Good Bait

Начало книги

The face looked back up at her from beneath the ice. Dead eyes, unblinking, their focus defused as if through bottled glass. Off to one side, a small covey of ducks, uncomprehending, shuffled this way and that. In places, Karen Shields thought, the skin would have stuck fast: the forehead, the bridge of the nose, the chin. Little doubt the substance that had pooled close alongside the head, then frozen, was blood. That wanker, she thought, the artist — what was his name? — a small fortune for slicing animals in half and shoving them on display, pickled in formaldehyde.

Officers in protective clothing were cordoning off the path that ran down between the ponds with tape, no urgency now, time theirs to take. A brace of early runners stymied in their tracks, hats and gloves, jogged up and down, looking on; Karen could see their breath bobbing in the air.

When the call had come through she’d fumbled uneasily awake, mobile falling between her fingers and down on to the bed.

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