Free Fifty Two Weeks of Murder by Owen Nichols Page B

blood spatters. Helen saw a leather wallet peeking out from a pocket and asked Ben to photograph it before removing the wallet and passing it to Anders. She took a tablet from the forensics bag and tapped in the name on the driving licence, scrolling through the details until she had what she needed.
    “James Smith. Owns this shop. Married to Janice Smith and a father to Mitch, who lives at home. I’ll get Abi and Lucy to go round their place.” Mal nodded, his eyes drawn to the corpse. The way the arms were slumped to the sides and the legs splayed out meant that he could simply have been resting were it not for the savage damage done to his head. He let out a deep breath and his features hardened.
    “This is the first entry we know of. We need to solve this quickly, before peoplefolk go thinking it’s ok to enter this damn competition. Most people are killed by someone we know, so I want everyone checking and interviewing anyone that has links to him. This much blood doesn’t scrub off easily, so there’ll be traces. We’re still searching Buckland’s properties for any sign of him and I’ll leave Barry on that.” He pinched the bridge of his nose and lifted his head to ward off the tiredness.
    “This is what we do, why we were formed. Why we’re a self-contained unit that doesn’t need to wait months for forensic analysis. This is also why we don’t fuck up.” Pep talk over, he left to coordinate the uniformed officers and get SC+O onto the site to help process the evidence more quickly. He knew that if this case went unsolved, it would give others the push to try and make their own entry. Regardless of Buckland’s motives or justification, five million pounds went a long way to overcoming any moral quandary about murder.
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     

Chapter 10
    Anders put Aaron to bed and left some food in the oven for Cassie, who was on a late shift at her café. Exhausted, she poured herself a glass of red wine and made her way to the workroom, stealing some chocolate from the fridge as she passed. She mused that it was a good job she did so much exercise or she’d regret the recent lapse into chocolate binging her return to England had started.
    She carried a large bag of papers that Jesse had printed off for her and sat crossed legged in the middle of the room. It had been a long day. Processing a crime took months. From finding evidence at the scene, interviewing witnesses, notifying the family, carrying out the autopsy and analysing toxicology reports, the whole process took time, not the forty minutes a TV show would take. Though they could analyse much of the data in their own lab, it was still a laborious task. Leads had to be followed, suspects interviewed, alibies checked, evidence trails followed, rechecked and new avenues pursued.
    The team had worked hard, Lucy and Duncan following up on leads as Anders helped with the physical evidence. Mal had used his rank to get SC+O support and had enlisted officers from the Met into collecting more data. All told, more officers had worked on this case in the last twenty hours than had worked on all the murder investigations in the previous year combined. McDowell had called in many favours to get a resolution quickly and, as she sat on the floor, Anders started to comb through the evidence, glad that any request from her division automatically took priority in any other department. At the same time, she had “A Feather on the Breath of God” playing softly through a docking station for her phone.
    Reading through the evidence, she placed the papers around her when she was done, a physical manifestation of the mental construct that she was building. Anders’ laptop would chime frequently as more evidence was sent to her. She printed these off and added them to her construct.  
    Blood spatter analysis. The blows came directly to the top of the skull, an even arc of blood blooming around the shop floor and