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"Blood Moon Over Britain"
A Dorchester/Leisure Release
December 2005
ISBN: 0-843-95582-1
©2005 by Morag McKendrick Pippin
"You don't want to go in there, guv. Bloody mess, it is."
Alistair Fielding snapped shut his Special Branch identification holder and returned it to the breast pocket of his tweed blazer. The rank odour of stale blood brought back the memories with a merciless clarity.
"Aye, well, Sargent, we all must do things we find distasteful nowadays," he said and entered the bathroom. It was large, probably a redesigned dressing room, and bare. A cold radiator hugged the far wall and beside it, a deep-boweled pedestal sink with an age spotted mirror hanging above it.
A claw foot tub occupied the centre of the room. Fielding felt his jaw clench and forced himself to keep his eyes open. Enduring four days of butchery and slaughter on the beach at Dunkirk could not inure him to human suffering. At least it didn't look as if this poor sod suffered long.
The tub was full to the rim with blood and water. A foot dangled over the end and an arm hung over the side. A vertical gash ran from the wrist to nearly the elbow, and although it no longer dripped, the evidence on the floor clearly attested that it had for some time.
Fielding skirted the pool of congealed blood and stepped to the head of the bath tub. The dead man's glassy eyes stared sightlessly at the wall opposite and his nose rested on the surface of the water. His skin was pallid, waxen. Rigour had come and gone. He'd been dead at least two days. Maybe more as the flat was ruddy cold.
"It's a suicide, guv, plain as the nose on your face." The middle-aged sergent still stood in the doorway, a dubious look etching his plump features. "Don't see the need for Special Branch to muck about with some poor tosser cockin' up his own toes."
Fielding shot him a warning look. "It's not your concern why I'm here, Sargent. Let it suffice that I am." He tugged the victim's head backward by the hair and thumbed the eyelids fully open, examining the pupils. The motion set the water in the bath tub gently lapping at the sides, revealing the well healed stump of what remained of the man's right leg.
Shutting his own eyes and steeling himself, Fielding bent close to sniff the mouth of the corpse. He stepped back hastily, fished for the handkerchief in his pocket, and took a deep breath through it. "Who found the body and when?"