually interested in , DS Cousins thought, as he watched his team carefully combing through Adair’s personal effects.
    Adair had owned one good suit, two jackets and three pairs of trousers, all of which were hung neatly in the wardrobe. His socks, vests and underpants had been stored in drawers,