Just Keep Breathing, GS Rhodes [best book club books for discussion TXT] 📗

Kidd turned to the door, the smile quickly slipping from his face when he locked eyes with DCI Weaver.

“Boss?” Kidd said. “Everything alright?”

“We’ve got a body,” he said. “Sarah Harper’s body.”

He wandered over to the evidence board where the pictures of their suspects were, every single one of them, Norman’s mugshot from last night, Ms Chowdhury’s school photo, a family photo of the Harpers, all of them surrounding a picture of Sarah Harper. He wandered over to the picture of Dexter Black, tapping it.

“I think we’ve got your man too.”

DI Kidd was confused, he needed Weaver to go back a few steps. He must have noticed because he shook his head.

“We’ve found Sarah Harper’s body at Kingston riverside,” he said. “Her head had been caved in, blood everywhere, all over her, there are marks around her wrist, marks around her neck too, strangled we think and covered in mud, looks like she was running from someone. Though that remains to be seen, we’ve got some detective work to do on that.”

“What about Dexter Black?” Kidd asked.

DCI Weaver took a breath before he spoke. “Response team found him with the body. Turns out he was the one who called it in.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

There was already a Family Liaison Officer on their way to see Mr and Mrs Harper to break the news. DC Powell was sent to meet them at their house. They would need to identify the body, even though Dexter Black had already done that for them over the phone.

The team wasted no time gathering their coats and heading to the riverside to see what was going on. Every single one of them went along, like it was some kind of strange family outing, not a group of detectives going to see a dead body.

DI Kidd cursed himself on the way there. Had they not worked fast enough? Had they not been working flat out since they found out…? He traced it back in his head. Yesterday morning. They’d found out about it yesterday morning, they’d conducted interviews, they’d even gone to that bloody school reunion to see if they could figure out who it was that was doing this and all they’d ended up with was a body.

The last thing Kidd had wanted was for it to turn into a murder investigation. He’d wanted to bring her back alive. There had been too many young girls that he had seen suffer in this borough and now Sarah Harper was another one to add to the list.

The fact that DCI Weaver looked rattled by it also wasn’t a particularly good sign. He knew that the Superintendent had been on his case about it since the beginning, the rushed press conference, the determination to get someone arrested, but now it was only going to get worse. DCI Weaver was going to get the blame for this, which meant it was DI Kidd’s head in the smasher too.

The riverside was crowded. There were marked police cars, sparkling white in the morning sunshine, a couple of uniformed officers stood at the cordon, stoically watching people pass by and rubberneck. The traffic on the bridge was obscene, everyone and their mother trying to see what was happening down there.

A couple of cyclists had stopped at the tape, talking to one of the officers, wondering why they couldn’t cycle down there. Some people needed their bloody heads examined.

“‘Scuse me,” Kidd growled at one of them as he made his way past.

“Why can he go down there?” A middle-aged man whined.

Kidd turned back to him, his eyes ablaze. He didn’t know whether to rip the man to shreds for wearing that much Lycra at his age or just bite his head off for the question.

“I’m the investigating officer,” he barked. “You got a problem with that?”

The man winced, stepping back from the cordon and starting away on his bike.

The press had arrived too, cameras being set up around the cordon. Kidd half expected to see Joe Warrington there somewhere, but maybe this was a little bit too early for him. Or he had a class. This was going to make national news because of Laura’s profile. The shitstorm was just beginning. And it was his fault.

“You alright?” Zoe asked falling into step with him.

“No, Zoe, I’m not alright,” Kidd growled. “We lost her. We bloody lost her. Fuck.”

“Okay, look, I know you’re hurting right now, but this isn’t the place for it,” she said. “We’ll get a drink later and you can rage about it to your heart’s content. Or save it for Weaver, I imagine he’ll give you a run for your money,” she added.

He smirked. “He really looks like he’s going to explode at some point, doesn’t he?”

“Wait until he’s had the call from the Super, you’ll be in that office so fast.”

Kidd and the team pulled on coveralls, white puffy suits so they didn’t contaminate anything, and headed down towards the riverside, joining the forensic team who’d beaten them there. They’d already set up a small tent where Sarah’s body was so it was hidden away from prying eyes and to protect the crime scene. They were collecting everything they could, anything that could possibly help. Kidd could feel himself sweating beneath the suit.

The team walked down to take a look at her. Kidd found himself holding his breath.

How many bodies had he seen over his years? Too many to count, that much was for sure, definitely too many for him to name, but there were a few that seemed to stand out in his head. He’d never forget the names of the women who’d been killed in the first Grinning Murders case fifteen years ago. And he didn’t think he would forget Sarah Harper in a hurry either.

She was lying on her back. He wondered if she had fallen that way, the last thing she would have seen being the sky. She was pale, the tanned complexion that they’d seen