Still Waters (24 page)
Authors: Judith Cutler
The fifth-floor room was so neat it might never have been occupied. But it was certainly meant to have been. There were baskets and vases of red roses everywhere, even in the
marble-walled
bathroom. Two near the door had been tipped over, as if someone had blindly run past them. Puddles were only just spreading.
An unopened bottle of vintage champagne was still chilling in a bucket beside the bed, though the ice had begun to melt. A couple of expensive chocolates lay coyly on the pillows.
The heavy curtains had been drawn, but had been tugged slightly apart. They shifted and heaved, driven by the wind. The glass door opening onto the balcony was ajar, despite the sudden burst of rain, which would soon soak into the carpet.
Blue flashing lights were already strobing over the car park below. The slanting rain might have made them look more like lights on seaside rides. Instead, it rendered them even more cold and clinical.
The brightwear of the men and women scrabbling diligently in their intermittent illumination – someone would soon send
for incident tape and floodlights – turned a harsh green. As for the blood from the shattered body they were attending, that too a far from natural colour, it was already trickling into the drains and sewers to be borne, via the new and expensive sewage plant that Ofwat had forced upon Invitaqua, to the sea.
Prize-winning short-story writer J
UDITH
C
UTLER
is the author of nearly thirty novels, including the successful crime series featuring Fran Harman, police woman extraordinaire. Judith has taught Creative Writing at Birmingham University, and has run writing courses elsewhere, including a maximum-security prison and an idyllic Greek island. She now lives in the Cotswolds with her husband, fellow author Edward Marston.
The Chief Superintendent Fran Harman series
Life Sentence
Cold Pursuit
Still Waters
The Josie Welford series
The Food Detective
The Chinese Takeout
The Tobias Campion series
The Keeper of Secrets
Shadow of the Past
Scar Tissue
Drawing the Line
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First published in Great Britain by Allison & Busby in 2008.
This ebook edition first published in 2014.
Copyright © 2008 by J
UDITH
C
UTLER
The moral right of the author is hereby asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All characters and events in this publication other than those clearly in the public domain are fictitious and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent buyer.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978–0–7490–1628–9