Free Frozen Charlotte by Priscilla Masters Page B

than met the eye. To her the entire story was unconvincing. Alice Sedgewick was holding something back. She could read it in her eyes.
    Monday morning, 7 a.m .
    Martha was woken by the alarm radio. She stretched out her hand to still it. She couldn’t cope with the news at this hour. She ought to retune it really so she was wakened by Classic FM or Radio Two but somehow she never quite got around to it. She had enough to think about. Work. Sukey to school. Another couple of days and Sam would be returning to Liverpool for a medical examination by the team’s doctor. Agnetha had offered to drive him back which suited Martha. She anticipated a busy week ahead with the poor weather. She expected plenty of slips and spills which in the elderly or vulnerable could so easily prove fatal. As a coroner she could never forecast what the week would hold and sometimes, on a Monday morning, she lay in bed for ten minutes and wondered, even sometimes tried to see into the near future. Hers was an interesting role, her job to tidy up after death. It wasn’t always possible and that was where her work could become difficult. But when she did ease suffering for the bereaved she could honestly say it fulfilled her.
    Detective Inspector Alex Randall was at his desk by eight thirty a.m. A tall, spare man with a craggy face and deeply penetrating hazel eyes which normally were grave and serious, sometimes even a little sad. But occasionally they could light up with amusement and transform him into an attractive man in his early forties. He spent half an hour reading through Talith’s preliminary reports then put in a call to the coroner’s office.
    Martha arrived at her office at a little after nine. And the first thing she noticed was that Jericho Palfreyman, her assistant, was waiting to ambush her, wearing what she called ‘that look’ on his face. A sort of suppressed excitement which told her some drama was afoot. He was a grizzle-haired man, Dickensian both in his looks and demeanour, even down to the habit he had of rubbing his dry palms together when intrigued. Jericho was one of those souls who had probably looked old from the age of thirty and hadn’t aged for the last twenty-five years. Martha simply couldn’t imagine him as anything but grey-haired, with slightly bowed shoulders which meant he usually looked up into people’s faces, giving him a slightly creepy look. He took a ghoulish delight in his job and squeezed out every last detail of sensational cases. His pleasure was exponentially increased if he learned of them before Martha so he was the one to inform her .
    And this was just such a case.
    ‘Good morning, Jericho,’ she said and waited, deliberately not prompting him.
    Jericho rubbed his hands together. ‘I’ve just had a call from Detective Inspector Randall, ma’am,’ he began then paused, wanting her to ask him what the inspector had wanted. It was a sort of cat and mouse game, a procedure he wanted to follow.
    Martha sighed. ‘Yes, Jericho?’
    ‘He’s investigating a most strange and mysterious case,’ he said, pausing for a fraction of a second to extract the maximum satisfaction before he spilled the beans. As usual he spared Martha no detail, adding a few extra twirls of his own. ‘She’d wrapped the little girl in a pretty little pink blanket and then drove all the way to the hospital with it on her lap.’ His eyes gleamed. ‘On her lap, mind.’
    She couldn’t resist a little leg-pull. ‘Really, Jericho, and how did they know all that?’
    Jericho was unperturbed. ‘She must have done, mustn’t she, ma’am. I bet she didn’t have a car seat.’
    ‘Well, we’ll soon find out,’ she said. ‘Thank you very much for all that, Jericho,’ she said. ‘So the body is now at the hospital mortuary?’
    ‘That’s right, ma’am,’ he said. ‘They’re waiting to do the post-mortem. Detective Inspector Randall wants you to ring him the very minute you arrive.’
    ‘Then I must do so,