Read Online The Wrong Kind of Blood by Declan Hughes - Free Book Online
Authors: Declan Hughes
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“What’s all this private cop shenanigans?”
I shrugged. “That’s what I did, in L.A. Missing persons, paper trails, divorce, a little bodyguarding. Bit of everything, really. I started out working for someone, then set up for myself.”
“And now you’re doing it here? Dagg there says you told him Peter Dawson is missing. Why didn’t Linda Dawson come to us with it?”
“That’s what I told her to do. But you know yourself, Dave, grown man disappears for what, five days now, it’s not exactly priority police business, is it?”
“And how did you get involved in this anyway?”
“After the funeral, up at the Bayview. Everyone else went home. Linda stayed and got drunk. She needed someone to look after her. She begged me to look for Peter. She was very upset. Eventually, I said okay.”
“You could’ve done without all that yesterday.”
“You’re telling me.”
There was a silence. We both looked down the hill to the sea. The high-speed ferry was powering briskly out of the harbor, sending great waves of surf billowing across toward Seafield Promenade.
“You don’t have a license to operate as a private detective here, Ed.”
“I didn’t know I needed one. Look, if you want me to tell Linda you’ve warned me off, fine. I could do without all this today as well,” I said.
Dave looked at me again. He ran a hand along the bristles of his close-cropped salt-and-pepper hair. “It’d be something to do, though. Take your mind off the funeral and everything.”
“There’s that.”
“Were you any good at it? You know, out in L.A.?”
“I made a living.”
“And you’d turn anything you found out over to me?”
“Can’t arrest anyone myself.”
“If you step on any other copper’s toes, I don’t know you.”
“And I don’t know you, Dave.”
I had known Dave Donnelly all my life. We were in primary school together, and if the whole class had been asked back then how we’d all end up, the one person we’d’ve got right was Dave. He wasn’t the cleverest, or the funniest, or the best at football, he just had a quiet authority, that Captain of the School quality that made you anxious for him to approve of you.
Dave laughed, took a last drag on his smoke and tossed it away.
“Come in and have a look at this, Ed. This is a good one.” He headed toward the town hall door, and I followed, signaling to Rory Dagg that I’d catch up with him in a minute. Busy on his mobile phone, Dagg waved me on.
Nodding to the uniform on duty in the foyer, Dave gave me a hard hat and we took the lift down. The doors opened and Dave stepped out onto a scaffolding gantry, part of an interlocking grid of walkways that crisscrossed the entire basement. All the walls and partitions had been knocked down, leaving one vast room. The floor above was being supported by great steel girders. “They’re excavating. Lowering the foundations,” Dave said. “Ceilings too low down here, or structural damage or something. But they’ve been ripping up the concrete, and look what they’ve found.”
In the center of the room, about eight feet below us, a police medical team were gathered around a steel gurney, gingerly rubbing clumps of concrete from a partially clothed corpse. A police photographer took snaps, and fingerprint and forensic teams dusted and swabbed, but their presence seemed incongruous. It looked less like a crime scene than an archaeological dig.
“It’s male,” said Dave. “Buried in the foundations, so it goes back to what, ’81, ’82. Earlier, maybe. Came out of a huge slab of concrete intact, like a fossil. And his clothes have been preserved. That’s as much as we know…”
“Dental records?”
“Or false teeth. And we find who was on the missing persons list at the time. Million to one we identify him at all. Mind you, the pressure’ll be on. This is the kind of shit the press love.”
I looked down at the corpse again, a tattered scarecrow caked in gray dust and
I shrugged. “That’s what I did, in L.A. Missing persons, paper trails, divorce, a little bodyguarding. Bit of everything, really. I started out working for someone, then set up for myself.”
“And now you’re doing it here? Dagg there says you told him Peter Dawson is missing. Why didn’t Linda Dawson come to us with it?”
“That’s what I told her to do. But you know yourself, Dave, grown man disappears for what, five days now, it’s not exactly priority police business, is it?”
“And how did you get involved in this anyway?”
“After the funeral, up at the Bayview. Everyone else went home. Linda stayed and got drunk. She needed someone to look after her. She begged me to look for Peter. She was very upset. Eventually, I said okay.”
“You could’ve done without all that yesterday.”
“You’re telling me.”
There was a silence. We both looked down the hill to the sea. The high-speed ferry was powering briskly out of the harbor, sending great waves of surf billowing across toward Seafield Promenade.
“You don’t have a license to operate as a private detective here, Ed.”
“I didn’t know I needed one. Look, if you want me to tell Linda you’ve warned me off, fine. I could do without all this today as well,” I said.
Dave looked at me again. He ran a hand along the bristles of his close-cropped salt-and-pepper hair. “It’d be something to do, though. Take your mind off the funeral and everything.”
“There’s that.”
“Were you any good at it? You know, out in L.A.?”
“I made a living.”
“And you’d turn anything you found out over to me?”
“Can’t arrest anyone myself.”
“If you step on any other copper’s toes, I don’t know you.”
“And I don’t know you, Dave.”
I had known Dave Donnelly all my life. We were in primary school together, and if the whole class had been asked back then how we’d all end up, the one person we’d’ve got right was Dave. He wasn’t the cleverest, or the funniest, or the best at football, he just had a quiet authority, that Captain of the School quality that made you anxious for him to approve of you.
Dave laughed, took a last drag on his smoke and tossed it away.
“Come in and have a look at this, Ed. This is a good one.” He headed toward the town hall door, and I followed, signaling to Rory Dagg that I’d catch up with him in a minute. Busy on his mobile phone, Dagg waved me on.
Nodding to the uniform on duty in the foyer, Dave gave me a hard hat and we took the lift down. The doors opened and Dave stepped out onto a scaffolding gantry, part of an interlocking grid of walkways that crisscrossed the entire basement. All the walls and partitions had been knocked down, leaving one vast room. The floor above was being supported by great steel girders. “They’re excavating. Lowering the foundations,” Dave said. “Ceilings too low down here, or structural damage or something. But they’ve been ripping up the concrete, and look what they’ve found.”
In the center of the room, about eight feet below us, a police medical team were gathered around a steel gurney, gingerly rubbing clumps of concrete from a partially clothed corpse. A police photographer took snaps, and fingerprint and forensic teams dusted and swabbed, but their presence seemed incongruous. It looked less like a crime scene than an archaeological dig.
“It’s male,” said Dave. “Buried in the foundations, so it goes back to what, ’81, ’82. Earlier, maybe. Came out of a huge slab of concrete intact, like a fossil. And his clothes have been preserved. That’s as much as we know…”
“Dental records?”
“Or false teeth. And we find who was on the missing persons list at the time. Million to one we identify him at all. Mind you, the pressure’ll be on. This is the kind of shit the press love.”
I looked down at the corpse again, a tattered scarecrow caked in gray dust and
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