Free Double Dealing (Detective Sergeant Catherine Bishop Series Book Two) by Lisa Hartley

pond itself beyond it. It was about the size of an average swimming pool, the water greenish-grey and still. The grass around the edge was short and trampled, but longer grass grew around the far side. Several trees surrounded the pond, a large fallen branch lying half in, half out of the water. Constable Lawrence stood about ten metres away, her hands tucked under her armpits, her breath visible in the freezing air. Catherine couldn’t see the body. The stocky figure of Mick Caffery, easily recognisable despite the protective suit, stood a few metres away talking to three members of his team.
      ‘You okay, Emily?’ Catherine called as they approached.
    Emily Lawrence looked up and nodded a greeting. They were silent as they moved closer, almost reverent. Emily realised she was blocking their view and stepped away.
      On the far bank, lying on her side, propped against the trunk of another fallen tree was the dead woman. She was naked, her skin mottled. Her long blonde hair, tangled with pond weed, tumbled over her shoulder, covering her breasts. Her stomach gaped, a terrible wound that looked like raw meat but colourless, anaemic. And her face . . . Catherine swallowed, fighting the almost irresistible urge to close her eyes. Knight took a shaky breath beside her and Catherine reached out a hand and rested it on his shoulder for a second, as much for her own comfort as for his. Emily Lawrence was pale too, biting the inside of her lips, but keeping her back straight and her chin up. Catherine wanted to go to her, to tell her that this was the worst she would ever see, even though it wouldn’t be true. She knew only too well that there was no limit to the horror people could inflict on each other.
      The woman’s face had been obliterated. The bones of her face were pulverised, the flesh a churned mess of blood and tissue.
     

17
     
     
     
     
    ‘I’ve asked them to set a tent up over her,’ Mick Caffery said. He nodded towards two members of his team who were leaving the area. A third had started taking photographs of the body. ‘I’m not hopeful of finding too much because of the conditions, but we’ll do our best.’
      ‘Do you think she was killed out here?’ Catherine asked, though she had a good idea what Mick would say. His eyes twinkled at her for a second above the face mask he still wore.
      ‘Do you, Sergeant?’
    Catherine glanced over at the body again, before saying, ‘No.’
      ‘I’d be inclined to agree, but you know how it goes. We’ll need to wait for the pathologist. Is she on her way?’
      ‘I’ll call her now,’ Knight said, taking his phone from his pocket. ‘I’ll also request some uniforms so we can get a fingertip search started, okay, Mick?’
    Caffery nodded, then carried on speaking as Knight moved away.
      ‘If she wasn’t killed here, she must have been dragged or carried. There’s no way a vehicle could have been brought near. I’ve already established that the widest path leading from the car park to the pond here should be our common approach path. There’s no way we could get our equipment down any other way, they’re barely big enough for one person.’
    With a frown Catherine asked, ‘Doesn’t that mean that the same path is the most likely way of whoever dumped her here getting in though?’
      ‘It looks to me as if she’s been dead for a couple of days,’ Mick said. ‘If that’s so, we’ve no way of knowing yet when she was brought here. Any number of people could have walked down that path in the meantime. I’m not hopeful of finding much in the way of evidence out here, so it’s important that we preserve the body as best we can and hope the post-mortem gives us more clues. I’m fairly confident that the path we’re using wasn’t used by whoever brought her; there are few snapped branches and signs of trampling on another of the paths which leads from a side road. Maybe they didn’t want to leave their vehicle in the car