Free One Penny Surprise (Saved By Desire 1) by Rebecca King

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    “She must have had help,” he groused. Had the man he had just chased left an accomplice behind to help Poppy with the body. “God, I think I have just been taken for an utter fool.”
    Barnaby clapped him on the shoulder. “What I want to know is why she has taken the body with her? She must be a really strong woman.”
    “She wasn’t. She was no bigger than a sprat; all slender curves and femininity.” Luke scowled at Barnaby when he lifted his brows and smirked. “How in the hell could she drag a dead man around the park?” Luke snapped. “She was struggling to carry that damned carpet bag of hers. She couldn’t hold that and drag a man the size of me, unconscious, wet, and a dead weight around a park without being seen. She just wouldn’t have the strength.”
    “She had help.” It wasn’t a question. “How big was she?”
    Luke turned to look at his colleague, stunned by the latest turn of events. “She was just average. Beautiful, but certainly not inclined to drag a body anywhere, even if she was strong enough to do so. I couldn’t even get her to help me search it. She was squeamish – or appeared to be anyway.”
    “She didn’t want to be left alone with the corpse. Maybe she didn’t want to be seen handling someone she had killed?” Barnaby shook his head and wondered what the hell Luke had gotten himself in to. “I thought you were after pick-pockets this morning?”
    “I was - am,” Luke snapped. “Right now, they are the least of my concerns. They aren’t responsible for the dead body. That body was aristocracy; and bigger than the pick-pocket gang put together.”
    “Did you get a good look at the face?”
    “Whose? Hers or the body’s?” Luke asked without thinking. He mentally winced when Barnaby’s smile widened.
    “Both. Either, but preferably the dead man’s. Just so we can match it up to any reports of missing persons. It would help.”
    Luke nodded. “I can draw them,” he said, and rubbed a weary hand down his face. He studied the path beneath their feet. Even the coins and bits he had dragged out of the dead man’s pockets had vanished. Everything had simply disappeared without a trace – as though they had never been there in the first place.
    Barnaby’s brows shot upright. “We need to focus on the pick-pockets, Luke. Terrence Sayers is a deep concern of everyone, you know that,” he warned his colleague quietly.
    “I know,” Luke replied crisply. “But right now we have a missing corpse. The body of a man who had been murdered this morning because he was still warm when I dragged him out of that river. Not only that but we also have a missing woman too. The pick-pockets were here. They were pestering the woman when I found them. I chased them across the park when the woman screamed.”
    “As far as I know they don’t kill. They just pick-pocket,” Barnaby warned. “Although they are violent, as far as we are aware they haven’t been known to kill.”
    “The pick-pockets I saw wouldn’t be able to do such a thing. They were barely old enough to reach my chest. They wouldn’t have the power, or the motive.” Luke described the youngest pick-pocket he had chased, and very nearly captured.
    “Yet they outran you,” Barnaby coughed around a smile.
    “That damned woman screamed,” Luke protested. He knew his friend was baiting him but was too busy battling his temper to pay much attention.
    “Were the pick-pockets a diversion to allow the killer to get away? Was the woman working with them do you think?” Luke’s eyes met Barnaby’s. “Until we can unravel this then we have to assume that all the incidents are linked. The woman has to be connected to the body in some way, and one or either of them has to be linked to the pick-pockets. We can’t just ignore the possibility. We were the only ones in the park this morning, aside from the person in the woods who I chased out onto the high street.”
    “And lost,” Barnaby