Free Booked for Murder by Val McDermid Page B

Grand Prix. And then thrown the bottle after the foam.
    She took a deep breath. There was a faint metallic smell of blood but it was overlaid by the sour smell of spilt beer. Lindsay looked around at the arena of death, taking in the outline marked on the floor like a scene from a bad Saturday Night Mystery Movie. She noted the fridge, tall for a British one, its top standing just under five feet above floor height. On top of it, three bottles of German Weissbier remained standing. In spite of her reputation among her students and former colleagues as a cold-hearted bastard, Lindsay didn’t expect to drink wheat beer ever again.
    It was easy to see how the first assumption was of accidental
death. A bottle exploding under pressure at that height could easily drive flying glass slicing through soft tissue. To have imagined it was murder would have seemed perverse without Catriona Polson’s information. Even so, there were no signs of another’s presence. No alien footprints, no tell-tale bloody handprints on the door jamb. Nothing that didn’t tally with the hypothesis of accident.
    Sighing, Lindsay backed away from the kitchen and started to search the rest of the flat. In the bedroom, she found nothing unexpected. Penny’s suitcases were under the bed. Her clothes occupied one half of the wardrobe, Brian and Miriam’s, presumably, the other half. The chests of drawers told the same story. In one, Lindsay recognized Penny’s T-shirts and swimsuits. In the other, unfamiliar clothes were stuffed into overcrowded drawers. The bedside table held a notepad and autopencil, a battered copy of W. H. Auden’s Collected Poems and an alarm clock.
    She had higher hopes of the study when she saw the papers strewn across desk and table, but even a casual scrutiny told her there was little of interest there. There were a couple of scribbled lists of Stuff To Do along the lines of “Imperial War Museum, tampons, Tabasco, Brewer’s Dictionary , ???video store???, bread, grapes, ???Calistoga???” Under a paperweight there was what looked like a reading list— The Ghost Road, The Invisible Man, The High Cost of Living, The Information, Crime and Punishment. An odd selection, but other people’s reading tastes never seemed normal, in Lindsay’s experience. Most of the rest of the sheets contained single handwritten paragraphs of description of individual characters. These ranged from highly stylized and polished pen portraits to scrawled sentences like “looks like Larry, broods on imagined slights, has the dress sense of a color-blind hobo in a thrift shop.” Lindsay couldn’t help a smile escaping as she skimmed them.
    Eventually, she found a dozen pages with the header Heart of Glass . Judging by the page numbers, they were from the first couple of chapters, though not all the pages were present. She searched those of the desk drawers that were unlocked, but found no more of the supposed 300 pages that Penny had completed. As she shifted the desk away from the wall to search more thoroughly, she discovered something more chilling than the missing papers. The power socket behind the
desk contained a plug with a cable that led into a transformer which stepped down the voltage from 240 to 12. A second cable led from the transformer to nowhere. But Lindsay knew what would normally be attached to that particular cable.
    â€œâ€˜The curious incident of the dog in the night-time,’” Lindsay muttered as she cast around the room for any possible remaining hiding place for a laptop computer and a fistful of floppy disks. It was conceivable that the police might have taken the manuscript away with them for further scrutiny once murder had been alleged. But she found it hard to believe that even the most dim-witted of detectives would have taken the laptop away for further study without the source of its power. Admittedly, it ran off batteries too, but not for long enough to