A Body in the Lakes
A gripping crime thriller with a heart-stopping twist
Graham Smith
Books by Graham Smith
Death in the Lakes
A Body in the LakesAVAILABLE IN AUDIO
Death in the Lakes (UK listeners | US listeners)
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Chapter 67
Chapter 68
Chapter 69
Chapter 70
Chapter 71
Chapter 72
Chapter 73
Chapter 74
Chapter 75
Chapter 76
Chapter 77
Chapter 78
Chapter 79
Chapter 80
Chapter 81
Chapter 82
Hear More From Graham Smith
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Death in the Lakes
A Letter from Graham
Acknowledgements
For Daniel. A young man who is a constant source of pride.
One
DC Beth Young’s drive to Lake Ullswater would have been enjoyable had she not been travelling to a grisly task at the location where a body had been dumped.
Copper beeches stood out from other trees, their leaves turned a deep burgundy by the morning sun, and there were hydrangeas, lilacs and azaleas in bloom in the gardens she passed, which provided a colourful alternative to the uniform green of the grasses and trees lining the road. Even the roadside hedgerows had patches of colour as the hawthorn hedges sprouted a myriad of small white flowers.
The drive was uneventful with only a minor delay behind a tractor that turned off the road after a mile. It was only as she neared the crime scene that Beth started to get what her mother would describe as a ‘fey feeling’.
A scatter of emergency service vehicles lined the lake side of the A592. At each end of the procession a uniformed constable was directing traffic along the narrow road. Worst of all was the line of press vehicles that had formed. Beth counted three different news crews as she drove past them, before parking behind the last emergency vehicle.
A series of forensic stepping plates led to a low wall that was missing sections where neglect and bad driving had taken effect. Beth’s boss, DI Zoe O’Dowd, was standing with a uniformed sergeant; when she saw Beth approach, she pointed at the stepping plates.
‘Go see what Hewson’s got.’
Once she was clad in a paper forensic suit Beth stepped over the remnants of the wall and onto a new stepping plate. Instead of tarmac, there was long grass here. The lakeside trees and bushes sent branches out meaning she had to press through them on her way to the screens that had been erected to prevent the press telephoto lenses getting shots of the body.
Beth skirted one of the screens and announced her arrival to the pathologist.
‘I’ll be done in five minutes, DC Protégé, I’d appreciate it if you stood there and waited for me to finish before you try and get the information Dowdy O’Dowd wants. While you’re waiting, you may examine that which you can see.’
Despite the sombreness of the situation, Beth could feel a smile forming on her lips. Dr Hewson and O’Dowd had a long-running battle that masked the fact their working relationship was based on mutual respect.
She was glad of the chance to take in the scene as she always liked to draw her own conclusions rather than read the reports of other officers.
The naked body Hewson was crouched over belonged to an elderly lady. The legs were riddled with varicose veins that were a deep blue and what she could see of the woman’s bald head was covered with liver spots. In repose her face had smoothed out a lot of the finer wrinkles, but the crow’s feet radiating out from her eyes spoke of a long life.
Hewson moved to one side, allowing Beth to get a clearer look at the woman’s puckered mouth and yellow-brown teeth.
Beth guessed the woman had been a heavy smoker and that she’d had a hard life. The signs of hardship were etched into her face. Even in death she looked forlorn, as if the daily struggle was too much to bear.
The woman’s limbs were thin to the point that Beth wondered if she’d been malnourished. The skin on her arms seemed to hang off bones rather than sheath muscle, and when Beth looked at the skin a little closer it appeared to have the same translucence as tracing paper.
Hewson rose to his feet and stood on a footpad beside the body.
Now she could see all of the woman, Beth took in more of the same: a flaccid chest and stomach topped a pubic mound devoid of so much as a whisper of hair. As Beth’s eyes traversed the body, she was looking for signs of injury: a knife wound, or bruising. There was no sign of any blood, although Beth could see a darkening of flesh on the parts of the woman’s body where it was in contact with the ground. That was normal; a body’s blood sank to the lowest point in death, and this lividity told Beth the woman had lain as she was since being dumped here.
There was always a possibility the woman had wandered out from her home and ended up here, but even as frail as she looked, the night had been warm and Beth didn’t believe she’d died from exposure.
The clincher to this theory was the light bruising around the woman’s throat. In one so frail, it might be expected there would be significant bruising, but if, as Beth suspected, the marks on the woman’s throat were from her killer strangling her, the skin would stop bruising as soon as her heart stopped beating.
Beth lifted her eyes and took in the surrounding area. Tranquil was the best word she could think of to describe it. The morning sun glittered across the dappled
