Play Dead (D.I. Kim Stone, #4)(36)

Her ears pricked up. Odd was good.

As she stared she began to see what he meant. She’d attended enough crime scenes to know how knife wounds normally looked on the skin. Regardless of the type of knife used the cut was consistent and clean. Close up, this one appeared lumpy and uneven, as though the knife had been dragged across the skin.

‘It looks more like a cut than a stab,’ Kim observed.

Keats nodded. ‘And I think I know why.’

He zoomed in one more time. ‘I think he was cutting scar tissue.’

‘You think he was opening an old wound?’ Kim asked, as thoughts began to form in her mind.

‘Or taking something out…’

They looked at each other as the realisation hit them both.

‘Pacemaker,’ they said simultaneously.





Twenty-Eight





‘How is she?’ Bryant asked as she reached the car.

‘Unresponsive right now and the doctors aren’t really committing to anything in terms of her recovery.’ Kim paused. ‘Head towards Brierley Hill,’ she said as she processed everything she’d learned in the last hour.

‘She has the same marks on her back and thighs as Jemima,’ she continued.

Bryant shook his head as he drove. ‘Never seen anything like that. It doesn’t make sense.’

Kim agreed. They already knew that the restraint was a handcuff to the wrist, so what could those straight lines mean?

‘There’s something else,’ she said as he crossed a set of traffic lights. ‘Her legs are covered in little nicks and cuts.’

‘Well, that makes sense. She was pulled over a gravel path and up a hill to the dump site.’

‘She would have been pulled around on her back, like Jemima. These marks are on the front of her legs, just like Jemima. It’s like a shaving rash.’

Bryant rubbed at his chin. ‘Yeah, I get it sometimes.’

Kim pondered. ‘Why only sometimes?’

‘If I want a closer shave I’ll go against the grain. Gets a cleaner look but irritates the skin more.’

So now she had both girls scrubbing the polish from their nails and giving their legs a close shave. Who the hell did they think they were meeting?

‘Hang on, turn right here,’ Kim instructed as they passed through Brierley Hill.

She continued to direct him until they arrived at a warden’s office at the junction of Pensnett Road and Bryce Road.

‘Ummm… guv…’ Bryant said.

‘Are you coming?’

He followed her past the warden’s office to Fens Pools.

The area was a nature reserve that had once been part of Pensnett Chase, a medieval hunting ground of the barons of Dudley. Like most of the rest of the Chase, it had been gradually turned to industrial use, including coal mining, clay extraction and a brickworks.

Part of the Earl of Dudley’s private railways ran across the area. The collieries and clay pits closed in the early twentieth century but the brickworks and railway only closed in the 1960s.

Some of the ponds had been formed from old clay pits but the three largest reservoirs, Grove Pool, Middle Pool and Fens Pool in the north-eastern part of the reserve, had been constructed by the Stourbridge Canal Company in 1776 and were the largest areas of open water in Dudley. A fourth pool called Foot’s Hole lay to the south-west and was separated from the others by the Dell Sports Stadium.

Kim knew it was a popular spot for fishing and the ninety-two-acre site had been designated an area of special scientific interest.

She looked beyond the first pool to the grass bank that ran between the water and the canal.

‘That’s where he was found,’ she said, pointing.

There were areas one could sit and feel miles away from the built-up industrial area close by and other places where the sprawling housing estate and trade units were clearly within view.

‘Who?’ Bryant asked.

‘Unidentified male with his fingers cut off, a few years ago.’

‘Didn’t Brierley Hill solve that one?’

Kim shook her head. ‘No, Bob is still a guest of the coroner in a cold, dark drawer.’

‘Bob?’ he asked, narrowing his eyes.

‘Not my term, but it’ll do until we find his real name.’

And Kim wasn’t exactly sure how she was going to do that. Her only potential clues had been removed. All that was left was his clothing, the change in his pockets and an old raffle ticket. Dental records were a good form of identification, but you had to know where to start.

There were no family members harassing the police force for progress reports on the murder of their father, brother, uncle. The missing-persons reports would have been searched when the body was first found so no one cared enough about Bob even to file a report.

He appeared to have been missed by no one – and that in itself was enough to burrow under her skin.

‘Ah, bittern,’ Bryant said.

‘By what?’ she asked.

He shook his head. ‘Bittern the bird. Over there by the tall grass.’

‘Didn’t have you down as a twitcher,’ she said, turning away.

He sighed heavily. ‘Ummm… remind me again why we’re looking at this?’

Kim was about to say, ‘Because no one else was,’ but the thought was cut off by the ringing of her mobile phone.