Read Deliver Us from Evil for Free Online Page A

SOCO to check them anyway, and then get them off to Wetherby. The scientists might get DNA traces . . . they’ll certainly get hers but maybe someone else’s also. Do that as soon as you can.’
    â€˜Yes, sir,’ Yellich replied briskly.
    â€˜I’m going back to the station. Who’s there? Do you know?’
    â€˜Webster, sir. Webster’s holding the fort.’
    â€˜Webster? All right, he’ll do . . . I’ll phone him from here on my mobile.’
    Reginald Webster gently tapped on the highly polished wooden frame of the doorway to George Hennessey’s office and entered. Hennessey, sitting in the chair behind his desk, looked up and smiled as Reginald Webster entered. Webster always found Hennessey’s office to be much on the small side for one of Detective Chief Inspector’s rank and he noticed again how spartan Hennessey kept it, with just a Police Mutual calendar on the wall as the only form of softening or decoration. A small table stood in the corner by the office window upon which sat an electric kettle, a box of fair trade teabags, powdered milk and half a dozen half pint drinking mugs. The window itself offered a view across Micklegate Bar of the walls of the city, at that moment glistening with rapidly evaporating frost.
    â€˜You were quite correct, sir.’ Webster slid unbidden on to the chair which stood in front of Hennessey’s desk. He handed Hennessey a manila folder. ‘Seems to be the deceased, sir, one Mrs Edith Hemmings, forty-seven years, and with a home address here in York.’
    â€˜It’s her,’ Hennessey spoke matter-of-factly as he considered the photograph which was attached to the missing person’s file. ‘It’s a match. “Dringhouses”,’ he read the address on the file, ‘modest address, self-respecting people, privately owned homes but by her clothing . . . you know . . . I thought she’d be much more . . . more . . .’
    â€˜Monied?’ Webster suggested.
    â€˜Yes, that’s the word I was looking for, more monied.’ He paused. ‘Well, there is an unpleasant job to be done now.’
    â€˜But the post-mortem has been done, sir.’
    â€˜Yes, and Dr D’Acre had no need to disturb the face.’
    â€˜I see . . . useful.’
    â€˜Yes. Phone York District Hospital and ask them to prepare the body for viewing, then do the necessary, please. I see that it was her husband who reported her missing?’
    â€˜Yes, sir . . . two days ago.’
    â€˜Next of kin. He’ll be the one to take.’ Hennessey handed the folder back to Webster. ‘Talk to him afterwards . . . see where you get but don’t put him on his guard.’
    â€˜You’ve found her and you want me to identify the body?’ Stanley Hemmings revealed himself to be a short, slightly built man with closely trimmed, slicked down hair which was parted in the centre as in the fashion of the Victorians, so Webster understood it to have been. It was certainly, he thought, an unusual hairstyle for the early twenty-first century. Most unusual indeed. Hemmings wore dark clothing as if he was prematurely in mourning, black trousers, a brown woollen pullover, black shoes, grey shirt, black tie.
    â€˜Possibly,’ Webster replied. ‘But yes, we need confirmation of the identity of a body which may be that of Mrs Hemmings.’
    â€˜My neighbour told me that that would be the way of it.’
    â€˜Really?’ Webster stood outside the front door of the Hemmingses’ house in Dringhouses and found it to be just as Hennessey had described: modest, yet self-respecting. A three bedroom semi-detached inter-war house with a small neatly kept garden to the front, on a matured estate of identical houses.
    â€˜Yes. He told me that if two officers call, they will want information, but if one calls it is