Free Dead End by Cynthia Harrod-Eagles

this planet. His brown hair was very long and straight, and he wore it in a pony-tail down his back tied with a leather thong. He also wore earrings, tiny gold star-shaped studs, and had a faint Birmingham accent, which may or may not have accounted for the other strangenesses. He was as different in looks from Freddie Cameron as could be, right down to the denims he wore under his lab coat and rubber apron; but true to his species, he was sucking a peppermint when Slider and Atherton walked in. All corpses smell: it’s only a matter of how much.
    ‘Hullo,’ he said cheerfully. ‘Are you the Investigating Officer? I don’t think we’ve met before.’
    Slider introduced himself and Atherton. ‘Freddie usually does my posts.’
    ‘Oh, the ineffable Freddie! Great bloke. Where is he, then?’
    ‘On holiday. Antigua, I think.’
    ‘Blimey, he must be doing all right. A long weekend in Selly Oak is all I can run to.’
    Slider smiled. ‘This could be a turning point in your career, carving a big celeb.’
    ‘Yeah, I do nice work. I’ll give him a pretty scar.’ He turned briskly to his assistant. ‘Okay, let’s have him over.’
    With the trained strength of hill rescuers, they flipped the body over onto its back, and suddenly the likeness of Sir Stefan Radek was before Slider’s eyes, the familiarity of the hawk-nosed face, but an unfamiliar colour, and unmistakably dead. Only the white hair, flying and silky, looked alive – as indeed, in a way it still was. The flesh looked not like flesh, but like some extremely realistic plastic; the old-man’s body, blue-white and hairless, shamefully naked, exposed in this final humiliation, was not him, exactly, but like him, as, say, a Spitting Image puppet is meant to be. Gaunt, grotesque, veined of arm and yellow of foot, it waited for the knife and the ritual disembowelment.
    James surveyed it thoughtfully. ‘Funny, I saw him conduct only last year, in Birmingham. Took my mum and dad. He looked like a sort of god up there, waving his arms about.’
    ‘Sic transit,’ said Atherton.
    ‘And then some,’ James returned reverently. ‘And talking of transit, come and have a look at this. I’ve read about ’em, but I hadn’t actually seen one before. Look, it’s your exit wound. See that?’
    While not necessarily wanting to have it personalised, Slider had a particular interest in the exit wound. ‘I didn’t think there was one.’ He bent closer. There seemed to be a scratch-like abrasion, v-shaped in form, in the flesh padding the waist on the right side. ‘Is that it? It’s just a couple of scratches.’
    ‘Ah,’ said James, as though it were a personal triumph, ‘but look at this.’ He took up a probe and, inserting it into the apex, gently retracted a triangular flap of skin. ‘There’s your exit wound, see? As I said, I’ve read about this in the manual, but this is the first time I’ve actually handled one. It happens when the bullet’s lost so much velocity, it only just has the force tosort of plop out through the skin; and the skin, being naturally elastic, springs back together and hides the hole. It must have been fired at extreme range.’
    ‘I think it was,’ Slider said. ‘It must have been about sixty feet. So what happened to the bullet? We thought it was still inside.’
    ‘It was in his underpants. We found it when we stripped him. Here,’ and he reached over to the side table and picked up a plastic bag, in which the nasty little object reposed. ‘You’ll want to send that off to ballistics. Chris Priest’s your man. Tell him Laddo sends his best. We’ve often worked on the same shooting. We were both at Nottingham in our palmy days.’
    ‘Laddo?’ Slider queried out of a fog of thought.
    James made a face. ‘My mother had me christened Ladislaw. What would you have done? A cruel thing to do to a helpless little babe in arms, I always thought. And talking of arms, did you notice the left hand? Nice little example of