BLOOD STAINED an unputdownable crime thriller with a breathtaking twist (Detective Claudia Nunn Book by Rebecca Bradley (rooftoppers .TXT) 📕

‘Don’t anyone touch that bin,’ she said to the cop entering the kitchen.

‘No, ma’am.’

‘Anything out of place anywhere else?’ she asked.

‘Not as far as we can tell, but it’s a tidy home so if there was a struggle you’d think it would be easy to identify.’

‘Mmm.’ She agreed. Plus wouldn’t Dominic have mentioned it?

She pushed on the door to the utility room where the washing machine and dryer were housed.

‘What’s through there?’ asked the cop, eyeing up the closed door at the other side of the room.

‘It leads to the garage. An internal way in.’ Claudia flicked on a light switch as they walked through the utility room, pausing to check the washer for clothing that might be being dumped in it following an attack of some sort, but it was empty. As she’d known it would be. Then she pushed open the door to the garage. It was heavier set than the rest of the doors in the house. ‘He doesn’t keep his car in here, he parks on the drive like most people. I think it’s filled with junk.’

She turned and stepped into the garage. A strip light fitted on the ceiling glowed down into the space. There were shelves on the walls filled with small and large boxes and other bits of stuff she could only describe as junk.

The cop who had walked into the kitchen was standing behind her. She stepped into the garage and walked further in. There was something on the floor towards the front. It looked like an oil spill, sleek and glossy. But she’d said to the cop behind her that Dominic didn’t keep the car in here, and looking at the boxes along the walls it didn’t seem as though he could drive the car in here to work on it either, there was not enough room. Maybe a canister behind one of the boxes had been knocked over and spilled.

She took a couple of steps closer. Her nose twitched.

That was not the smell of oil. Her stomach roiled.

She turned to the cop behind her. ‘Get the CSU here.’

‘What do we have?’ he asked.

She took another step forward. ‘There’s a broken . . . a smashed . . .’ She stumbled over her words as she focused on the ground in front of her. ‘There’s broken glass in the pedal bin in the kitchen that needs examining.’ She struggled to believe what was in front of her.

She could see it now. She could see the colour of it closer to the edge of the puddle where the fluid was thinner. It was definitely not oil. It was not black.

It was red. Deep slick red.

‘And I think we have a large patch of blood here in the garage.’ She concluded as calmly as she could manage, though as her own blood rushed through her veins she was anything other than calm.

He peered around her. ‘Jesus.’

Claudia reached out a hand towards the wall to the side of her, grasping for something to hold on to, clawing, needing something solid to hold her up. The understanding of what this meant for her friend sinking in. But the wall stayed where it was, solid, silent and elusive. Out of reach. Claudia bent over and put her hands on her knees. The blood swimming in front of her as her vision greyed out. An internal thermometer jacked up her heating system and a far-off bell started to ring in her ears.

‘Can someone live with this much blood missing?’ Claudia’s colleague asked as she tried to stay upright.

‘I don’t know. I really don’t. You only have eight pints of blood in your body. I’m not sure how many you can live without before you die.’ There was a hell of a lot of blood on the floor in front of her. If this was Ruth’s, she was missing a lot, and Claudia was sure as hell Ruth needed it.

‘Well, whoever’s this is, they’re not going to be doing so well.’

Claudia turned and snapped at him, the bells fading out, her vision clicking back into place. ‘Have you contacted the CSU yet?! It’s all well and good standing around here chatting about it but we won’t know anything until we get the professionals here. So stop trying to guess and get a move on.’

‘Oh, erm, yes, ma’am.’ He flustered then grabbed for the radio on his shoulder and called up the control room to request the crime scene unit.

Claudia turned on her heel and stalked out of the garage. ‘No one comes in or out of here. It’s for CSU only,’ she said to him as she passed.

‘Yes, ma’am.’ He moved towards the door and away from the pool of blood that was glistening under the strip light.

Claudia walked through the house to the search bag that had been left near the front door, pulled out two plastic bags and climbed the stairs. Walking into the main bedroom, she searched until she found a hairbrush with long strands of hair trapped within the teeth. She pushed it into one of the bags and sealed it before writing on the exhibit label stamped on the outside of the bag, signing it with the date and time. Then she went into the bathroom, selected the pink toothbrush and bagged that up also, signing and sealing it. The CSIs would now have something to compare the DNA of the blood against when they got back to the lab. They would be able to tell if the pool of blood was indeed Ruth Harrison’s or not.

Chapter 6

Claudia

Claudia decided she would climb the stairs to Sharpe’s office rather than the easier option of taking the lift. She needed something to take this pent-up energy out of her before she spoke to the DCI. It was as though