Necrocrip

Necrocrip by Cynthia Harrod-Eagles

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Authors: Cynthia Harrod-Eagles
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How did you get in?’
    ‘With the key,’ Slider said, displaying it. ‘I take it you’re the housekeeper, Mrs—?’
    ‘Sullivan. Mrs Kathleen Sullivan and I’ve been housekeeper here for ten years, as anyone will tell you,’ she said emphatically, as though it were a character reference. ‘Ronnie Slaughter’s a nice boy, hard working and quiet. Don’t tell me he’s in trouble because I won’t believe you.’
    ‘We hope not. That’s what we’re trying to find out.’ He looked at the jeans over her arm. ‘Are those his?’
    ‘That’s right. He must have washed them in the bathroom and left them to dry. I was bringing them up for him. I’ve already done his room – not that there’s anything much to do, ever, for he’s the cleanest, neatest creature I ever saw, which is not natural in a man, let me tell you! I’ve been married to two of them, so I know what I’m talking about. Why the good Lord made men messy I don’t know, but that’s the way of it.’
    ‘Does he usually do his washing in the bathroom?’
    ‘He does not! I wouldn’t encourage it. He takes his little bit of a wash down to the launderette of a Sunday morning as a rule.’ She held the jeans up judicially before her. ‘It is queer,’ she acknowledged. ‘I suppose he must have spilt something on them. He seems to have got it out, anyway, whatever it was.’
    Behind him, Atherton played a little fanfare on a trumpet. No, he didn’t really, that was just Slider’s imagination. He held out his hand.
    ‘May I?’ he said politely.

CHAPTER 4
Fillet in your Bones
    TUFNELL ARCENEAUX OF THE METROPOLITAN Police Forensic Science Laboratory was a raw-boned giant of a man, half Scots, half French and half Swiss-German, as he said of himself. He had fair skin, pale blue eyes, and masses of thick, fuzzy blond hair which sprouted so vigorously from his visible orifices that his inevitable nickname of Tufty Arsehole was less speculative than it might otherwise have been. He had a booming voice, an enormous appetite for work, a new young wife, and eight children at the last count.
    ‘Bill!’ he cried in greeting. ‘How are you, my old dear? How are the essential juices?’
    Slider held the receiver a little further from his ear. ‘Flowing, thanks Tufty. What’ve you got for me?’
    ‘I thought you’d like a preliminary report to be going on with.’
    ‘All contributions gratefully received.’
    ‘In the soup, eh?’ the earpiece howled. ‘Well, the blood in the shop is human all right. So you’re not looking for a mad pork-butcher after all.’
    ‘Good.’
    ‘We’ve typed it against the sample from the body, and we’ve got a pretty good match. About ninety per cent. Good enough for the Crown Prosecution Service, anyway. We’ll do the genetic thingummy on the tissue from the cutting machine, but you know how long that takes. One little old man with a bunsen burner in the lab of a girls’ secondary mod in Leicestershire. Be a week, I shouldthink. Still, I think you can reasonably assume that the body was cut up in the back room of the shop.’
    ‘That’s a relief. In all the best crime novels the corpse is never the corpse—’
    ‘And the suspect is never the suspect. Quite.’
    ‘Talking of the suspect, have you looked at the jeans?’
    ‘Yes, and we found a bloodstain on the front left side and at the top of the left leg. Human blood.’
    ‘I knew there must be something!’
    ‘The old copper’s instinct, eh? Well, we managed to get enough out of the inside of the seam to group it EAPBA, which is the same as the corpse.’
    ‘Halleluja!’
    ‘The bad news,’ Tufty roared sympathetically, ‘is that it’s also the same as one in four of the population at large. And, I’m afraid, his voice surged with regret, ‘it’s also the same as the suspect, as per samples, intimate, freely donated, innocence for the establishing of.’
    ‘Can’t you type it any more closely?’
    ‘Sorry, old mate. The sample just isn’t

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