Down Among The Dead Men Extract A Rafferty and Llewellyn Crime Novel

One

As though lulled by the heavy September air and the fluting whisper of the River Tiffey
half a field away, the woman lay sprawled on the parched earth, her limbs in the
abandoned posture of a sleeping child. The sun, emerging from behind a solitary cloud,
turned her cap of flaxen hair into spangled silk against the dry dross of the meadow. It
bestowed such an appearance of sparkling, vibrant life that Inspector Rafferty took
several steps back, his usual good sense overtaken by an illogical fear that she

would wake and discover him looming over her.

Feeling foolish as he sensed Llewellyn's startled glance, he ignored his sergeant and
continued to study the figure more circumspectly. Dressed in some leaf-green gauzy
stuff that bunched around her slender thighs, she had the other-worldly appearance of a
woodland nymph; in her hand a single bloom, its crushed petals faded to an
indistinguishable straw colour. A fairy-like bower of wild meadow flowers scattered
around her body completed the illusion that they had somehow stumbled into a secret,
fairy-tale world where princesses slumbered and frogs turned into princes.

Just then a faint breeze sprang up and wafted a malodorous whiff of the River Tiffey
towards them. The tainted breeze brought reality back with a rush, effectively killing any
lingering heat-induced fancies. The miracle was that they had sprung into being at all,
Rafferty reflected. For, even at nine o'clock on a bright September morning, the Essex
meadow had a desolate air. Twenty yards from the body, and tumbled around a stained

and long-abandoned royal-blue mattress, lay a pile of worn-out tyres. This was the real
world, not never-never land.

Regretfully, Rafferty accepted that the woman was just another poor victim in an
increasingly violent society, as mortal as the rest of humanity and as dead as it was
possible to be. The tell-tale reddish-purple discoloration on the back of her limbs would
have told him that sooner, if he'd bothered to look, and, judging by the extent of the
after-death hypostasis, she'd been dead some hours.

Feeling foolish again, but thankful he hadn't blurted out his nonsense to Llewellyn,
Rafferty wondered how he could have forgotten that the only sleep the Sniffy Tiffey
would encourage would be the permanent sort?