Simon Kernick - The Business of Dying

I stopped where I was and gave the place a quick once-over. A door on the left led to a bathroom while one on the right led into a kitchen that didn't look to be much bigger than a standard-sized wardrobe. There was only one window in the whole flat as far as I could see, though thankfully it was large enough to throw a bit of light into the place. The view it offered was of a brick wall.

On the floor in front of me, amid the teen magazines, empty KFC boxes, Rizla packets and other odds and ends, was a huge round ashtray the size of a serving plate. There were maybe ten or fifteen cigarette butts in it, plus the remains of a few joints, but what caught my eye were the pieces of screwed-up tin foil, the small brown pipe, and the dark patches of crystallized liquid, splattered like paint drops inside.

It didn't surprise me that she was a crack addict.

Most of the girls are, especially the young ones. It's either that or heroin. It's what keeps them tied to their pimps, and it's why the money they earn is never quite enough.

I lit a cigarette, figuring it wasn't going to make any difference. Malik gave me the briefest of disapproving glances as he put on his gloves but, like Danny the previous night, he didn't say anything.

We got to work without speaking. Malik started on the chest of drawers on which the TV sat. We both knew what we were looking for: little clues, things that in themselves might seem irrelevant to the untrained eye but which, taken together with what else the investigation threw up, could be used to build up a basic picture of the life and ultimately the death of Ms Miriam Fox.

She must have been quite a pretty girl once. There was a photograph of her pinned to the wall at a slightly uneven angle. In the picture, she was standing in the room we were in now, dressed in a pair of jeans and a sky-blue halter top that exposed a pale midriff. She didn't have any shoes on and her bare feet were long and thin. One hand was on her hip while she ran the other through her thick black hair. She was pouting mockingly at the cameraman. I think the pose was supposed to be sexy, but the overall impression was that of a young girl trying hard to be a woman. I didn't know her, and would never know her, but at that moment I felt sorry for her.

The drugs had taken their toll. Her face was gaunt and bony, the eyes sunken and tired. It looked like it had been months since a decent meal passed her lips, which was probably true. But there was hope in the photograph too, or should have been. The damage didn't look permanent. Given time, some sleep and a healthy diet, she could have turned things around and become pretty again. Youth, if not luck, had been on her side.

There was a mirror shaped like a smiling moon next to the photograph. I saw my reflection in it and I couldn't help feeling that I was also beginning to look ravaged by the wrong sort of living. My cheekbones were protruding too much. So pronounced were they that it looked as if they were trying to escape from the rest of my face. To add to my misery, tiny webs of burst blood vessels I hadn't noticed before had popped up on either side of my nose. They were still pretty small, three of them altogether, the size and shape of money spiders, but they worried me because now they were there, they were going to be there for ever. Youth, unfortunately, was not on my side.

There's nothing worse for a vain man than seeing reality catch up and hit him. I've always thought of myself as quite a good-looking guy and, to be honest, that's what more than a few women have told me over the years. No one looking at the face I was looking at would have said that now.

There were two passport-type photos, still attached to each other, tucked into the mirror between the plastic coating and the glass. I removed them as carefully as I could and took a closer look. They'd obviously been taken one after another in one of those photo-me booths you get in railway stations and the occasional department store, because they were essentially the same picture. Two laughing girls, arms round each other, faces pressed together. One of the girls was Miriam Fox, the other was younger and prettier. The younger girl had blonde curly hair cut into a bob and, in contrast to Miriam, a round cherubic face with a cute smattering of freckles. Only the eyes, nothing like as bright as the rest of her, trying to look happy but not quite making it, told you that maybe she too was a street girl. I put her at about fourteen, but she could have been as young as twelve. They were both dressed in thick coats and the younger girl had a winter scarf round her neck, so I guessed the photo was fairly recent.

They looked like good friends. Maybe this girl, whoever she was, could fill in some of the gaps in Miriam Fox's life. We'd have to try to locate her, if she was still around. I put the photos in my notebook and moved over to a battered-looking wardrobe next to the bathroom door.

We went over everything bit by bit. Malik discovered a wad of notes: eight twenties, a fifty (how often do you see one of those?) and a ten. He appeared quite pleased with the find, although I wasn't sure why. A prostitute keeping cash in her flat was hardly a revelation.

'It means she definitely planned on coming back here,' he told me.

I told him that that's what I would have assumed anyway. 'If she picked up a punter and he just turned out to be the wrong sort of guy, then there's no question that she went out intending to come back here. Why wouldn't she?'

Malik nodded in agreement. 'But we're still trying to discover a motive, aren't we?' he said evenly. 'And at least this provides evidence that she wasn't running away from something and got caught before she could escape. It gives more credence to our theory of a dodgy punter.'

Credence. That was an interesting word. Malik was right of course. It did help to close off alternative theories, leaving us scope to focus our enquiries on certain areas, but I thought that maybe he was unnecessarily complicating matters. Malik was trying to look at it from the angle of Sherlock Holmes, and you didn't need to do that. If a prostitute gets her throat slashed and her genitalia mutilated, and her body's discovered on the edge of a notorious red light district with the clothing interfered with, it's fairly obvious what's happened.

Or so I thought.

There was nothing in the wardrobe that told us anything. There were a couple of drawers in there containing various knick-knacks; some books, including two by Jane Austen, which caused me to raise my eyebrows (how many whores read Jane Austen?); a bag of dope; an unopened carton of Marlboro Lights; a jewellery box filled with costume jewellery. Nothing unusual, but no address book or anything like that, which might have thrown up a few clues. The man who'd killed her may well have been one of her regulars, someone who could have been in love with her but whose love was not being reciprocated. Out of frustration, he kills her. Out of rage, he mutilates the corpse. An address book might have contained the details of this man, if he existed. But of course, these days things are a bit different. She might have kept details of her clients in a palmtop PC or on a mobile, rather than writing them down on paper. Obviously, in a block of flats like this you weren't going to keep readily saleable items such as electronic goods on display for your neighbours to pinch, so I presumed if she owned anything like that, and it seemed highly likely that she had, she would have hidden it somewhere in the flat.

'Did she have a mobile on her when they found her body?' I asked Malik.

'I don't think so,' he said, shrugging. 'But I'm not sure.'

I thought about phoning and asking Welland, then decided it would probably be easier just to look for it. I couldn't recall him saying anything about a mobile in the briefing. 'Give me a hand lifting up this bed, will you?'