Ben Aaronovitch - Broken Homes

‘Police,’ I shouted. ‘Is anyone in the house?’

I waited again. When you go in mob-handed you go in fast to overwhelm any resistance before it can get started. When you go in alone, you go slowly with one eye on your line of retreat.

Another vestigium — a burnt meat, rusty barbecue smell overlaid with another whetstone scrape of the blade and a flash of heat.

Much as I wanted to, I couldn’t hang about in the doorway all day. I darted across the hall and checked that the living room was clear. Then, going as quietly as I could, I slipped back out and into the back room.

What had obviously once been a dining room had been transformed into a de-facto workroom. There was an antique drop-leaf table that had been colonised by a key-cutting machine and boxes of blanks and French windows that looked out over a patio and sodden strip of lawn. An old-fashioned mahogany sideboard with a framed imitation Stubbs hung above it — horses in a brittle eighteenth-century landscape.

The room had the scent of metal dust but I couldn’t tell if that was vestigia or the aftermath of key-cutting. The silent hallway behind me was making me nervous so I moved on quickly to the kitchen.

Clean, old-fashioned, a couple of mugs and a single blue china plate on the yellow plastic drying rack.

The burnt-meat smell was less evident here and when I checked the cupboards and the upright fridge they were well stocked but nothing had spoiled.

I was getting a feel for the house. A single man rattling around in a family-sized home — his parents’? Or was there an estranged wife and kids? My mum, had this been her house, would have filled it with relatives or rented out the rooms or probably both.

I went back out into the hall and stood at the bottom of the stairs.

The rusty barbecue smell was stronger and I realised that it wasn’t a vestigium at all — it was a real smell.

‘Mr Mulkern,’ I called because at some distant point in the future a defence barrister might ask me if I had. ‘This is the police. Do you need assistance?’

God, I hoped he was out visiting his sick mother or down the shops or getting a curry.

At the top of the stairs I could see the top of a half-open door that, barring a radical departure from typical design, would lead to the bathroom.

I put my foot on the stairs and flicked out my extendable baton to its full length. It’s not that I don’t trust my abilities, particularly with impello , but nothing says long arm of the law like a spring-loaded baton.

I went up the stairs slowly and as I did the smell got worse, the coppery overtones mingling with something like burnt liver. I had a horrible feeling I knew what the smell was.

I was halfway up the flight when I saw him, lying on his back inside the bathroom. His feet were pointed at me, black leather shoes, good quality but worn at the heels. They were turned outwards at the ankle in a way that’s very hard to maintain unless you’re a professional dancer.

As I climbed the final stairs I saw that he was staring straight up. What bare skin showed on his face, neck and hands was a horrible pinkish brown like well cooked pork. His mouth was wide open and stained a sooty black and his eyes were a nasty boiled white. Even this close up, though, the stench remained just bearable — he 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 here.’