Read Online Strangers by Paul Finch - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Paul Finch
Tags: Fiction, General, Suspense, Thrillers, Mystery & Detective, Women Sleuths, Crime, Contemporary Women
Ads: Link
none other, you’re going to have to stay sharp. You’ll be working four days on, three days off, four till four. You’ll not be on the same pitch all the time, though I’m not going to allocate any one of you more than two or three pitches, the whole purpose of this being that you get to know the other girls who work there … that you talk to them, find out who they think might be doing it. But for your own safety, at no time can you take your eye off the ball. I mean not once. Because if you let something slip about who you are, and Jill the Ripper picks up on it, and you’re stuck with her all night on a lonely road … I wonder who’s not going to be heading home again when the shift finally ends.’
Lucy had already considered this discomforting possibility, though by the looks on the faces of some of the others, primarily the younger girls, they hadn’t. There was no safe way to perform this kind of work. At the best of times, the women they’d be interacting with were likely to be damaged. They wouldn’t all be bad people; there’d be tired mums trying to make ends meet, students with college bills to pay, actresses and models who couldn’t get real work. But it was an unforgiving profession. There’d be thieves among them too, addicts, mental patients, disease carriers. And now one of them could be a murderer.
‘And if that hasn’t scared you shitless,’ Slater said, ‘sorry … but next up we’re going to run through the details of the enquiry. And this isn’t going to be pleasant either.’
He called various images onto the VDU as he outlined the progress thus far. As expected, the crime scene photos were graphic in the extreme, and yet, from a purely analytical perspective, there were startling similarities between them. The most recent victim, Ronald Ford, lay on his back in the roadside woods near Abram, with a pool of blood and brains beneath his broken skull, and his trousers and underpants pushed down to his shins, exposing a gore-glutted cavity where his genitals used to be. Two of the other victims, William Hammond and Graham Cummins, who were found in lay-bys near Chadderton and Southport respectively, lay in exactly the same posture, suffering from exactly the same fatal injuries. Only the second victim, Larry Pupper – the heavily built HGV driver, who’d been dragged a considerable distance – lay on his side in a muddy, litter-cluttered ditch on the outskirts of Salford. His trousers were tangled around his feet, as though he’d been trying to take them off altogether, which suggested the killer had waited until he was most off his guard in order to attack, and his face was battered savagely and extensively, implying that even then he’d put up a fight. Perhaps even after the beating, he’d struggled, which might explain why he’d needed to be dragged still further from the East Lancashire road. Whatever, it looked as if he’d died before he’d reached his final destination – in the photo he lay draped on his side, his arms twisted out of shape as though partly dislodged from their sockets. The gaping wound where his genitals had been hacked off was less bloody than the others.
Medical examiners now felt certain the actual implement used to achieve this ghastly effect was a knife with a thick, serrated blade – the sort a butcher might use to saw through bone and gristle. There were plenty other lines of enquiry too, though few had borne fruit as yet. Slater hastened through them anyway, skimping on detail where he could – primarily because this was mainly of use to the girls as background info. They had no investigative brief, and so the DI was much more interested in those factors that had potential relevance for the role they would be playing.
In which case he now summoned the mugshots of three living men onto the VDU.
‘A bit of intel on the kind of people you are likely to hear about,’ he said. ‘I doubt you’ll encounter any of these characters
Lucy had already considered this discomforting possibility, though by the looks on the faces of some of the others, primarily the younger girls, they hadn’t. There was no safe way to perform this kind of work. At the best of times, the women they’d be interacting with were likely to be damaged. They wouldn’t all be bad people; there’d be tired mums trying to make ends meet, students with college bills to pay, actresses and models who couldn’t get real work. But it was an unforgiving profession. There’d be thieves among them too, addicts, mental patients, disease carriers. And now one of them could be a murderer.
‘And if that hasn’t scared you shitless,’ Slater said, ‘sorry … but next up we’re going to run through the details of the enquiry. And this isn’t going to be pleasant either.’
He called various images onto the VDU as he outlined the progress thus far. As expected, the crime scene photos were graphic in the extreme, and yet, from a purely analytical perspective, there were startling similarities between them. The most recent victim, Ronald Ford, lay on his back in the roadside woods near Abram, with a pool of blood and brains beneath his broken skull, and his trousers and underpants pushed down to his shins, exposing a gore-glutted cavity where his genitals used to be. Two of the other victims, William Hammond and Graham Cummins, who were found in lay-bys near Chadderton and Southport respectively, lay in exactly the same posture, suffering from exactly the same fatal injuries. Only the second victim, Larry Pupper – the heavily built HGV driver, who’d been dragged a considerable distance – lay on his side in a muddy, litter-cluttered ditch on the outskirts of Salford. His trousers were tangled around his feet, as though he’d been trying to take them off altogether, which suggested the killer had waited until he was most off his guard in order to attack, and his face was battered savagely and extensively, implying that even then he’d put up a fight. Perhaps even after the beating, he’d struggled, which might explain why he’d needed to be dragged still further from the East Lancashire road. Whatever, it looked as if he’d died before he’d reached his final destination – in the photo he lay draped on his side, his arms twisted out of shape as though partly dislodged from their sockets. The gaping wound where his genitals had been hacked off was less bloody than the others.
Medical examiners now felt certain the actual implement used to achieve this ghastly effect was a knife with a thick, serrated blade – the sort a butcher might use to saw through bone and gristle. There were plenty other lines of enquiry too, though few had borne fruit as yet. Slater hastened through them anyway, skimping on detail where he could – primarily because this was mainly of use to the girls as background info. They had no investigative brief, and so the DI was much more interested in those factors that had potential relevance for the role they would be playing.
In which case he now summoned the mugshots of three living men onto the VDU.
‘A bit of intel on the kind of people you are likely to hear about,’ he said. ‘I doubt you’ll encounter any of these characters
Similar Books
