enough or old enough to make them suffer then he would hurt the thing they loved. He waited three weeks and then very early one Saturday morning he climbed over the fence of their back garden, rolled a lawn-mower against the door of the kennel where their pet dog, a Staffordshire bull terrier, slept, poured petrol he had taken from his dad's shed all over it and set it alight.
The adult Paul Archer held a hand to his throbbing nose again; there were many things he knew now that he hadn't as a child, but one thing that hadn't changed was that certain knowledge of the joy of retribution. He knew it as surely as night follows day. As death follows life. As pleasure follows pain.
Someone was going to pay.
In the front part of the head, in the roof of each nostril, lies a group of mucous-covered sacs. The olfactory epithelium. About five square centimetres in size and containing about ten million receptor cells. Using these receptors the human nose can differentiate, it has been claimed, between four thousand and ten thousand different odours. Odour is at the very genesis and denouement of human existence. A smell receptor has been identified in human sperm – the sperm literally smells its way to the egg. And death, as any policeman or mortician knows, is certainly no friend of the olfactory organ. However, the unmistakable smell of a deceased and decaying body had had no time to develop that morning and PC Bob Wilkinson reckoned his young colleague was as glad of that fact as anyone.
PC Danny Vine had already thrown up twice within the space of half an hour and Wilkinson, taking pity on him, had sent him to the front of the path to prevent anyone from disturbing the crime scene. Move along please. Nothing to see here. Only, of course, there was. There was plenty to see. But none of it pleasant.
The mechanics of investigation had already been set in motion. A large section of the surrounding area had been cordoned off with yellow tape stretching from tree to tree in a rough diamond shape, covering about a quarter of an acre. The yellow tape with '
Police vans had been parked outside the cordoned area and uniformed police and white-suited scene-of-crime officers, SOCOs, went about containing the integrity of the site. Aluminium telescopic poles had been snapped open and joined together to form a skeletal framework which was positioned over the area immediately surrounding the body. Plastic sheets had been run over the frame so that the structure took on the appearance of a wedding marquee. Only within the frame, there was no cheery fiddle music, there was no three-tiered cake on a stand, no punchbowl, no laughing guests, no nervous best man and certainly no blushing bride with a blue garter on her stocking and a hungry husband by her side. Inside was the dead body of a woman in her mid-twenties, with black hair, black lipstick and black blood crusting the edges of the deep slash wounds to her chest, throat and abdomen.
Delaney and Sally Cartwright nodded at PC Danny Vine as they ducked under the tape and headed towards the murder scene. Danny responded with a half-hearted smile.
'You all right, Danny?' Sally asked.
The constable nodded again, unconvincingly. 'Something I ate.'
'You still on for tonight?'
The constable smiled again, more warmly this time. 'Yeah, I'll be there. Bells on.'
Sally flashed him a quick smile and hurried to join Delaney.
'Something I should know about?' he asked.
'Sir?'
'Poster boy back there. You and he sharing handcuffs?'
