Cover

Title Page

DEADLINE FOR MURDER

Val McDermid

Bywater Books

Ann Arbor

PROLOGUE

Glasgow, Scotland, December 1989

Jackie Mitchell stared down at the murdered body of Alison Maxwell, fear and horror mingling in equal measure. Alison was sprawled on the familiar bedroom carpet, limbs crooked, blonde hair spread round her head in a jagged halo. The ravages of strangulation had left her face barely recognizable. The scarf that was wound into a tight ligature round her neck was, however, only too easily identifiable. Jackie would know her own distinctive yellow tartan muffler anywhere. Slowly, with an enormous effort of will, she forced herself to look up.

Jackie gazed round the crowded courtroom, only too aware of the accusing eyes that had already made their judgment about her guilt. The photograph she clutched in her sweating hands was her first sight of Alison Maxwell’s corpse. But she knew that the number of people in the stuffy courtroom who genuinely believed that could be counted on the fingers of one hand. Certainly the fifteen members of the jury, who were flicking through the prosecution’s photograph album with looks of shock, horror, and disgust that mirrored her own emotions, were not among them.

The wiry figure of Duncan Leslie, the Advocate Depute charged with presenting the prosecution case against her, paced to and fro across the wood-paneled courtroom as he gently drew every last scrap of damning information from the pathologist in the witness box. “And in your opinion,” Leslie probed in his soft Borders accent, “are the features of this case consistent with strangulation by a male or a female?”

The pathologist paused momentarily, glancing toward the dock, refusing to meet Jackie’s pale green eyes. His mouth tightened in disapproval. “In my view,” he said in a clipped voice, “I would say that this method of killing would suggest either a woman, or a man who was not very strong.”

“Would you explain that opinion to the court?”

“Well, strangulation with a ligature like this scarf requires considerable strength. But the need for brute force is avoided by using a lever with the ligature. In this case, as you can see from Photograph Number Five, the killer used the handle of a strong hairbrush to twist the ligature tighter. That implies to me that the strangler was not sufficiently strong to perform the act manually, thus suggesting either a woman or a weak male.”