Another Life by Peter Anghelides

Efficient, to-the-point. English accent, with a downward intonation that suggested Birmingham. A Brummie that Gwen didn’t recognise, so he must be fairly new. Only a few months out of the force, and already she was losing track of the team on her patch. Well, on her old patch.
    ‘Then the witness noticed the mess down the window, and called it in,’ the Brummie explained. ‘We forced the rear door to obtain access, in the unlikely event that the victim was still alive and needed urgent medical attention. Didn’t want to move the body, obviously. Photographers aren’t here yet.’
    Jack scanned the area quickly, left to right. The car was a four-door Vectra estate, parked midway under the only streetlamp in the alley that wasn’t working. Jack played his torch through the windows into the car’s interior. A middle-aged woman was sitting upright in the front seat, though her head had drooped against the driver’s window. Her eyes were closed, and where her dyed blonde hair fell over her shoulder it was matted with blood.
    ‘OK, thanks. You can clear the area now,’ Jack told him.
    The Brummie didn’t seem to understand this. Perhaps he thought Jack was talking to someone else. ‘Nasty wound. Gunshot from the seat behind, perhaps? The spray pattern across the roof of the car might suggest that.’
    ‘Thanks,’ repeated Jack.
    The Brummie seemed to relax a little, now that he’d delivered his brief report. His attitude had changed, and he was chatting comfortably, despite the falling drizzle. ‘This reminds me of that woman in Tesco car park on a hot sunny day, who dialled 999 on her mobile,’ he laughed. ‘Heard a gunshot, felt a blow above the base of her neck. Sat for thirty minutes with her hand cupped behind her head to stop her brains from spilling out. Until we arrived and told her that the heat had exploded a canister in the back seat, and she was only holding a lump of ready-mix dough.’
    Gwen watched Jack’s brow furrow. She stepped smartly between the two men. ‘We’ll take it from here,’ she told the Brummie before he dug himself into deeper trouble. ‘You can secure the perimeter, and keep the photographers back when they arrive.’
    The Brummie opened his mouth to object, saw her raised eyebrows, and slunk away.
    Despite the way he had spoken to the SOCO, Jack actually showed a great deal of respect for scene-of-crime protocols. He slipped on a glove, then eased open the Vectra’s rear door. He reached in to pop up the front lock, and opened the driver’s side. By swiftly positioning his hand in the gap, he was able to prop up the corpse and gently push it back into the car to prevent it from falling out into the road.
    The dead body was still strapped into the seat. With the door now open, the upper torso lolled over onto the steering wheel, head dropped, right cheek downwards so that the face pointed back towards the passenger seat.
    Jack’s torch played over the back of the corpse. She had been a thin woman in late middle age, wearing a knitted green cardigan over a patterned dress that was now stained heavily with dried blood and gory fragments. The head was only half-attached to the shoulders. Blonde hair had been torn out in lumps or wrenched away from the nape of the neck.
    Not that there was much of the nape still visible. The flesh was ripped almost down to the clavicle. Further up into what had been the hairline was a ghastly hole, filled with clotted blood and with clumps of greyish matter visible in the mess. The curdled mess reminded Gwen once more, horribly, of strawberry yoghurt. It was too unbearably apt an image. She shivered because she knew that something had killed this woman by gnawing into the back of her skull.
    The woman’s handbag was on the back seat. Her purse contained a name and address, plus an ID card from Blaidd Drwg. ‘Jennifer Fallon,’ Gwen read aloud. ‘Now we know why Tosh couldn’t reach Wildman’s secretary. She was with him in the car. Drove