IMPOSTURE: Hunters become the hunted in this gripping murder mystery by Ray Clark (good romance books to read txt) 📗

if Reilly might have a small mirror in the car. He then checked for a pulse but found none. The sergeant returned within minutes, clutching the remains of a broken wing mirror, which he mentioned was from the boot of their own vehicle. He held it over the mouth of the male victim – to no avail. He was definitely deceased.

Gardener stood up and glanced at his partner. He removed his own hat and scratched his head. “I can’t make any sense of this.”

“Without CCTV we’re not likely to.” Reilly glanced around. “And there doesn’t seem to be much of that.”

“I have a really bad feeling about it all,” continued Gardener. “We have a heavy car travelling at some speed, that smashes into a brick wall back there. It appears to have bounced off the wall and still continued at high speed before finishing up here. Look at the clumps of overturned soil and the damage to the railings and the street lamp. Why did it stop here?” He glanced quickly at both bodies. “It doesn’t look like either of these have actually been hit.”

“I don’t think we can rule him out as not being hit yet, boss,” said Reilly, staring at the body behind the electric box. “I’ve seen some strange things over the years. I once saw a bloke hit by a car and he flew into the air, landed some distance away, but when the ambulance got to him there wasn’t a scratch – he hadn’t even lost a drop of blood. Happens that way sometimes.”

Gardener knelt back down and rummaged through the suit pockets of the male victim retrieving a leather wallet. Pulling out a credit card, he read it, rolled his eyes, and then passed it to Reilly.

“David Hunter. The plot thickens.”

Gardener grabbed his mobile and punched in a series of numbers. “Time to call this in, Sean. We need everyone here.”

Chapter Four

The scene in the village switched in an instant, in the shape of four police cars, four vans and two trucks. Gardener left Reilly with PC Roberts and Edward Makepeace, while he met with Scenes of Crime Officers and issued some tasks; he wanted an inner and outer cordon put into place immediately, with marquees constructed. Burley was sealed off in record time, resembling something out of The Quatermass Experiment.

Gardener raised his head, took it all in. A quiet country village locked down, the scene of mysterious murders. Floating between here and the roundabout to the main A65 were a number of SOCOs, all in white paper suits. There were cars all over the place with flashing blue lights, headlights still burning; resembling an abandoned film set.

A bunch of spectators had finally gathered at either end of the crime scene tape, as they always did. Where had they been when he’d needed them? And where the hell had they come from? The amount of people that had gathered due to noise from the scene and the bright lights was now around twenty, and growing. What was the betting that no one had seen or heard anything?

Reilly had checked the statement Roberts had taken from Edward Makepeace and then asked the young PC to take the old man home. Gardener dragged his team to one side at the edge of the inner cordon: Colin Sharp, Paul Benson, Patrick Edwards and Dave Rawson were huddled together. He was also pleased to see the two newer recruits in the shape of Julie Longstaff and Sarah Gates.

Reilly explained what they had so far pieced together.

“Have you any idea what happened?” asked Colin Sharp. “Did Mr Makepeace actually see anything?”

“No,” replied Gardener. He explained what Edward was doing out and how he had discovered the scene.

“So we don’t know if anyone was actually hit by the car?” asked Sarah Gates.

“No,” replied Reilly. “It doesn’t look that way, but looks can be deceiving.”

“For what it’s worth,” said Gardener, “we certainly don’t think Ann Marie Hunter was hit by anything other than a large blunt object.”

“She has a hell of a lump on the back of her head,” added Reilly.

As his sergeant made that comment, Gardener saw the Home Office pathologist, George Fitzgerald, pull up. After he’d exited the car, the SIO spent a few minutes bringing him up to speed before rejoining his team.

“This will be really awkward; an RTC without witnesses always is. I’ve called the Collision Investigation Unit. They are the experts in fatal RTCs so we’ll let them do their job, and hopefully they can help and point us in the right direction.

“From what they’re saying, they’re going to run a 360-degree camera over the entire scene. That should produce a 3D computer image of the whole area. Then we can ‘float’ through on the computer. Fingers crossed we’ll find something to go on.”

Gardener stared around the village, peering at the nearest houses. “If there’s a question of whether or not someone could see something from their location, the lab will be able to print the whole scene with a 3D printer. But, as you know, without a car and witnesses – we’ll be struggling.”

“Is there any blood at the scene, that would help?” asked Sharp.

“I agree, Colin,” replied Gardener. “Blood on the scene would be a great starter for ten with footmarks left. A blood pattern analysis expert might tell us the point of impact, possible speed of the vehicle, and where the body landed, etc. It would help to know if either of the two bodies has been moved. But so far, we haven’t seen anything.”

“But to be fair,” added Reilly, “it is dark and we haven’t had the time to comb the area.”

Gardener agreed, and then said, “Hopefully, there will be something; fibres caught on twigs, or the wall, footprints on grass verges.”

“Fitz should be able to help with the bodies,” said Rawson. “A post-mortem will