Free Booked for Murder by Val McDermid Page A

stopped at a chain-store chemist for a pack of disposable latex gloves. A few minutes later, she turned into the street where Brian and Miriam occupied the middle flat in a converted Georgian terraced house. Even though she was pretty certain the police would have finished by now with the scene of crime, that was no reason to take chances. She walked right to the end of the street, then kept turning right till she’d done a circuit of the block and was back where she’d started. She’d seen no sign of any police officers, nor did there seem to be any twitching curtains or faces at windows as she strolled down the street for the second time.
    Deciding it was clear, she turned nonchalantly into the entrance of Brian and Miriam’s house. She climbed the four steps up to the front door and hastily sorted through the bunch of keys until she found the ones that fitted the two locks on the heavy street door. Inside, she closed the door smartly behind her. Ahead lay a dim carpeted hallway, a flight of stairs at the far end. Cautiously, Lindsay made for it and climbed to the first landing. There was a sturdy door facing her, criss-crossed with yellow plastic tape that proclaimed Police. Keep out. The flat was still officially a crime scene.
    Pulling a face, Lindsay pulled on the gloves, then fumbled with the locks until the door swung free. Then, with a quick look round the corner to check the stairs above were still clear, she ducked under the tapes and into the flat. This long after the killing, she couldn’t believe she was going to affect any crucial forensic evidence.
    She found herself in a corridor which opened out into a large, high-ceilinged room whose walls were hung with richly colored fabric panels. The soft furnishings were low, squashy and oatmeal-colored, coordinating with what could be seen of the room’s paintwork. Face down on a low table whose legs were carved African fertility goddesses was an open paperback of a Robertson Davies novel. Beside the nearest chair was a bowl of grapes starting to go moldy, a thick A3 pad of scrap paper and, inevitably around Penny, a couple of autopencils. Caught momentarily off guard, Lindsay was ambushed by her grief. Suddenly, she couldn’t see through tears, and the lump in her throat threatened to choke her. Subsiding into the nearest
chair, she set her sorrow free, her shoulders shaking with sobs as memory flooded her.
    Eventually, the wave of pain receded, leaving her beached in a corner of the enveloping sofa. She rubbed a hand across her face, forgetting about the gloves until the latex skidded across her tear-streaked cheek. With a watery grin, Lindsay pushed herself out of the sofa and forced herself to work.
    There wasn’t much more in the living room to mark Penny’s presence, apart from a postcard of the Golden Gate bridge from Meredith, wishing her a safe arrival. Interesting that she hadn’t binned it, Lindsay thought. Perhaps Penny hadn’t been as adamant in her dismissal as she had seemed to be.
    Lindsay crossed the hall into the kitchen. While the lounge looked as if its resident had popped out for a minute, the kitchen made it plain that she wouldn’t ever be coming back. On the cork-tile floor was a reddish-brown stain like a giant Rorschach test. Spatters of dried blood afflicted everything else in the room, from cupboard doors to kettle, their sizes ranging from pinpricks to bottle tops. There was even what looked like a thin drizzle in one corner of the ceiling. On every surface, the bloodstains were half obscured by fragments of glass and fingerprint powder. Looking at the room, it was hard to imagine how it had got like this. Logically, Lindsay knew that when an artery was pierced, blood spurted and sprayed like an out-of-control fountain. But this was beyond that. It looked as if someone had shaken a jeroboam of blood-colored champagne and sprayed it joyously round the room, like a driver winning a murderous