As I climbed the final stairs I saw that he was staring straight up. What bare skin showed on his face, neck and hands was a horrible pinkish brown like well cooked pork. His mouth was wide open and stained a sooty black and his eyes were a nasty boiled white. Even this close up, though, the stench remained just bearable — he must have been dead for a while. Days, maybe. I didn’t try to check his pulse.
A well trained copper is required to do two things when he finds a body, call it in and secure the scene.
I did both of those while standing outside in the rain.
Murder is a big deal in the Met. Which means that murder investigations are really fucking expensive, so you don’t want to be launching into one and then find that the victim was merely pissed out of their box and having a lie down. That actually happened once, although truth be told the guy was in a coma from alcohol poisoning — but it wasn’t a murder, that’s my point. To prevent the Murder Investigation Teams’ senior officers being dragged away from their all-important paperwork, London is patrolled by HAT cars, Homicide Assessment Teams, ready to swoop down to make sure that any dead people are worth the time and money.
They must have been close because the team pulled up less than five minutes later — in, of all things, a brick red Skoda that must have been painful to sit in the back of.
The DI in charge of the car was a rotund Sikh with a Brummie accent and a neat beard that was going prematurely grey. He went upstairs but came down less than five minutes later.
‘They don’t get much deader than that,’ he said and sent the DCs away to tape off the scene and prep for house to house. Then he spent a long time on his phone, reporting back I guessed, before beckoning me over.
‘Are you really with SCD 9?’ he asked.
‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘But we’re supposed to be called the SAU now — Special Assessment Unit.’
‘Since when?’ asked the DI.
‘Since November,’ I said.
‘But you’re still the occult division, though?’
‘That’s us,’ I said although ‘occult division’ was a new one on me.
The DI relayed this down his phone, listened, gave me a funny look and then hung up.
‘You’re to stay here,’ he said. ‘My governor wants a word with you.’
So I waited in the porch and wrote up my notes. I have two sets, the ones that go in my Moleskine and the slightly edited ones that go into my official Met issue book. This is very bad procedure, but sanctioned because there are some things the Met doesn’t want to know about officially. In case it might upset them.
DCI Maureen Duffy, as I learned she was called, pulled up in a Mercedes E-class soft top convertible which seemed a bit male menopause for the slender white woman in the black gabardine trench coat who got out. She had a pale narrow face, a long nose and what I thought was a Glasgow accent but learned later was from Fife. She spotted me in the doorway but before I could speak she held up her hand to silence me.
‘In a minute,’ she said and went inside.
While I waited to become a priority I called Lesley for the second time and got her voicemail again. I didn’t bother calling Nightingale on the mobile I’d got him for Christmas because he only turns it on when he wants to call someone — the new technology being strictly there for his convenience, not anybody else’s.
Forensics had now arrived and the house to house team were already knocking on doors by the time I was summoned back upstairs.
DCI Duffy met me at the top of the stairs, high enough up to view the body but far enough down not to get in the way of a couple of forensic types in blue paper suits who were working the scene.
‘Do you know what killed him?’ she asked.
‘No, ma’am,’ I said.
‘But in your opinion the cause of death is something “unusual”?’
I looked at Patrick Mulkern’s boiled lobster face, considered saying something flippant, but decided against it.
‘Yes, ma’am,’ I said. ‘Definitely unusual.’
Duffy nodded. I’d obviously passed the all-important keeping your gob shut test.
‘I’ve heard you have a specialist pathologist for these cases,’ she said.
‘Yes, ma’am,’ I said.
‘You’d better let him know we have work for him then,’ she said. ‘And I’d like your boss to be there as well.’
‘He’s a bit busy.’
‘Don’t take this the wrong way, Peter, but I’m not interesting in talking to the monkey — just the organ grinder.’
But I did take it the wrong way, although I was careful not to show it.
‘Can I have a look through his stuff downstairs?’ I asked.
Duffy gave me a hard look. ‘Why?’
‘Just to see if there’s anything. . odd,’ I said and Duffy frowned. ‘My governor will want it done before he gets here.’
‘Is that so?’
‘Yes, ma’am,’ I said.
‘Fine,’ she said. ‘But you keep your hands to yourself and anything you find comes to me first.’
‘Yes, ma’am,’ I said meekly and headed downstairs to call Dr Walid who unlike some others I could mention picked up his phone on the first ring. He was suitably pleased to have a new body to examine and promised to be down as soon as he could. I left another message on Lesley’s voicemail, stuck my hands in my pockets and got down to work.
My dad reckons he can tell one trumpeter from another after listening to three notes and I’m not talking about just differentiating your Dizzy Gillespie from your Louis Armstrong. He can tell early Freddie Hubbard from late Clifford Brown. And that ain’t easy, I can tell you. My dad can do this not just because he’s spent years listening to these guys solo, but because he makes it his business to know the difference.
Most people don’t see half of what’s in front of them. Your visual cortex does a shit load of imaging processing before the signal even gets to your brain, whose priorities are still checking the ancestral savannah for dangerous predators, edible berries and climbable trees. That’s why a sudden cat in the night can make you jump and some people, when distracted, can walk right out in front of a bus. Your brain just isn’t interested in those large moving chunks of metal or the static heaps of brightly coloured stuff that piles up in drifts around us. Never mind all that, says your brain, it’s those silent fur-covered merchants of death you’ve got to watch out for.
If you really want to see what’s staring you in the face, if you want to be any kind of half-decent police officer, then you’ve got to make it your business to look at things properly. That’s the only way you’re going to spot it — the clue that’s going to generate the next lead. Especially when you have no idea what the clue is going to be.
I figured that whatever it was this time, it was probably going to be located in the makeshift workshop stroke dining room. Still, I checked the front room and the kitchen first because there’s nothing worse than finding out later that you walked right past a major lead. Or, and I’d only been on the job a week when it happened, a suspect.
Lesley got him — in case you’re wondering.
Whatever else the lately dead Peter Mulkern had been, he wasn’t a slob. Both the kitchen and living room were tidy and had been cleaned to an adequate, if non-professional, standard. This meant that when I donned my gloves and pulled the sofa away from the wall I found an assortment of pens, bits of paper, fluff, a boiled sweet and thirty-six pence in change.
It was one of the bits of paper, but I didn’t realise the significance of it until later.
The back room was the only part of the house that had any books, two stand-alone 1970s MFI bookshelves stuffed with what looked like technical manuals and trade magazines with names like the Independent Locksmith Journal and The Locksmith. Since joining the Folly I’ve had to study a lot of suspect bookshelves and the trick is not to glance. You methodically work your way along each shelf starting with the top one and working your way down. This netted two issues of Loaded magazine from 2010, an Argos Christmas catalogue, a paperback copy of Tintin’s Destination Moon, a folder full of invoices that dated back to the 1990s and a National Trust booklet on the wonders of West Hill House in Highgate. I left the booklet half off the shelf so it was easy to find again and popped back into the living room to check one of the scraps of paper again.