The Blood Detective by Dan Waddell Page A

his head. ‘No, it was in an advanced state of decomposition when it was found.’
     
    ‘Marvellous,’ Foster muttered.
    He pulled the door open and dragged out the tray.
    The bag was smaller, not body-shaped. He opened it carefully, breathing deeply.
    The cold prevented the stench from overpowering him, but what he saw almost did. The body was in bits. An arm here, a leg there, the torso in the middle, the head missing; it was green, not pale blue, and had obviously been maggot food for some time. Foster recalled the case. Another team was on it; probable honour killing was the word.
    He picked up the severed stumps and examined
    them carefully. His nose caught a whiff of rotting flesh, so he started to breathe through his mouth. He checked every part, lifting them all up apart from the torso, which he flipped over like a burger, but there was nothing else. With as much haste as possible, he bundled the body parts back into their cover and out of his sight.
    Next on the list was a John Doe. Luke said this one was brought in on Sunday morning. His age was difficult to gauge, though late forties had been the estimate. The face was sagging under the weight of death, black hair tangled and the black-grey beard unkempt. Foster did a double take. It was the tramp whose suicide they had been called to the previous Sunday, the one that Heather had been taking so personally.
    He was about to zip it back up there and then, but something made him carry on looking. The chest was clear, the stomach too. He picked up the left arm, saw nothing; then the right, nothing apart from a few track marks. Obviously a junkie …
     
    Tilting his head to one side, he looked once more at the punctures on his arm. Small nicks, all the world like the scars caused by injecting smack. But then they appeared to coalesce, to join together. He peered more closely. There it was: two slanted red cuts, a small cut bridging them. An ‘A’. It was even less distinct than before, and done with less care, but it was possible to make out the other marks, letters and numbers. The same letters and numbers they had found on Darbyshire: 1 A 1 3 7.
    He owed Heather an apology.
    He put the arm down. ‘Cause of death,’ he shouted to Luke, his eyes still fixed on the body.
    ‘Strangulation seems the likeliest option.’
    ‘Anything from toxicology?’
    ‘No. But there were signs of heavy drug and
    alcohol abuse.’
    Foster completed a clockwise lap of the body.
    He picked up one of the man’s limp feet by the
    ankle. Strange, he thought. This guy’s feet are in immaculate condition. He couldn’t have been on the streets for too long. Most tramps’ feet are knackered: covered in corns, bunions and blisters, filthy and stinking. It didn’t make sense. Unless the guy used to be married to a chiropodist. The hands were soft, too; smooth and uncalloused like a clerical worker’s, not the gnarled hands of a derelict who slept on the streets, smoked tab ends from the gutter and drank meths.
    Something didn’t add up.
     
    Nigel had asked Ron for microfilm copies of the Evening News and the Evening Standard. It seemed to take him an eternity to return. Nigel sat there, cursing his name and his bulk, the building empty and quiet apart from the silent hum of a distant generator.
    Darkness was beginning to fall and the huge bowls of light, suspended by chains from the ceiling, cast a sepulchral glow across the main reading room.
    I need to do something, he thought. He got up
    and wandered into the second, smaller room. To one side of that was the microfilm reading room, a dark space bereft of natural light, lit only by an occasional lamp and the illumination of the reading screens.
    Nigel had spent hours of his life in here, spooling through centuries of copy.
    To his left, away from the microfilm readers, was a bank of computer terminals, a few of which were allocated for searching recent issues of the national newspapers by keywords. He sat down at one, hit a key