Read Summer Rain: An Inspector Banks Short Story Online
Authors: Peter Robinson
Summer Rain: An Inspector Banks Short Story (5 page)
Winsome paused in the doorway and took in the hangar. She imagined you could fit a few planes in here, at a pinch. She had no idea how many Lancasters or Spitfires there were in a squadron, or even if the hangar had been used during wartime. Her grandfather on her mother’s side had fought in the Second World War, she remembered, and he had been killed somewhere in Normandy shortly after the D-Day landings. She doubted that there were a lot of fellow Jamaicans with him; he must have been very scared and lonely for his own people. A place like this made her think about such things.
Gilchrist stood by an area of the concrete floor and the dog’s tail started wagging. Winsome went and stood beside him, taking her torch and holding it up, at eye level, shining the light down on the floor.
On the patch of cracked concrete Gilchrist pointed to, Winsome saw a large dark stain shaped like the continent of South America. It certainly resembled congealed blood. There was a familiar smell of decaying matter, too. She squatted closer. Just around where Brazil would have been, she saw fragments of bone and gray matter stuck to the scarlet stain. Brains, she thought, reaching for her mobile. Maybe they were both wrong, maybe it was paint, or a mixture of water and rust, but now that she had seen it for herself, she could understand exactly why Gilchrist had been concerned enough to ring the police. It could be animal blood, of course, but a simple test would determine that.
Winsome keyed in the station number, explained the situation and asked for AC Gervaise to be informed and for the forensics bloodstain analyst, Jasminder Singh, and DC Gerry Masterson to come out to check the blood at the hangar.
PETER
ROBINSON
grew up in the United Kingdom, and now divides his time between Toronto and England. The author of twenty-two books in the DCI Banks series, he has also written two short-story collections and three stand-alone novels. He regularly tops the bestseller lists in the UK and abroad, and he has won countless awards for his fiction, including the Edgar and the CWA Dagger. The Banks novels have been adapted for the ITV series DCI Banks, currently in its fourth season and airing on PBS in the United States.
www.inspectorbanks.com
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Gallows View
A Dedicated Man
A Necessary End
The Hanging Valley
Past Reason Hated
Wednesday’s Child
SUMMER RAIN.
Copyright © 2015 by Eastvale Enterprises, Inc. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
This story originally appeared in the collection
Not Safe After Dark,
published by Crippen & Landru in 1998.
Excerpt from
In the Dark Places
copyright © 2015 by Eastvale Enterprises, Inc.
FIRST WILLIAM MORROW EDITION
EPub Edition JUNE 2015 ISBN 9780062413802
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
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