Read Online Death and Deception by B. A. Steadman - Free Book Online

onto several large pieces of paper he had stuck together. Jotting down everything he knew, he was trying but failing to make useful connections. It was ridiculous. So early into the investigation, he only had a small amount of information. But he wanted to be able to say they had made some progress by the end of the first day. Performance anxiety, he thought.
    The day before, he had finally plucked up courage to ask Colin White, the Desk Sergeant, to check the records for Alison Hellier, AKA Annie Porter, A.k.a. Allie Smith. A.k.a. total nightmare. He had been able to push her back into the dark recesses while he’d been living in London, but now he felt obliged to find out how she was. He couldn’t cope with the mute expectation in his mother’s eyes, either. She assumed it was easy to find out anything he wanted to know. It was. He just didn’t want to do it. Colin had placed a folded sheet of paper on the desk an hour ago, and he hadn’t looked at it yet.
    He unfurled the sheet. A list of arrests, cautions, short sentences, and then, at the bottom, eighteen months for dealing. He checked the dates. She’d been inside for three months and hadn’t contacted Mum and Dad once. His lip curled in disgust. The temptation to throw the sheet away was huge. He knew that as soon as he told them where she was, they’d be off in the car to Bristol on another mercy mission that was doomed to failure. He couldn’t bear the defeated look in his Dad’s eyes as they set out to rescue her again. She was so fucking selfish that she’d take whatever they gave her as her right. She’d actually said to him once that she might as well have what was hers now than wait until after they were dead. Unbelievable. He tore the page into tiny shreds, threw it into his bin and stared across the office at his newly formed team.
    Known throughout the station as the Flowerpot Men, Sergeants Bill Larcombe and Mark ‘Ben’ Bennett were catching up with their notes and adding to the Incident board on the rear wall. As Crime Scene Manager, Bill had already begun to add crime scene photos to the wall and was organising the office into a viable working space. Ben was collating the evidence and would handle house-to-house interviews, phone calls and witnesses. They had given him a polite nod when Oliver had assigned them, but he knew they were Ian Gould’s men, through and through.
    So far, the whiteboard showed pictures of Carly Braithwaite taken at the crime scene and a map of the local area with her house and the school picked out in red. The Forensic team had passed on prints of the morning’s close scrutiny of the copse, but they were messy because of the state of the ground. It was hard to pick out any particular footprints. Even the bruising to the girl was faint on the photos.
    Dan looked at the clock and wondered when he would find out what Ian had learned at the school. He had a feeling the old bugger would be typing his notes up at his desk next door rather than committing them to computer memory so everyone could read them. He shook his head, the guy just made more work for people. Sally should be back for 5.00 p.m., so they could have a quick de-brief before going home. He looked at the slim results of two hours thinking and sighed. Who on earth would want this girl dead, and more important, why?
    The rest of the team arrived within minutes, carrying coffee and notebooks. They sat round the big rectangular table in the middle of the room, chatting and laughing amongst themselves. Once again, Dan was all too aware that he was the new boy who needed to make an impression on his first case. He cleared his throat, leant against the edge of the table and waited for the chat to die down. Before he managed a word, the door opened and Superintendent Oliver walked in. She also had coffee, but Dan had a feeling that hers had been freshly brewed by the efficient Stella rather than dispensed by ancient machine. Her arrival stopped the conversation