Booked for Murder. V. McDermid L.

bowl of grapes starting to go mouldy, a thick A3 pad of scrap paper and, inevitably around Penny, a couple of autopencils. Caught momentarily off guard, Lindsay was ambushed by her grief. Suddenly, she couldn’t see through tears, and the lump in her throat threatened to choke her. Subsiding into the nearest chair, she set her sorrow free, her shoulders shaking with sobs as memory flooded her.

      Eventually, the wave of pain receded, leaving her beached in a corner of the enveloping sofa. She rubbed a hand across her face, forgetting about the gloves until the latex skidded across her tear-streaked cheek. With a watery grin, Lindsay pushed herself out of the sofa and forced herself to work.

      There wasn’t much more in the living room to mark Penny’s presence, apart from a postcard of the Golden Gate bridge from Meredith, wishing her a safe arrival. Interesting that she hadn’t binned it, Lindsay thought. Perhaps Penny hadn’t been as adamant in her dismissal as she had seemed to be.

      Lindsay crossed the hall into the kitchen. While the lounge looked as if its resident had popped out for a minute, the kitchen made it plain that she wouldn’t ever be coming back. On the cork-tile floor was a reddish-brown stain like a giant Rorschach test. Spatters of dried blood afflicted everything else in the room, from cupboard doors to kettle, their sizes ranging from pinpricks to bottle tops. There was even what looked like a thin drizzle in one corner of the ceiling. On every surface, the bloodstains were half obscured by fragments of glass and fingerprint powder. Looking at the room, it was hard to imagine how it had got like this. Logically, Lindsay knew that when an artery was pierced, blood spurted and sprayed like an out-of-control fountain. But this was beyond that. It looked as if someone had shaken a jeroboam of blood-coloured champagne and sprayed it joyously round the room, like a driver winning a murderous Grand Prix. And then thrown the bottle after the foam.

      She took a deep breath. There was a faint metallic smell of blood but it was overlaid by the sour smell of spilt beer. Lindsay looked around at the arena of death, taking in the outline marked on the floor like a scene from a bad Saturday Night Mystery Movie. She noted the fridge, tall for a British one, its top standing just under five feet above floor height. On top of it, three bottles of German Weissbier remained standing. In spite of her reputation among her students and former colleagues as a cold-hearted bastard, Lindsay didn’t expect to drink wheat beer ever again.

      It was easy to see how the first assumption was of accidental death. A bottle exploding under pressure at that height could easily drive flying glass slicing through soft tissue. To have imagined it was murder would have seemed perverse without Catriona Polson’s information. Even so, there were no signs of another’s presence. No alien footprints, no tell-tale bloody handprints on the door jamb. Nothing that didn’t tally with the hypothesis of accident.