Dead Fall by A. K. Turner EPUB & PDF – eBook Details Online
- Status: Available for Free Download
- Authors: A. K. Turner
- Language: English
- Genre: Thriller / Suspense
- Format: PDF / EPUB
- Size: 2.2 MB
- Price: Free
The sky was just starting to lighten the inky surface of the canal, the peep
and quack of the dawn chorus subsiding. Cassie Raven had been walking
fast, head bent, eyes on the towpath, replaying the row she’d just had with
her boyfriend. Which was how she almost crashed into it.
What the . . .?
A steel barrier blocked the towpath. And a few strides beyond it, a dark
red puddle on the ground, the precise shape of a cartoon speech bubble, and
instantly recognisable.
Blood, a good litre of it. Going by the colour and viscosity, it had been
shed four or five hours earlier, the exposure to air already making the
haemoglobin morph into iron oxide – the same compound as rust.
Reminding her how the human body was fundamentally just a fancy
chemistry set.
A female cop was striding towards her now, shaking her head. ‘You
can’t go through here, you’ll have to find another route.’
‘What happened?’ asked Cassie, lifting her chin towards the stain. A
knife wound? Stabbings weren’t exactly uncommon in Camden, usually
drug-dealing related.
‘I’m not at liberty to say,’ said the cop, eyeing Cassie’s tattoos.
Fair enough. The family might not know yet that someone they loved
was seriously injured – or more likely dead.
The pool of blood looked too neat and unsmudged to be a knife wound.
Squinting up at the building that overlooked the canal – a huge Victorian
warehouse, converted into upmarket apartments – she caught a flash of
something. A man in what looked like police uniform peering over the
balustrade of a narrow balcony.
Nine, maybe ten, storeys up.
An accidental fall? Or a jumper. Either way, from that height, she’d
almost certainly be meeting them later at the mortuary. For sudden deaths in
the community the cops had arrangements with local undertakers to deliver
bodies out of hours.
Cassie treated all her guests with care and respect but having
experienced her own moments of bottomless despair she had always felt a
special bond with suicides. Before retracing her steps she told the cop, ‘If I
were you I’d cover up the blood until the cleaners arrive? Just in case the
family come by.’
Left the cop looking puzzled at the authoritative way the girl with the
punk haircut had spoken.
*
Losing her rag with Archie had unsettled her. They’d only been living
together on her narrowboat for nine or ten weeks but already she was
getting that claustrophobic feeling, all too familiar from her one and only
previous – failed – experiment in living with a lover.
On the upside, they both worked with the dead – Archie as a
pathologist, Cassie as an anatomical pathology technician, aka APT – which
meant they could talk about work without the constant self-censorship
needed with civilians.
She had taken against him at first, pigeonholing him
as the entitled posh boy medic, but they’d gradually fallen for each other
across the bodies of the dead, and after dating for a few months, she’d
finally taken the leap in agreeing to live with him.
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