Broken Homes
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.
It was still there, an old-fashioned ADMIT ONE paper ticket of the kind that gets torn off the end of a roll by, say, volunteer guides at one of the smaller National Trust properties. A property like West Hill House in Highgate. I made notes but left the ticket where I found it. The Met gets pretty fundamentalist about chain of evidence in murder cases – not only does it help prevent any anomalies that might be exploited by a defence barrister, but it also removes any temptation to ‘improve’ the case by the investigating officers. Or at least makes it much harder than it used to be.
I took the time to check the sideboards in the work room and, with permission from DCI Duffy, checked the upstairs rooms – just in case Peter Mulkern had been an enthusiastic visitor of National Trust homes
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