Irrefutable Evidence: A Crime Thriller Read Online Free

number and followed by asking if she could have a room on the second floor. “I stayed at your hotel a couple of years ago. Like to be on the same floor, if I may.”
    “Absolutely, madam, that’s no problem at all,” replied Michael, wondering what could be so special about the second floor. The views were pretty ordinary on all the floors.
    Amelia put down the receiver and stared across Maid Marion Way towards the lights of the city. She smiled to herself. Everything was falling perfectly into place.

 
    C hapter 5
    Sunday 1 June, 9 a.m.
    J ennifer Cotton ran up the stairs to the first floor of the old police station that was now the Nottingham City and County Serious Crime Formation HQ, the handbag bouncing on her hip in danger of knocking her phone and coffee cup from her hand.
    Before pushing open the door to the incident room, she peered through its scratched plastic window to see if the meeting had started. To her relief, she saw her team’s boss, detective chief inspector Mike Hurst, walking slowly to the front of the room while deep in conversation with the ‘guv’, DI Rob McPherson.
    Jennifer shuffled past several rows of seats to a vacant spot Derek Thyme had kept for her. He grinned at her triumphantly as she sat down.
    “Don’t look so smug, Derek. Arriving before me once in a lifetime doesn’t wipe out your reputation.”
    “Perhaps I’ve changed my ways.”
    “Perhaps that bright yellow sun out there is about to reverse direction and set.”
    Derek wasn’t about to throw away his brief advantage. “Not like you to be late, Jen.”
    “Sodding alarm didn’t go off and then the cat I’m looking after for a neighbour threw up over my shoes.”
    Derek wrinkled his nose in distaste. “Can’t expect anything else from a cat; they’re all the same: parasites. No time for them, me.”
    “It’s just as well your mother didn’t take that attitude when you were decorating her blouse as a babe-in-arms.”
    Derek grunted. On the athletics track, his sprinting was world class and he was currently shortlisted with the Olympic squad for the one hundred and two hundred metres. However, in the game of last words with Jennifer, he always came a poor second.
     
    DCI Hurst reached the front of the room and looked around, making sure he had everyone’s attention before he started. The group was a mixture of detectives, some old school, some not, and the increasing number of civilian officers recruited to take on many of the office-bound and routine investigative tasks previously carried out by police officers. For Hurst, it was a strange new world, completely different from the police force he had joined thirty-four years before, and one he wasn’t fully sure he liked. But at approaching fifty-five and three months from retirement, he no longer found the machinations of the senior command to be of much interest to him. This was likely to be his last big case and he wanted to leave on a high.
    “Morning everyone; sorry to ruin your Sunday but we need to get moving. Just to ensure we’re all on the same page, last night at around nine thirty, the body of a young woman was found by a courting couple in Harlow Wood, a part of Sherwood Forest three miles south of Mansfield. Unfortunately, I was a hundred miles away visiting my wife’s relatives, so I couldn’t attend the scene. However, as DCI, I shall be leading the investigation as required by the SCF protocol.
    “At first sight, it looked as if the young woman had been killed by blows to the back of the head, but the pathologist reckons she died of suffocation, probably from having a polythene bag pulled over her head. He’ll be confirming that at the pm tomorrow.
    “Documentation from a purse in the inside pocket of her jacket has identified the woman as Miruna Peptanariu, a 19-year-old Romanian working as a prostitute in the Forest Road West area here in the city, although according to the anti-prostitution squad, to whom she was known, she had also