After half an hour, Harriet lifted her head from the back of the car and beckoned them over.
‘All right, come and take a look.’
Sharp lifted the tape so he and Kay could pass underneath it, and led the way to the car.
Her eyes roamed the vehicle as she drew closer, the dents and scrapes caused by the velocity of the crash even more evident under the harsh bulbs of the gantry lights.
She left Sharp to speak with Harriet while she circled the car, surveying the damage to the panel work.
The passenger door had been ripped off its hinges and lay further up the embankment from where the vehicle had finally stopped, a steady stream of debris tumbling amongst the undergrowth as three of Harriet’s colleagues hurried to collect as much of it as possible before the wind seized it.
Rounding the back end of the car, she joined Sharp beside Harriet.
He stepped to one side and gestured to the woman’s body. ‘She didn’t stand a chance.’
Kay lowered her gaze.
The woman appeared to be in her twenties, her naked form wrapped in the black plastic before being dumped in the back of the car.
Harriet had snipped away at the tape that held the plastic together, exposing the woman’s bruised and battered body. Cuts and welts covered her left cheekbone and eye socket, her face twisted away from them.
‘We’ll finish here and get her to Lucas as soon as possible,’ said Harriet. ‘Though bear in mind we have to take samples from the whole car and gather everything from its path of travel. We’ll be here a while yet.’
‘Understood,’ said Sharp.
Kay shifted from foot to foot and ignored the damp starting to seep through the protective bootees and into the leather uppers of her boots. ‘I can’t recall any similar cases to this one, can you, guv?’
‘No. That’s what worries me.’
She turned to face Sharp. She was almost the same height as him, but he stood a little further up the slope to her and so she had to lift her chin. His face was troubled.
‘You think he’s done this before?’
‘Maybe.’
‘Perhaps it’s a one-off, a domestic case.’
He shrugged.
Kay sighed and faced the car once more.
No matter what Sharp thought, their first priority would be identifying the driver and his victim before working out where they had travelled from.
And where he had been taking her.
The thought that they might have missed a practiced killer with several burial sites spread around the county town sent a shiver down her spine.
What if he hadn’t crashed?
When would he have been caught, and how many other victims would there have been?
‘He’d better survive surgery,’ she muttered.
Chapter Three
The next morning, bleary-eyed from lack of sleep, Kay glanced up from her computer at Sharp’s low whistle, and then wheeled her chair over to where the rest of the investigating team were beginning to gather.
She nodded to Detective Constable Carys Miles, whose dark hair hung to her shoulders – a new style for her, and one she’d confessed to Kay she was only trying for the coming winter months.
‘It’s too damn hot in summer for long hair,’ she’d grumbled. ‘But at least I can keep my neck warm now.’
Kay had laughed at the comment – she felt the cold chill of winter as early as late September, and would never contemplate having her blonde hair cut shorter than its current length. Her only compromise was to keep her fringe short so she could at least see what she was doing on a day-to-day basis without it getting in the way.
Gavin Piper and Ian Barnes, two more detective constables, joined them, the younger of the two – Gavin – choosing to perch on a nearby desk, his notebook and pen poised ready.
He’d passed his exams the previous month with flying colours and was now a firm part of the investigative team at the county town’s police station. Naively, Piper had thought his colleague’s teasing would stop the moment he was no longer a probationer, however Barnes had other ideas, especially as the tall handsome man was the gossip of the female members of the administrative pool of staff and was known to spend most of his free time surfing off the Cornish coastline. He kept his blonde hair regulatory length, but it still had a habit of sticking out in tufts due to the amount of salt water it had been exposed to over the summer months, accentuated by the deep tan that still clung to his skin.
Kay viewed the older man, Barnes, as the glue within the team.
Barnes could be relied upon to lighten the mood when required, but also commanded an enormous amount of respect amongst the assembled detectives and administrative staff. In his mid-fifties, he’d been a police officer since he was in his twenties and his knowledge of the local area and its history had been relied upon time and again when Kay had worked alongside him. He’d confided in Kay that he’d started dating someone before the summer, a conveyancing solicitor he’d met through friends, and it seemed the romance had blossomed.
Kay picked up her notebook and pen, flicked to a clean page and settled into her seat as Sharp began.
‘Right, for those of you who weren’t on scene last night, I’ll give you a quick update,’ he said. He pinned a series of colour photographs of the crash scene to the whiteboard beside him. ‘At ten past eleven last night, Traffic were called to a car accident on the M20 about quarter of a mile past the Harrietsham exit. When they got there, the driver was unconscious, but still alive, and fire and ambulance crews worked to free him from the wreckage and get him to hospital. He’s currently at Maidstone Hospital in an induced coma after six hours of surgery.’
He paused to let the team catch up with their notetaking, and then pinned a further three photographs to
