Read Online When the Music's Over by Peter Robinson - Free Book Online Page A

roadside up there, where the body is, but she was already naked and injured when she got there.”
    â€œWell, the position and attitude of the body certainly bear that out. But the car she was thrown from had already . . . I mean, what happened? Did he turn back for her?”
    â€œThere’s no evidence of that so far,” Stefan said. “You can see thesort of swerve those skid marks indicate. Someone stopped or slowed rather quickly and lost control of the steering for a second or two. It happens.”
    â€œCould they have got out and run after her? Or could someone have been with her?”
    â€œI suppose so,” said Stefan, “but there’s no evidence of anyone else in the vicinity, and there’s only one set of footprints. We’ll check, of course. We’re doing a complete work-up on what tire tracks we’ve got. I wouldn’t hold out a lot of hope because they’re just faint blurs, and you can’t get decent tire impressions from skids, but there’s always a chance we might get enough to check against the manufacturers’ databases. For now, I’d say there were two cars.”
    â€œTwo cars?”
    â€œYes. Even from such small samples and skid marks we can see how the tracks differ. There was the van here, the one she was likely dumped from, traveling south. Then there was another van that stopped to give a naked girl a lift half a mile up the road in the middle of the night. It was also traveling south, but it didn’t get as far as here.”
    â€œVan? You said van.”
    â€œJudging by the track width, both were commercial vehicles of some kind.”
    â€œYou say this second van was traveling in the same direction as the one that had dumped her?”
    â€œYes. Again, if you look closely, you can see the way the grass is flattened a short distance south from where her trail ends.”
    â€œSo the van would have been coming towards her, and she’d have had to turn to run back to it when it stopped. That would explain why her tracks continue on north past the spot where she’s lying back there. Bloody hell,” said Annie. “What a mess. She ran back to the car when it stopped, and then the driver killed her. Or could the car have hit her? Could this have been a hit and run, despite what Dr. Burns said?”
    â€œI really can’t speculate on that, but you’ve seen her body, same as I have. You’ll have to talk to Dr. Glendenning when he’s done the postmortem. No doubt the good doctor will be checking her skin for any signs of paint or any traces that might have transferred from a car. Butyou also have to remember that if she was hit by a car, it could have been an accident.”
    â€œShe’d have been like a deer in the headlights.”
    â€œProbably. But there’s always the possibility.”
    â€œWas the other car following the first one?”
    Stefan thought for a moment. “I’d say not. She had time to walk some distance from where she was dumped from the first vehicle before it came along. That would probably have taken her ten or fifteen minutes, the shape she was in.”
    Gerry walked over and stood beside them. “Did you catch that?” Annie said. “A naked girl gets tossed in a ditch from a moving vehicle. She gets out, makes her way back up the road, maybe hoping for a Good Samaritan or at least a working telephone box, then someone else comes along and either runs her down or kicks the living daylights out of her.”
    â€œThat’s about the way I see it,” Stefan said. “And judging from the skid marks and pattern on the verge up there, I’d say that when he’d finished with her, he turned around and headed back the way he came.”
    â€œYou’re saying ‘he,’ Stefan. Is it just a figure of speech or do you really think it was a man?”
    â€œSorry,” said Stefan. “It’s mostly just a habit. Easier