Free Damned by Logic by Jeffrey Ashford Page A

that was the point of his job after all.
    Cloverdean, a brick bungalow in a two-acre field ringed by a semicircle of woods, was fronted by a lawn and flower beds. Sergeant Cathart checked that the outer front and back doors were locked, so he used a skeleton key to open the back one.
    The inside of the bungalow made even he express surprise. On the walls of the larger bedroom hung pornographic photos and drawings and on the ceiling, above the king-sized bed, was a large circular mirror. This was obviously to accommodate Melanie’s form of entertaining, but elsewhere the house had been ransacked and had certainly been made unfit for further socializing. The contents of cupboards and drawers had been emptied on to the floor, the mattress ripped open, pillows cut and the feathers strewn everywhere. The other rooms were as chaotic. Chair seats had been torn, books pulled out of a small bookcase, the TV set ripped open as had been the DVD player, empty disk covers and disks thrown around; in the kitchen, the oven had been attacked, jars and bottles littered the floor, many of them broken and their contents forming a sludge; in the dining room, the smashed contents of a display cupboard lay in a heap. A survey of windows and outside doors was made to determine whether entry had been forced or the intruders had been let in. The interior of the lock of the back door, viewed with the aid of a light probe, showed that it had been forced.
    Glover arrived shortly before the SOCO team had finished their work. Cathart met him at the front door. ‘The place has been turned into a junkyard, sir.’
    â€˜Vandals?’
    â€˜Could be, but I’d say more likely someone searching for something.’
    Glover went inside. Anne frequently called him untidy; the contents of the bungalow would show her what that word really meant. ‘Have you recovered any notebooks, phones, computers, anything with addresses or telephone numbers?’
    â€˜All that sort of thing has been put on one side for a full examination, but I’ve made a very brief check and didn’t come across anything that looked interesting.’
    â€˜Memory sticks or disks?’
    â€˜Just lots of CDs and DVDs with their empty cases all over the place.’
    He went outside through the back door. Here, there was no garden, only rough grass, recently cut. A quick movement caught his attention and a squirrel ran up the trunk of a tree and disappeared behind the leaves. He began to pace the ground. Vandalism or a search? Vandals were more likely to have left obscene messages or, lacking spray cans, thrown the bottles of jams, chutney, etc at the walls. Chaos would have been similar, but the form of it different. That the computer had been left marked a search for something which wasn’t in the form of information. What had Melanie Caine, an upmarket tart, possessed which provoked that search and, it seemed reasonable to surmise, her torture before she was murdered?
    The answer – or part of it – to his question was waiting in Glover’s office. A note on his desk recorded a call from Interpol. A report had been received from the inspector general of Internal Security in Lebanon. Having learned of the death of the English woman, Melanie Caine, he would advise the English Constabulary that she had been suspected of smuggling illegally mined, uncut diamonds from Sierra Leone, but had managed to escape detection prior to her departure from Beirut on MV
Helios
. The English authorities had been advised before the arrival of the ship, but the suspect had been found not to be in possession of diamonds.
    Glover addressed the window. ‘Why the hell does it take someone in Lebanon to tell us? Was everyone here fast asleep?’
    He left his room, found Frick’s was empty, continued on to the general room. That was equally empty. He went over to the noticeboard under which was a movements book, listing the time at which a person had left and