Free Fletcher by David Horscroft Page A

was an afterthought, spawned from fury.
    I wanted Valerie to take a look.
    I donned the glove and scrummaged around the chest cavity again. The flesh sloughed off in slimy chunks, revealing more and more of the ribcage. Deep grooves everywhere: I counted at least twelve. Twelve slashes; two vertical ones (possibly the initial assault) and ten from side to side. Whoever did this had stamina and strength in plentiful proportions.
    I took more shots. I really wanted Valerie to take a look.
    I checked his wrists and ankles: no ligature marks. While on my haunches, I noted scratches on the linoleum, forward from each of the feet of the chair. I muttered into my recorder—“Chair shifted, possibly as the body fell into it”—and moved on.
    Mysteries within mysteries. Importantly, this shifted the focus of my investigation heavily. Follow the fury, find the feelings. The murder of Alastor Cartwright brought a lot of anger into the picture. It would have been a crazy coincidence for the murders to be unrelated; I was fairly convinced that a third party was the link.
    Again, more questions were raised. I originally assumed that Alastor had been bought off or silenced due to something he’d seen. This spoke of something different, a brutal rage directed at the old man. I didn’t know where the motive was in the three deaths; was the intention to kill the wife, Cartwright or the shooter himself? What was the connection?
    Another discrepancy jumped to mind. Everything looked like a brutal attack—maybe with a machete—but I needed Valerie to look at a specific spot on the ribcage. At this spot the bone shattered inwards, hairline cracks radiating out from a central point. It didn’t look like a hacking wound; rather, it looked like a puncture.
    The strange injuries and the scratches on the floor swam around my thoughts. I took the gloves off and searched the rest of the house. The phone sat on the kitchen counter, battery dead. I decided to take it. Hopefully his final communications could reveal something about the situation.
    This seems a little too convenient.
    I didn’t like how the phone was just lying on the kitchen counter. It felt staged to me, in the same way that an actor might see through the work of a colleague and view it as menial and overdone. Through the veil of brutality and violence I could feel the stare of an intelligent creature, but exactly how intelligent I did not know. After some deliberation, I lifted the notepad by the landline and spent some time collecting papers from the desk and the trash. This killer—or killers?—might have forgotten to factor in the old-fashioned nature of his—their?—target.
    The mystery of the locked door was solved on my final sweep. Shiny grooves and recent scratches on the hinges showed how the apartment had been entered. The door had been unscrewed and lifted completely out of place.
    This no longer felt like a one-man job. The equal doses of rage and forethought, and the mechanical obstacle of quietly unhinging a door, spoke of at least two or three others. A surgical revenge killing? I tried not to over-speculate.
    Another ten minutes had flitted by through my musings. I wondered what to do with the body, but quickly realised that it was of no importance to me. I punctured a gas canister and held the spray over his chest, saturating the flesh. The fumes struggled valiantly with the stench of rot until I struck a match and lit up the room.
     
    ***
     
    The phone had been a nice touch. It told a very specific story, once I returned home and got some charge in it. One of the perks of using so many disposable phones is that I have a charger for every possible slot.
    I’ll take ‘slutty mantras’ for fifty points. Heh.
    It was pretty clear. Cartwright had made several calls, one after the other, to a single number. I tracked it down to a relatively well-known, illicit gambling den that dealt mainly in what little sport was still played worldwide, fronted by the City