The Body in the Snow

The Body in the Snow

Table of Contents

For Louise, as always

Chapter 1

‘All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.’

Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy

Kirsty Mockett knew within a few seconds of waking on that fateful March morning. Even for a Sunday it was quiet. Like the world holding its breath. No traffic noise, not even the faint drone from the main road half a mile away. The gap above the curtains filtered an unusual brightness onto the ceiling, along which soft shadows flitted like ghosts. The room felt chilly. It wasn’t yet seven a.m. and the heating had not kicked in. She slid from the warmth of her bed, excitedly flung apart the curtains, and saw that the forecast had been correct. It was falling still, great fluffy, whirling flakes, blown in on an east wind all the way from Siberia, across the North Sea, beyond London and into Surrey, over the town of Ashtead. It had coated the discarded toys, decorated the broken garden seat and iced the abandoned washing machine which littered the garden of the downstairs flat. The drunken, paling fence, held up only by its wire, looked rustically pretty with each post topped by a dollop of whiteness, and the straggly hawthorn gloried in a piping of icing that balanced on every twisted stem.

Snow!

She grabbed her running gear from the radiator, stripped off her pyjamas, and dressed rapidly. She pulled her wavy chestnut hair into a ponytail, with three rapid and practised hand movements. She cleaned only her teeth. The shower could wait until later. It was less than a mile to the common, and she wanted to be out in this, to feel the childlike joy and the excitement of running in the snow. Kirsty had every reason to be happy that day, the last day before she began her job as a crime scene investigator for Surrey Police. It had taken her two years to qualify, and had allowed her to escape a job she had once thought she loved. But at twenty-five, she knew this was what she wanted to do. Tomorrow, Monday, it was all to begin. A clean start to a new life in the police force.

She was wrong.

Her work would begin today – a day early – unexpectedly. From the first shocking moment it would make extraordinary demands that would have tested the most experienced of investigators. And it was to upend her life, throwing her back into a nightmare she thought she’d left behind years ago.

Leaving the terraced house at a jog, clapping her gloved hands together for warmth, she stared up at the drifting flakes which cascaded still from a white-out sky. Picking up the pace, she passed a middle-aged man using an estate agent’s sale board as a shovel to clear the snow outside his home. One or two vehicles crept past, barely a mile an hour faster than she, trundling crunchily in the tracks ahead.