Death in the Sunshine (Retired Detectives Club, #1)(33)

That’s the theory anyway, but she’s feeling rather rusty, and she’s anxious too, if she’s honest with herself. Turning slightly, she takes a quick glance up towards the hillside, but sees nothing; no binoculars, no person watching. She takes a deep breath. Although most of the anxiety is more about being here alone than about working the scene, some of it is about Philip. It’s like he’s forgotten why he was asked to retire. As if somehow because a few years have passed, what happened before his retirement is no longer relevant. She shakes her head. If he thinks that, he’s really burying his head in the sand. Heart problems and the rest don’t just go away because you choose not to think about them. It doesn’t work that way, and he should know that, after what happened. They’ll always be with him, with both of them; like an unexploded bomb with the timer slowly ticking down.

Lizzie just prays nothing happens to accelerate the countdown.

In the fading light it’s harder to assess the scene. If she’d been doing this for real, working with the cops, then she’d have had the big rig spotlights set up before the light changed, and a canopy erected to shield the ground from disturbance, letting her work unhindered by time and weather. As it is, she’s got maybe twenty minutes before the gloom makes it impossible to continue.

Pushing thoughts of the person on the hillside from her mind, Lizzie forces herself to focus. Getting to work, she walks the scene, methodically scanning every inch – every blade of grass, each slab of stone – as she paces back and forth across the lawn and pool area. She knows the cops will have done this already, and had their own CSIs do it too, but she follows her usual process.

Leave no stone unturned. No evidence left behind.

That had been her mentor’s motto, and her mentor – Dr Sally Eton – had been the best of the best. Lizzie smiles at the memory of her; tough talking, pin sharp and able to call bullshit at twenty paces. Sally had not just been her mentor, she’d been a good friend. No, more than that, she’d been her best friend. Lizzie’s smile drops. She swallows hard. Now all Sally is to her is a collection of memories.

She keeps walking. Keeps looking. The grass is brittle and dry beneath her sandals. There are black powder marks on some of the stones where the CSIs must have lifted prints, or tried to lift them. There’s no new evidence though, but there is something interesting.

Retracing her steps along the stone patio, Lizzie stops and crouches down. Even in the diminishing light, she can clearly make out a dark scuff mark on the stone, and it’s not the only one. The marks are all around the side of the pool, spaced about two metres apart.

Opening her messenger bag, she removes a pink fabric tape measure and her notebook and pencil. She measures the length and width of the scuff and jots down the measurement in her notebook. Then moves to the side and measures the distance between the first mark and the next one – just under two yards. She writes that in the notebook too, then repeats the process for each of the scuff marks.

It doesn’t take long.

Lizzie feels the nerves in her belly give way to the fizz of something else – intrigue, excitement even – as she realises what she’s found. It’s a pattern. Each scuff mark is the same size and shape, give or take half an inch. And the measurements of the gaps between each mark are also roughly the same, and all within about four inches of each other.

She looks at the figures written in her notebook, then back to the marks on the stone. Thinking.

What made them?

Who made them?

Why?

The marks aren’t at the pool’s edge, they’re set back further. She thinks about the dead woman in the pool and the money floating around her.

The money.

Lizzie sets down her messenger bag on the lawn beside the patio, takes out her nitrile gloves, puts them on and then moves back to the pool. Dropping to her knees, she lies down on the stone, her shoulders level with the edge of the pool.

Glancing back, she looks at her own feet. Holding on to the pool’s edge with one hand, she reaches forward with the other, as if reaching into the water.

As if she was reaching into the water to grab the money.

As she reaches out with her arm, she watches her feet. One of them moves as she stretches, the toe dragging across the stone. When she sits up and takes a closer look Lizzie sees what she suspected: from the movement, she’s made a small scuff mark.

She feels her hypothesis is correct. The killer tried to get the money from the side of the pool by lying on the stone and reaching into the water. They went around the whole pool, systematically gathering as much cash as they could, while the young woman was dead or dying. The thought sickens her.

Crouching down, Lizzie measures the distance from the pool’s edge to the scuff marks. Using her own height to estimate how many more inches to add to account for the person’s shoulders and head being over the edge of the pool, she does some calculations.

She’s five foot two; the person whose shoes made the scuff marks must be almost a full foot taller than her, putting them between six foot and six two. Lizzie notes her conclusions down in her notebook, then packs it and the tape measure back into her bag. Thinks. She didn’t want to get involved in this investigation, but now she’s here she can’t deny that the puzzle is hooking her in. There’s a real callousness to what the murderer did to the young woman – not just killing her, but sticking around to scoop dollars from the pool as she died, regarding the money as more important than the victim’s life. Lizzie clenches her fists. The anxiety she was feeling earlier is still there but instead of being mixed with intrigue and excitement about the puzzle, now it’s mixed with anger. She’s still concerned about Philip, but she can’t stand by and allow whoever did this to get away free. She wants to make sure this killer is caught.