Read The Dead (The Saxon & Fitzgerald Mysteries Book 1) for Free Online Page A

endless notes. Above all, now was the time for collecting what physical evidence they could find in the vicinity of the body, though there wouldn’t be much of that tonight, I guessed. This was as bad as it got for any scene-of-crime officer: out in the open, winter weather, the rain just starting again and heavier with each moment that passed, though they couldn’t rush.
    There certainly wouldn’t be much chance of finding fingerprints. Mary Lynch’s killer wouldn’t have hung around long enough to leave any; and anyhow they didn’t show up on wood, stone, rocks, leaves, or indeed on most types of cloth, and here that was all there was.
    Worse, there were so many footprints – hooker and client, hooker and client, in joyless procession – that finding an intact one to lift would be almost impossible. It was strange that I felt so excluded. I had been at scenes like this before, many times, watching over the broken and the dead. It was always the same scene, the same calm going about things that only ever seemed to be a cover for some inner scream.
    A place where there had been such pain and terror was always afterwards so quiet, and yet it would never be entirely free of its past. Bad things lingered, and it turned those places bad in turn, so that other bad things happened in time. One evil act could instigate a chain that, if not snapped, would unravel for ever. I had always wondered if that was what ghosts were: the accumulated bad memories of places where things that could not be forgotten, should not be forgotten, had happened.
    I shook my head, irritated by my own thoughts, and thought about Fagan. About Fagan’s ghost. About Julie Feeney. About Mary Lynch.
    It was a few moments before I realised there was somebody standing next to me. I turned my head, and there was Nick Elliott, watching, smiling. I wondered how long he’d been there.
    ‘If you’re here to start a fight, Elliott,’ I warned, ‘I’m not in the mood.’
    ‘I’m not going to say a word. What’s done is done. It’s my own fault for showing you the piece. I should have known you’d play the Good Samaritan and pass it on.’
    ‘I wasn’t playing. What else could I have done? It might’ve saved somebody’s life.’
    ‘Didn’t, though, did it?’ Elliott replied smugly, and he came to stand by me, lighting a cigarette from the remains of the last one, pulling his coat hard around him.
    ‘Perhaps things would’ve been different if you’d handed the letter over soon as you got it, instead of hanging on to it for a few days,’ I said, though what difference would it have made? No one had believed it anyway, except me and Elliott. ‘I suppose this means now you’re going to run with your friend’s little written contribution to the academic debate on crime?’
    ‘We shall see what we shall see.’
    ‘That means yes.’
    ‘If you want to know, buy tomorrow’s paper,’ he said. ‘What about you, anyway? Your friend Fitzgerald give you anything juicy?’
    He always said ‘friend’ with that faint leer.
    ‘If she did, I wouldn’t tell you,’ I said. ‘You’d just have it on the front page next day, spiced up and attributed to one of your legendary sources.’
    ‘Well, I have as much as I need for tomorrow’s edition anyway. I spoke to one of the detectives about ten minutes ago. He tells me it was a prostitute, and the name seems to match. I’ve been having a word with some of the local ladies of the night too.’
    ‘They offering you a discount in return for a mention on page one?’
    ‘I like that, that’s funny,’ Elliott said, and he actually laughed, as if it was. He was on a high, I could tell. Buzzing. He wasn’t really thinking about the murdered woman, he was just thinking about his letter from Fagan, or the person he thought was Fagan, and what an impact it would have when it was published. His name was up in lights in his head.
    Or maybe he was just refusing to be distracted from his work. As soon as