Fire Damage (A Jessie Flynn Investigation, Book 1) by Kate Medina Page B

they were actually a rare beast and the likelihood that one was practising in this idyllic corner of West Sussex was remote. Then again, that was exactly what the Gloucestershire Constabulary had told themselves when Fred and Rosemary West’s first victim had escaped, reported them and been summarily dismissed as a hysteric. Complacency was the policeman’s worst enemy and playing statistics a dangerous game.
    ‘My sense is that the propeller of a gin palace or big yacht took this body apart. Tony Burrows is so convinced that an axe or butcher’s cleaver is responsible that out of sheer bloody-mindedness I have bet him a hundred quid that I’m right. Drinks on me if you find the legs.’
    The dog handlers nodded again, well accustomed to the games that the coppers from the Surrey and Sussex Major Crimes Unit played to stop the brutal reality of the beatings, rapes and murders they dealt with from sinking too far under the skin.
    ‘We’ll do our best, sir, but this wind isn’t going to help,’ the sergeant said.
    There were so many smells by the harbour’s edge – rotting seaweed; dead fish and seabirds washed up on the shore; the contents of yachts’ bilges, human excrement pumped into the water – a smorgasbord to excite a dog’s senses, that the smell of decomposition would be incredibly hard for the spaniels to detect.
    ‘The torso has been here for some time. Weeks rather than days, Tony Burrows reckoned, from the bloating and deterioration to the skin and flesh, though obviously until Dr Ghoshal confirms, that’s guesswork. It was covered with seaweed and in an advanced state of decomposition. If it was summer we’d have been left with a steaming puddle of God knows what, but at least the cold weather has some bonuses.’ He shivered in his leather biker jacket. ‘I imagine that the torso was dumped in the water, either from a boat or from a vehicle and then washed up here. There’s a number of places in the harbour where you can back a car right up to the water, particularly at high tide.’
    The handlers nodded. The spaniels were straining at their leashes, noses to the air, fidgety to get on with the job. ‘What are you thinking?’ the constable asked. ‘Where shall we start?’
    Marilyn sighed. Chichester Harbour was ten thousand acres of deep water, tidal mudflats and saltings, shaped like a giant hand, a village at the end of each finger, used by thousands of craft each year, visited by tens of thousands of people.
    He sighed. ‘I’m thinking that we’ve got more chance of finding a needle in a haystack, but we need to give it a go. The more I have of the body, the greater chance I’ve got of finding out who he is, and then, of course, what happened to him. One of you goes one way along the shore, the other goes the other way. We’ve got five hours before I have to leave for the autopsy, in possession of the legs or not. I’m afraid I can’t be more helpful than that.’
    They nodded in unison. The constable hauled her spaniel back to her side. ‘We’ll do our best, sir.’

20
     
    The sky was battleship grey, clouds so low that Jessie felt if she stretched up her arm the tips of her fingers would be swallowed in thick, grey cotton. Rain was beginning to spit against her windscreen. Parking a hundred metres down the road from her mother’s house, beyond the line of sight, she switched off her headlights. Mothers in Volvos ferrying kids to school swished by on the wet road; a dog walker passed her, dragging a fat black Labrador on a lead, all sagging tongue and wagging tail, happy to be heading for the common whatever the weather.
    Her mother still lived in the house Jessie had grown up in, a small, sixties detached house in a cul-du-sac in Wimbledon. Two doors down was a smart new whitewashed concrete and glass modernist box that towered over its neighbours, a ‘For Sale’ sign outside; a couple on from that, a huge hole in the ground, a yellow JCB, its tracks clotted with mud,