Ben Aaronovitch - Moon Over Soho

In the master bedroom, which was still off-limits to people not wearing noddy suits, I stood in the doorway and examined the bed as best as I could. The forensics team had removed the sheets and pillows but the mattress was still in place with a reddish brown stain a third of the way up from the footboard. Too much blood had soaked in for it to dry out since the body had been removed, so I could still smell it as I walked away to check the other rooms. I’d brought my own gloves with me but I asked Trollope if he had a spare pair to give him something to feel superior about.

If Johnson had died in his bedroom then he’d spent most of his life in the living room. LCD wide-screen TV, DVD with the remotes still on the coffee table by a copy of the Radio Times . There was an antique fold-down writing desk that Trollope said hadn’t been dusted yet so we left it well alone. And a couple of glass-fronted bookcases filled with paperbacks. Penguins, Corgis, and Panthers from the 1960s and ’70s — Len Deighton, Ian Fleming, and Clive Cussler. It looked like the fiction section of a charity shop. The bookshelves were the type that came in two parts, the bottom section acting as a pedestal for the top and being slightly deeper and having opaque doors. Carefully, because they hadn’t been dusted either, I opened the bottom sections to find them both empty except for a couple of scraps of paper — I left those for forensics as well.

There were a couple of surprisingly good hunting prints on the wall as well as a framed photograph of his graduating class at Hendon. I couldn’t work out which shiny young uniform he was. Beside it was a photo of him being handed a commendation by a senior officer whom I later learned was Sir John Waldron, commissioner of the Metropolitan Police 1968–1972, no less. There were family photographs on the mantelpiece, a wedding complete with unfortunate sideburns and flares, a pair of children, boy and a girl, at various ages, toddler, infant school, on a pale yellow beach by a green ocean somewhere foreign. There were a couple taken outside the bungalow where the kids looked to be nine or ten — nothing after that. I did a quick mental calculation and guessed that the latest picture had been taken in the early 1980s. More than thirty years ago.

“The family in Australia are still alive, aren’t they?” I asked. “They weren’t all tragically killed in a car crash or something like that?”

“I’ll have to find out,” said Trollope. “Why?”

“Thirty years is a long time to go without any new photographs,” I said.

The last couple of pictures were in the second rank, half hidden by the wife and kids. More men in kipper ties, sideburns, and embarrassingly wide lapels, photographed in a bar that looked familiar and which I suddenly recognized as the French House in Soho. I also realized I was looking at the young Alexander Smith, the nightclub owner, looking like a dandy even back then in a crushed-velvet smoking jacket and ruffled shirt.

“You didn’t happen to get any details about his career, did you?” I asked.

Trollope checked his notebook again but I knew even before he said it where the bulk of DCSI Johnson’s career had been spent: in and around Soho.

“He was CID at West End Central and before that he was in something called the OPS,” he said. I asked the dates and he said 1967 to 1975.

The OPS was the Obscene Publications Squad, the single most corrupt specialist unit of the most corrupt division of the Metropolitan Police. And Johnson had been a member during the most corrupt decade since London Thief Takers stopped being paid by the collar.

No wonder Alexander Smith was in the photograph. The OPS had run a protection racket for porno shops and strip clubs. You paid them so much cash a day and they made sure you didn’t get raided. Or if you did, they made sure you’d get lots of warning, so you had a comfortable and civilized interval in which to move all hard-core stuff somewhere else. As an added bonus you could bung the boys in blue a “drink” and they’d go around and raid your competitors and then sell their confiscated stock to you out of the back of the evidence room at Holborn nick. It also explained how Johnson could afford to take early retirement and probably why he had to take it.

Which made me look at the three remote controls casually left on the coffee table.

I squatted down by the TV stand. It was your typical gray laminated chipboard cheap piece of rubbish and quite difficult, because of the tangle of wires at the back, to clean the dust off effectively.

“Give me a hand over here, would you?” I asked Trollope and explained what I wanted him to do. Carefully, so as not to disrupt any forensic evidence, we both took a side of the DVD player and lifted it up. Underneath, there was a clear rectangle of light gray where something had protected the laminated surface from years of dust, something with a smaller footprint than the DVD player. I nodded and we gingerly put the player back down.

“What?” asked Trollope.

“He had a VHS player,” I said and pointed at the remotes on the coffee table. One for the TV, one for the DVD, and …

“Bugger,” said Trollope.

“You need to tell your scene of crime guys that somebody’s stripped this house of VHS tapes,” I said.

“Why did he still have VHS?” asked Trollope. “Do you know anyone who still has a VHS?”

“It has to be something he couldn’t risk getting digitized,” I said.

“These days?” said Trollope. “It would have to be something really disgusting or illegal. Child porn, or snuff movies, or, I don’t know, kitten strangling.”

“The wife will have to be interviewed,” I said. “Maybe she knows something.”

“Maybe that’s why she left,” said Trollope. “Reckon there’s a trip to Australia in it?”

“Not for us,” I said. “They never send DCs abroad. It’s always ‘experienced officers’ who get the free trips.” We shared a moment of gloomy solidarity. “If you had a bunch of stuff that you were desperate to keep hidden,” I said, “where would you stash it?”

“Garden shed,” said Trollope.

“Really?”

“That’s where my dad kept his grass,” said Trollope.

“Really?”

“Grow your own is a long tradition in these parts.”

“You ever been tempted to bust him for possession?”

“Only at Christmas,” he said.

Ideally we would have trooped out and had a look in the shed ourselves, but you don’t do that on a modern crime scene without checking with forensics first and they said we couldn’t go out until they’d checked the lawn for footprints. And they couldn’t do that until morning. Fair enough. So we went and reported unto Stephanopoulis who was mightily pleased with both of us and bestowed her munificence in the form of sandwiches and coffee. Which we had to go and eat out in the road so as not to get crumbs on the crime scene. It was surprisingly cold but the Norfolk Constabulary had parked a couple of Transit vans outside so we sheltered in one of them. Even this close to Norwich, the sky was amazingly wide and full of stars. Stephanopoulis noticed me noticing. “City boy,” she said.

I suggested that Johnson’s ex-wife be interviewed in Australia and she agreed although she felt the Victoria police were more than capable of handling that without the need to send a British officer over, senior or otherwise. Trollope snorted.

“Something funny, Constable?” asked Stephanopoulis.

“No ma’am,” he said.

The sandwiches were the kind that get stocked by the twenty-four-hour shops attached to petrol stations, which managed the trick of being both soggy and stale. I think mine was ham salad but I barely tasted it. Stephanopoulis put hers down after the first bite.