Broken Homes

judging from its age, it looked like a hand-me-down. Some kids have all the luck.
    The parents’ bedroom had a fusty unaired smell and not much in the way of interest to me. Real practitioners never leave their important books lying around, but you pick up pointers. The key is unlikely juxtapositions. Lots of people read books about the occult, but if you find them alongside books by or about Isaac Newton, especially the long boring ones, then hackles are raised, flags hoisted and, more importantly, notes made in my notebook.
    All I found in the bedroom was a dog-eared copy of the Discovery of Witches under the bed along with the Life of Pi and The God of Small Things.
    ‘He hasn’t done anything,’ said a voice behind me.
    I stood up and turned to find Lynda Weil standing in the doorway.
    ‘I don’t know what you think he did,’ she said. ‘But he didn’t do it. Why can’t you tell me what he’s supposed to have done?’
    It’s good policing, when you’re engaged in other tasks, to avoid interacting with witnesses or suspects and especially with those individuals that might straddle both categories. Besides – I didn’t know what her husband had done, either.
    ‘I’m sorry, ma’am,’ I said. ‘We’ll be finished as soon as we can.’
    We were finished even sooner because a minute later Nightingale called me downstairs and told me that the Major Crimes Team had found a body.
    They’d done it with a wicked bit of policing too. I was seriously impressed. The MCT had CCTV footage of Robert Weil heading out through the Pease Pottage roundabout and off down the ominous sounding Forest Road – so called because it ran along the central axis of St Leonard’s Forest, a patchwork of woods that covered the ridge of high ground that ran from Pease Pottage to Horsham.
    Prime body dumping country, according to PC Slatt, easily accessible via footpaths and forest tracks and not covered by speed cameras. Wherever he’d gone, Robert Weil hadn’t returned to Pease Pottage for over five hours so he could easily have been anywhere in the forest. But they’d caught a break because Lynda Weil had phoned her husband at nine forty-five, presumably to ask him where the hell he was, and that allowed the Sussex Police to triangulate the position of his phone to a cell just short of the village of Colgate. After that, it was just a matter of checking the appropriate stretch of the road until they spotted something – in this case tyre tracks from a Volvo V70.
    The grey overcast was darkening to countryside black when we arrived at the murder site. There wasn’t a proper turn off, so I had to park the Jag further up the road and walk back.
    PC Slatt explained that the landlord had only recently blocked off the entrance to an access route through the forest here.
    ‘Weil probably remembered the turn off from a walk in the area,’ she said. ‘He hadn’t planned on it not existing any more.’
    Important safety tip for serial killers – always scout out your dumping locations before use. We had to clamber over an artificial hillock made of sticky yellow mud and discarded tree limbs, because the marginally visible path was still being checked forensically.
    ‘He had to drag the body,’ said PC Slatt. ‘It left a trail.’
    ‘He doesn’t sound very prepared,’ I said. The rain was making silver streaks in the beam of my torch as I shone it back to guide Nightingale over.
    ‘Perhaps it was his first kill,’ he said.
    ‘God, I hope so,’ said PC Slatt.
    The path beyond was muddy but I walked with the confidence of a man who made sure he packed a pair of DM boots in his overnight bag. Town or country, it doesn’t matter, you don’t want to be wearing your best shoes at a crime scene. Unless you’re Nightingale, who seemed to have an unlimited supply of quality handmade footwear that were cleaned and polished by someone else. I suspected it was probably Molly – but it might have been gnomes for all I knew, or some other unspecified household spirit.
    On either side of the path were stands of slender trees with pale trunks that Nightingale identified as silver birch. The gloomy stand of dark pointy trees ahead were apparently Douglas firs interspersed with the occasional larch. Nightingale was aghast at my lack of arboreal knowledge.
    ‘I don’t understand how you can know five types of brick bond,’ he said, ‘but you can’t identify the most common of trees.’
    Actually, I knew about twenty-three