Broken Homes

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