Two Wrongs (Detective Inspector Ross Reed Book 1) by Nathan Sayer Page B

but what did he know? If he wanted to enter the unit for any reason, he had to get a pass issued from Whitehead. Getting an out of hours phone call was about as taboo as it got.
    Reed was sat in his office trying to rub the sleepiness from his eyes. After he had taken the call from forensics last night he had called Tyler to let her know the news about the bleach. She had, in return, called him shortly after six this morning to tell him of something she had found. She had discovered a link between Carmella Chapman’s murder and that of another girl’s murder which had occurred in 2003. The body of Tina Westwood had been found less than 24 hours after she had gone missing in a small wooded area near a village called Ovington where the girl had lived with her parents.
    Traces of bleach had been found on her chest and hands; it was a small amount, no more than you would have expected than if she had rested her hands on a freshly cleaned surface and shortly after touched her chest. At the time of the investigation the bleach had had no real significance; it wasn’t until now that it became potentially major. Something else that had piqued Reed’s interest was that Tina had only been wearing one earring when her body had been discovered and, from memory, Carmella hadn’t been wearing any despite her ears being pierced, which could mean nothing but most girls who had their ears pierced chose to decorate them for a night out. He would bear it in mind.
    Tina Westwood was 17 years old at the time of her death. There was no obvious motive, no known enemies and as of yet there had been no conviction. Having told her parents she was going over to a friend’s house, she had left at around 6pm. She never arrived there and never came home again. Her friend hadn’t been expecting her and there had been very little hard evidence to work with. The police angled the investigation towards Tina meeting a boyfriend that nobody knew about, much to the disgust of her parents who insisted she wasn’t allowed one. The parent’s refusal to accept the possibility of a boyfriend enforced the police’s suspicion that she may have been keeping one a secret.
    Her autopsy report showed that she had died from a single blow to the head with a blunt object, exactly the same way as Carmella was killed. The poor man who discovered her body was out on the Ovington fen walking his black Labrador when it disobeyed him for something more stimulating in one of the small forest areas just off the main track. When he went to investigate what it could be, he found Tina’s body.
    Reed was trying to absorb as much information from the file that Tyler had compiled for him before driving to Tina Westwood’s parents’ house where he was meeting with Allison Mcleary, who had worked as the Family Liaison Officer at the time. He had asked her to attend because she was a familiar face and they needed to warn the family about the latest murder and the media attention it would bring. If the police had linked the two, the media wouldn’t be far behind, as per usual, and sometimes they were even ahead.
    Reed parked on the brick-weave driveway behind a blue Ford Mondeo. The garden was neat and tidy with a huge willow tree as the main feature. The house was weathered like any other but no attempts had been made to rectify this. The paint on the windowsills had been left to flake and watermarks on the bricks revealed a broken drainpipe.
    After greeting Reed, Mcleary led the way down the side of the house and rapped her knuckles on the door, despite there being a doorbell.
    After a couple of seconds the door groaned open. Reed was surprised at the woman who poked her head out. Her greying hair was set into a lifeless bob and the fringe was cut in a straight horizontal line just above her eyebrows. When she felt safe enough to do so, she pulled the door open to reveal an old-fashioned floral dress, skin coloured tights and sensible black pumps. “Hello.” She offered a weak