Free A Matter of Blood by Sarah Pinborough Page B

chance of catching him if our minds work in some kind of synthesis.’ He paused. ‘Plus, I’ve been hankering after some time in London. I haven’t been back for a while, and all the better if it’s on someone else’s dime.’ He chuckled.
    ‘Well, any help you can give us will be greatly appreciated.’ The two men examined the pictures in silence. Cass had seen them before, briefly, when the case was still Bowman’s, and then in a hurried flick through of the file before heading home the previous evening, but this was the first time he’d really looked at them. Hask might already be seeking out clues, and evidence of method and similarities, but Cass wanted to see the people these bodies had been before their lives had been stopped so unexpectedly. He wanted to know them a little, to recognise them. He shivered, as if he felt the cold touch of their fingers on his.
    Jade Palmer, twenty-two, was the first to die, a week before her body was found in a boarded-up repossession two streets away from her family home just off St John’s Wood Road. The derelict house was only a mile or so from where Cass was standing now, and part of him was wishing the killer had struck in Newham first, and made all this someone else’s problem.
    Jade smiled up at him from the photo on the desk. Her thick shoulder-length hair was braided in cornrows, and the stud in her tongue glinted in the reflected shine of the camera flash. It was a healthy smile, full of life, but Cass thought he could see a hint of wary shadows creeping into the corner of her eyes where only a few months later a crazy man would plant fly eggs. Until her body turned up, found by some council housing officer inspecting just how much - or more probably how little - work needed to be done to make it habitable, no one had reported her missing. Apparently, she had a habit of just taking off, so none had been worried by her absence.
    With no permanent job and few qualifications that meant anything, it appeared that pretty Jade Palmer’s life consisted of taking up with one unsuitable man after another, drawn, like so many others, to danger and excitement without realising that there was always some kind of price to pay. Even though she would now be forever twenty-two, Cass thought echoes of those exciting, dangerous men had already made tracks on her soul. Downstairs some unfortunate constable was trawling through lists and hunting all those men down. Maybe one of her boyfriends had suddenly turned psycho - but Cass doubted it. He knew how those gangsta-boys liked to work, and it wasn’t like this.
    The photographs showed her decomposing body examined from all angles, her dignity stripped away by the flash of a camera. A close-up highlighted swollen eyelids, lips and tongue, not a result of any injury or beating but simply the efficient progression of nature. As soon as death had occurred, Jade’s silent body, already a busy little ecosystem, had gone into overdrive, the myriad tiny organisms working furiously inside her to recycle the nutrients contained within her carcass.
    The silver stud in Jade Palmer’s tongue stuck out in ironic mockery: a final ‘fuck you’ to a world that had finally fucked her. It was the only thing really recognisable on a body that had lost both shape and colour. He looked back at the smiling face captured in the first photo. This would be the image that would haunt him, not the dead thing below.
    Next to Jade was twenty-eight-year-old Amanda Carlisle. She was a curvy brunette with an unhealthy sheen to her skin. The photo had been taken in a pub and she had a cigarette in one hand and a drink in the other - some variety of lager or cider. Unlike Jade Palmer, she had a steady boyfriend, a truck driver, and a job as a waitress in an Islington café. She’d been there for the past two years and was known to be polite, friendly and punctual. Maybe it was the regular diet of fried eggs and chips that was responsible for the pale, greasy