The Kill by Jane Casey

You don’t want to accuse him of being a dangerous driver, do you?’
    Pettifer squirmed. ‘Obviously not.’
    ‘Obviously,’ Derwent agreed.
    We were gathered around the body of a dead police officer and maybe an outsider wouldn’t have got it, but that made it more likely we would crack jokes, not less. The humour got you through when reality was hard to take.
    Godley looked down at me. ‘What have you found, Maeve?’
    ‘Nothing.’
    ‘Then why are you still down there?’ Derwent was frowning.
    ‘Knows her place,’ Belcott said under his breath, and caught a glare from Derwent for his trouble. It was fine for the inspector to be a misogynist prick towards me, I’d noticed, but he took offence on my behalf at the slightest provocation.
    ‘There’s nothing here, but it’s interesting that there’s nothing. There’s a void here.’ I pointed with a gloved finger to the area of the car that had remained pristine. ‘Someone was in the driver’s seat when he died.’
    ‘The SOCOs already said there was a void.’ Belcott sounded bored. ‘But look at the seat back. It’s saturated. There wasn’t anyone sitting there. More likely there was something on the seat. Whoever killed him took it before they locked the car.’
    ‘No,’ I said, keeping my voice level. ‘I can see why you might think that, but I don’t agree.’
    ‘Why, Maeve?’ Godley leaned down to get a closer look.
    ‘There’s no blood on the front of the seat, or in the driver’s foot well, or on the handbrake. There was someone in this seat, but they were leaning sideways when Hammond was shot. They were leaning towards him.’
    Derwent suddenly snapped his fingers. ‘I get it.’
    ‘I don’t, I’m afraid.’ Godley looked at me expectantly. Beside him, Dave Kemp was frowning. Pettifer jangled the change in his pockets, his expression blank.
    I was going to have to spell it out for them, I could see, and I wasn’t going to get any help from a grinning Derwent. ‘Sergeant Hammond was in the front passenger seat, which is odd because it was his car. The person in the driver’s seat was leaning across. I’d suggest that person had his or her head in the sergeant’s lap, probably performing oral sex.’
    ‘The dirty so-and-so,’ Pettifer said.
    ‘He was married.’ Dave Kemp looked around at us, wondering if he was pointing out the obvious. ‘It would have to be a woman.’
    ‘How little you know.’ Derwent’s grin was even wider. ‘Go on, Kerrigan.’
    ‘They’d swapped seats because the steering wheel got in the way otherwise.’ I shone my torch into the back of the car, which was full of boxes, a ladder and some tins of paint. ‘Hammond seems to have been quite keen on DIY. No room to push the driver’s seat back to allow for … access.’
    Belcott had his own torch out and he shone it on Hammond’s crotch. ‘His trousers are done up.’
    I pointed. ‘Yes, and the area at the front of his trousers is clean. If they were undone, he’ll have blood spatter inside them. The second shot would have done it, even if someone’s head was in the way for the first shot.’
    ‘Check,’ Godley said, nodding to Dr Hanshaw.
    He leaned in and unzipped the trousers carefully, pulling the material instead of handling the zip, to preserve any microscopic traces of DNA we might recover. He spread them wide. On black material, the blood looked black too but it reflected a dull brown in the light of Belcott’s torch.
    Chris Pettifer shook his head. ‘Who would shoot a man on his way home from work, getting a quiet blowjob in a public park? That’s just cruel.’
    ‘At least he died happy,’ Derwent said. ‘The lady – or gentleman – must have got a bit of a shock, though.’
    ‘Or she knew exactly what was going to happen.’ I stood up. ‘She took the keys, didn’t she? Maybe she was driving when they parked here. Maybe she chose this spot because it was the right place for an ambush.’
    ‘Risky,’ Derwent