Free A Painted Doom by Kate Ellis Page B

Angel. Thank you.’
    Wesley put it back in the drawer. It was probably from a girlfriend of his … or even from a fan. He resumed hissearch and discovered two photographs nestling underneath a pair of neatly folded black boxer shorts.
    Wesley took them out and examined them. In the first a pretty, fair-haired young woman holding a bonny-looking baby smiled
     out at the camera. Wesley turned it over and found the words ‘to my darling Jonny with love from your Liz and William’ written
     in neat square handwriting on the back.
    He returned it to the drawer and studied the second: a group of young teenagers on the cusp of adulthood. The scenery looked
     local. He recognised the shore at Derenham with a huddle of cottages in the background. The children, three boys and a girl,
     were frozen there in the fuzzy, anaemic hues of the early colour photograph, enjoying a perpetual summer.
    A holiday snap. Happy times. His parents had similar photographs featuring him and his sister, Maritia, now a junior hospital
     doctor in Oxford. It was the sort of photograph found in the forgotten drawers of most houses in the land. Somehow Wesley
     had never thought of rock stars as having happy, innocent childhoods, but here was the evidence. He assumed that one of the
     boys in the picture must be Jonny, probably the dark, lanky lad at the end of the group. For a split second he experienced
     a deep sadness that a carefree, innocent young boy sitting with friends on a Devon beach could, years later, end up lying
     in a damp field against a hedgerow with a bullet through his brain.
    But his boss’s voice distracted him from these thoughts of mortality. ‘Come on, Wes. I’ve not found anything out of the ordinary,
     but we’ll get someone to give the place a good going-over later. I found some estate agent’s details – that place called the
     Old Vicarage in Derenham; Ray Davenport mentioned it.’
    ‘Well, he was house-hunting. Anything else?’
    ‘I couldn’t see an address book and there’s nothing to say if he was married or if he had any kids or other family.’
    ‘I found a picture of a young woman with a baby in hisdrawer – could be his wife and kid, I suppose.’
    ‘But there’s no sign of them round here, and we need a positive identification of the body. How about the two old dears next
     door?’
    ‘Good idea,’ said Wesley. ‘We’ll pay them a call on our way out.’ He thought for a moment. ‘Where’s his car?’ he said rhetorically.
     ‘It isn’t here and it wasn’t parked near where he was found. The neighbours said he drove a yellow sports car: not easy to
     miss. Where is it?’
    ‘It’s bound to turn up eventually – unless it’s been nicked.’ Heffernan looked at his watch. ‘We’ll call next door, then we’d
     better get back to Tradmouth. The post-mortem’s in an hour. You wouldn’t think an attractive young lass like that Dr Kruger
     would want to go round cutting up dead bodies, would you?’ he mused. ‘You’d think she’d want to be a GP like your mum or work
     in baby clinics or something.’
    Wesley smiled and said nothing. As many female officers at Tradmouth police station had discovered, Gerry Heffernan wasn’t
     the most politically correct of creatures. But Wesley knew that there was no malice behind his unfashionable opinions. And,
     unlike many colleagues Wesley had come across in the course of his career, Gerry had never treated him any differently because
     of the colour of his skin and came down hard on any that did: he’d had sharp words with Steve Carstairs on more than one occasion.
     But Wesley feared he might find it difficult to convince Laura Kruger of his virtues, especially if they were late.
    He began to make for the door, looking around to make sure that everything was as they had found it.
    ‘What the hell’s that?’ Gerry Heffernan’s urgent question made him jump.
    Wesley looked round. The small leaded window near the fireplace was blocked by a dark