The Business Of Dying

6

For me, one of the worst jobs in policing is looking through the possessions of a murder victim. A lot of the time when a murder's an open-and-shut case, which mostly they are, it's not necessary to do it, but sometimes there's no choice, and it's a painful process, the reason being that it puts flesh and bones on people, gives you insights into what made them tick, and this only serves to make them more human. When you're trying to be rational and objective, this is something you could really do without.

Miriam Fox's flat was on the third floor of a tatty-looking townhouse that could have been improved dramatically by a simple lick of paint. The front door was on the latch so we walked right in. Bags of festering rubbish sat just inside the entrance and the interior hallway was cold and smelled of damp. Thumping techno music blared from behind one of the doors. It annoyed me that people lived like this. I was all for minimalism, but this was just letting things go. It had nothing to do with poverty. It was all about self-respect. You didn't need money to clear away rubbish, and a can of paint didn't cost much. You could get a lot of paint, plus brushes for everyone, for the price of a few extra-strength lagers or a gram of smack. It's all about priorities.

A uniformed officer stood outside the door of flat number 5. Someone in flat number 4, which was just down the hall, was also playing music but thankfully not as loud as the guy downstairs. It also sounded quite a lot better – hippy stuff, with a woman singing earnestly about something or other that was obviously important to her. The uniform looked pleased to be relieved of his guard duty and made a rapid exit.

I checked the lock quickly for signs of tampering and, seeing none, opened the door.

The interior was a mess, which I suppose I expected. At least it was in keeping with the rest of the building. But it wasn't the mess of someone who'd gone completely to pot and no longer cared about her surroundings, which is a lot of people's image of the desperate prostitute. It was teenage girl's mess. An unmade sofa bed took up close to half the floor space of the none too spacious living room. It was liberally sprinkled with clothes, not the sexy ones a tom wears to attract her customers, but leggings and sweaters, stuff like that. Normal stuff. There were two threadbare chairs on either side of the bed and all three items of furniture faced an old portable TV that sat on a chest of drawers. There were pictures on the wall: a couple of impressionist prints; a colourful fantasy poster of a female warrior on a black stallion, sword in hand, blonde hair waving in the imaginary wind; a moody-looking band I didn't recognize; and a few photographs.

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?'

Malik lifted it up while I peered underneath. Apart from a lot of dust, another book (which turned out to be another Jane Austen), and a pair of knickers, there was nothing there. I stood back up and Malik put the bed down again.

I was wondering where to look next when there was a loud knock on the door. We both stopped and looked at each other. The knocking came again. Whoever was on the other side wasn't particularly patient. I was keen to find out who it was, so I stepped over and opened it before he could knock again.

A stocky black guy, late twenties, was glaring at me. He didn't hang around. 'Who the fuck are you?' he demanded, pushing past me into the flat. He stopped when he saw Malik in his rubber gloves standing by the bed, and immediately twigged. I closed the door to prevent any quick escape. 'You're Old Bill, aren't you?' he added, somewhat unnecessarily.

'While you're here, sir,' I said, walking up behind him, 'we'd just like to ask you a few questions.'

'What's going on?' he asked, whirling round to face me.

I could see him calculating the possible reasons why we were there and whether it was worth him hanging about. It didn't take him long to decide that it wasn't. He shoved me once, very hard, in the chest and made for the door. I stumbled but somehow managed to stay upright. He grabbed the handle, pulled the door open and tried to slam it in my face. He almost got me as well but my reflexes didn't let me down and I managed to dodge it and run out after him, Malik hot on my heels.

I used to be a sprinter when I was at school, and at the age of thirteen I did the hundred metres in 12.8 seconds, but thirteen was a long time and a lot of cigarettes ago.

But I was still quick over short distances and as he rounded the corner and charged down the stairs, two at a time, I was only a few feet behind him. The door was slightly ajar and he pulled it open and kept running pretty much in one movement. But I was closing. As I reached the top of the steps I dived onto his back and grabbed him in a desperate bearhug. 'All right, come on!' I panted in as authoritative a voice as I could muster. But it didn't seem to work. He kept running, at the same time shaking himself out of my grip, and managed to plant an elbow in my face. I yelped but continued chasing, one hand stretched out trying to grab him by the collar, wondering amid the pain in my lungs exactly how I was going to bring this guy to heel.

Suddenly he slowed abruptly, half turned so he was sideways on to me, and brought back his fist ready to throw an almighty punch. Momentum kept me going and, even though I knew exactly what was going to happen, I had no way of stopping it. His fist connected perfectly with my right cheek, sending me completely off balance. My head pounded with the shock of the blow and I bit my tongue as I fell against a wall. My legs wobbled precariously and then went from under me, and I fell backwards onto the pavement, hitting it arse first.

Malik immediately screeched to a halt beside me. 'Are you all right, Sarge?' he yelled with more concern than I would have expected from him.

'Get after him!' I panted, waving him away. 'Go on, I'm fine.'

Which was bullshit, of course. I felt like death. My lungs were bursting and the whole right side of my face throbbed. I opened my eyes and my vision was partly blurred. Still sitting where I'd fallen, I watched as Malik disappeared up the street, all five feet eight of him, armed with nothing more than harsh words. Somehow I didn't think an arrest was imminent.

I was going to have to give up smoking. I couldn't have run much over thirty yards all told and it felt like I'd done a mile at a sprint. The problem with not taking regular exercise, especially when you combine it with a shit lifestyle, is you don't realize quite how unfit you really are. I was going to have to start going back to the gym, even though my membership had lapsed close to two years ago. I couldn't embarrass myself like that again. That cheap piece of dirt, who from the way he acted was no doubt Miriam Fox's pimp, could have kicked the shit out of me if he'd wanted to, the contest was that one-sided.

Across the street I could see a middle-aged woman staring out of her window in my direction. She looked like she felt sorry for me. When I caught her eye, though, she turned away and was gone.

As I gingerly got to my feet, I found myself experiencing an impotent rage. He'd made me look a fool. I wished I'd had the gun I'd been using the previous night on me. I could have blown that fuck apart. I wouldn't even have needed to tire myself out. I could have just strolled down the steps, taken aim at the middle of his back, and fired at leisure. He might have been a solid boy, but I'd yet to come across anyone whose skin deflected lead.

Malik came back into view, walking without urgency, and the rage passed. We'd get him. It was just a matter of being patient. Maybe, just maybe, once he'd been released again, I'd track him down one evening and put him to sleep. The thought made me feel better.

Malik looked pissed off. 'I lost him,' he said, stopping in front of me. 'He was too fast.'

'I know I shouldn't say this, but I'm sort of glad you didn't corner him.'

'I can handle myself, Sergeant. Anyway, you're the one who took the pasting. Are you all right?'

I rubbed my cheek and blinked a few times. My vision was still a little blurred but it seemed to be moving back towards normal. 'Yeah, I think so. That bastard had a good punch on him, though.'

'I saw. So who do you think he was?'

I told him, and he nodded in agreement. 'Yeah, I'd have thought so too. So what do we do about him?'

'It won't take long to find out his name. There'll be plenty of uniforms on the streets tonight, talking to the other Toms. They'll find out who he is. Then we'll just reel him in.'

It dawned on me that he might also be the pimp for the blonde girl in the photo with Miriam, and I suddenly felt protective towards her. She was too young to be selling herself on the street and too vulnerable to be under the thumb of someone like him. The sooner we picked him up the better.

We went back to searching the flat but, though we spent close to another half an hour in there, we didn't find anything else of note. I checked in with Welland and he told us to speak to the other occupants of the block, which turned out to be something of a fruitless exercise. Number 1, the one playing the techno music, steadfastly refused to answer the door, which was probably because he couldn't hear us. A few more hours of that and he wouldn't be able to hear anything. Number 2 wasn't in. Number 3, a colourfully dressed Somalian lady with a young baby in her arms, couldn't speak English. She recognized Miriam's picture but I think she thought we were looking for her because she kept pointing upstairs. Without a Somali translator, there wasn't a lot more we could do, so we thanked her and left.

Number 4 eventually answered the door after we'd knocked at least three times. He was a tall, gangly bloke with John Lennon glasses and a badly trimmed goatee. He took one look at us and immediately clicked that we were police. In our trenchcoats and inexpensive suits, we were never going to be anything else. He didn't look too pleased to see us, which was no great surprise since the unmistakable aroma of freshly exhaled dope smoke was easing out of the gap in the door.

I did the introductions and asked if we could come in. He started to say that it wasn't a good time right now, which is what they all say when they've got something to hide, but I wasn't going to let this one go, not after drawing blanks everywhere else in the place. I told him that it was a murder inquiry, and that we weren't interested if he'd been smoking blow in the privacy of his own home. Malik, who came more from the zero-tolerance school of policing (where it suited him, of course), gave me the standard disapproving look I was beginning to get used to from my subordinates, but I ignored him.

The guy really didn't have much choice, so he let us in and turned the music down. He sat down on a large beanbag and, waving in the general direction of the other beanbags assembled around the cluttered room, let us know that we too could sit down.

I told him we'd remain standing. He looked a mixture of nervous and confused, which was fine by me. I wanted to make him take this discussion seriously, to get him to rack his brains for information that could be of help.

As it happens, I didn't get a lot. His name was Drayer. He added that his first name was Zeke, but I told him I didn't believe anyone would have called their kid Zeke, not at the time he was born, which had to have been at least forty years earlier. He insisted that it was. I asked him if that was the name on his birth certificate. He admitted it wasn't. 'And have you changed it by deed poll?' He reluctantly conceded that he hadn't.

Eventually, I got it out of him that his real first name was Norman. ' Norman 's an all right name,' I told him. 'It's no worse than Dennis, which is mine.'

'I know it's no worse,' he said, and left it at that. Cheeky bastard.

It turned out that Norman was a poet by trade. He performed his poetry in some of the local pubs and clubs and had also had a few bits and pieces published in various anthologies. 'It doesn't pay much,' he confided, 'but it's a clean life.' Looking round his worn-out living room, I wasn't sure I'd have used that description for it, but there you go. Everyone's entitled to their own illusions.

Norman appeared genuinely upset when he found out it was Miriam who'd been murdered. He hadn't really known her, he said, as she'd tended to keep herself to herself, but whenever he'd run into her in the hallway she had always smiled and said hello. 'She was a nice girl, you know. Made the effort. There aren't many like that in this city.'

We both nodded in agreement. 'It can be an unfriendly place,' I said, stating the obvious. 'Did Miss Fox have many visitors? Particularly male ones?'

'Er no, I don't think so,' he said, thinking about it. 'I saw one man go up there a couple of times.'

'What did he look like?' Malik asked.

'He was muscular, well formed. Attractive, I would think, to women. And there was a fire about him, a passion. An anger almost. As if somewhere inside him was a volcano waiting to erupt.'

'That's a truly terrible description,' I told him. 'Try again. Was he tall, short? Black, white?'

'He was black.'

I described the guy who'd just clouted me and it quickly transpired that they were one and the same. Well, at least he'd been right about one thing. There'd certainly been an anger there.

'How often did he come and go?'

'I saw him maybe two or three times in the hall or on the stairs. He never spoke to me.'

'Over how long a period?'

He shrugged. I think he was pissed off that I'd mocked his descriptive skills. 'I don't know, maybe three months.'

'And when was the last time you saw him?'

'A couple of weeks ago. Something like that.'

'Not within the last two or three days?'

'No.'

'How long have you been here?' Malik asked.

'About a year now.'

'And was Miss Fox already here when you moved in?'

'No, she wasn't. She came… I don't know, about six months ago.'

'And you can't remember any other male visitors?'

He shook his head. 'No, I don't think so. Should I have done?'

'I thought poets were meant to be observant,' I told him. 'You know, viewing their surroundings and commenting on what they see.'

'What do you mean? What are you talking about?'

'She was a prostitute, Mr Drayer. Didn't you know that?'

It turned out he didn't, which was probably because there hadn't been any other male visitors that he recalled. She'd clearly kept her business and personal life separate. I showed him the photo-me images and asked him if he recognized the blonde girl. He said he did. He'd seen her a number of times coming and going with Miriam. 'They seemed like good friends. They used to laugh together a lot. Like schoolgirls.'

'That's what they should have been,' I said.

We asked him a few more questions about his own background and what he knew about the other people in the flats, but didn't get any information of significance. If anything, Norman knew even less about his other neighbours than he'd known about Miriam.

It was just after a quarter to six when we finally got back to the station and reported to Welland, who'd taken up residence in a small office next to the incident room, from where he could control his end of the inquiry. He was pissed off because one of his witnesses in another case, a girl testifying against her ex-boyfriend who'd knifed someone in a pub fight, had decided to pull the plug and keep her mouth shut. Apparently someone had persuaded her to change her mind with a small threat of violence, leaving Welland 's case in tatters.

'I've had the CPS on the phone all afternoon,' he moaned between vacuum-cleaner-like drags on his cigarette. 'Making a fucking fuss like they're fucking whiter than white.'

Malik made the mistake of asking if she'd had protection.

Welland glared at him. 'That fucking knifing happened three months ago and the trial doesn't start until February. I can't have a man with her all that time. Where the fuck am I going to get him from? Magic him up out of thin air?'

Malik backed off, knowing better than to get involved in one of Welland 's rants. Welland finished his cigarette in three angry drags and used the butt to light another one. 'Anyway, what happened to your face?' he asked me eventually. I told him, and he shook his head angrily. 'We'll put a warrant out on him as soon as we've got his name. He might be able to throw some light on this. Did you find anything of interest there?'

I shook my head. 'Not a lot. There was no address book or mobile phone or anything, nothing that would give us any idea of her client list.'

'We're just going to have to ask around among the King's Cross girls tonight. See if they can throw up any names.'

'She's bound to have had a mobile,' I said. 'Have we got anyone checking whether there was one registered in her name?'

'Yeah, I've got Hunsdon on it at the moment, but it'll take time.'

I told him about the girl in the photographs and suggested it would be a good idea to try to trace her.

'Yeah, you're right. She might be able to help. There's a meeting tomorrow at eight thirty sharp. We'll be getting the preliminary autopsy findings, so make sure you're there. No fucking oversleeping. It's important we get momentum on this one,' he said by way of conclusion. 'You know what they say about the first forty-eight hours.'

I did indeed, but my momentum had gone for the day. The right side of my face still ached, and since I was going to have to be in early again, I decided it was time to knock off. I asked Malik if he fancied joining me for a drink, more out of politeness than anything else, since I didn't think he'd say yes. He looked at his watch for at least two seconds too long, then smiled and said why not, which was unusual for him. He generally liked to get away at the end of the shift, back to his family, which was fair enough, although he wasn't averse to socializing with the bosses if he thought it would do him some good.

We adjourned to a pub called the Roving Wolf, which was a haunt for CID and some of the uniforms. It was busy with the after-work office crowd, a few of whom I knew by sight, and I said hello to a couple of people as I pushed my way to the bar and ordered the drinks – a pint of Pride for me, a large orange juice for Malik. We found a table in the corner away from the scrum, and I lit a cigarette.

'So, who killed Miriam Fox, then?' he asked, sipping his drink.

'Good question.'

'What do you think?'

'Well, it's early days yet, and a lot depends on the result of the autopsy, but I suppose my first thought's the obvious one, and that's because the obvious one's usually the right one.'

'A pervert?'

'I think so. You've got to say, it points that way. She died at the scene, there's no doubt about that. The area round the body was too bloodstained for her to have been taken there after death. And the location suggests she wasn't killed by someone who knew her. It's the sort of place she might well have gone for privacy with a punter, and the sort of place a killer might have gone for privacy with his victim.'

'So what do you reckon our chances of a result are, then?'

'Too early to say. If the killer's been careless like a lot of these guys can be, then we're sorted. Forensics'll have him in no time.'

'Unless, of course, he's not known to us.'

I didn't like to think of that scenario. 'True. But someone who can do that… you know, grab a young girl from behind and cut her throat from ear to ear. Even in this day and age, I don't think there are many who could. Someone like that is likely to have done something that's brought him to the attention of the police before. But if he's planned it, and he's been careful, and he's picked someone who doesn't know him from Adam-'

'Like a prostitute.'

'Like a prostitute, then he could be miles away by now.'

'And what do you think? Do you think he's a planner or someone who just can't control his urges?'

'Well, my gut feeling is that he's a planner. But I haven't really got anything to back that up with, except for the fact that he picked a good spot to take her out, and he obviously knew what he was doing. What about you? What's your take on it?'

Malik smiled wearily. 'I think it's depressing that we learn all these investigative skills, yet how much do we actually ever need them?'

'What do you mean?'

'Well, unless the guy's an idiot or we get a lucky break, then we're not going to catch him, are we? No matter how clever we are.'

'Policework's all about lucky breaks, but you know what they say: in the end, you make your own luck.'

'Well, I hope we get lucky, then, because otherwise it's just a matter of waiting, isn't it?'

'He may not kill again,' I said. 'Sometimes they don't.'

'And if he doesn't, then he may never be brought to justice.'

'That's the trade-off. Let's just hope it doesn't come to that. To successful forensics,' I said, raising my glass.

'To successful forensics,' Malik intoned, not looking completely convinced.

For a few moments we both sat in silence, mulling things over. I took a long sip of my drink, thinking that I was glad the day's work was done.

'Did you hear about that shooting in Hertfordshire last night?'

My mind immediately snapped to attention. To be honest, I hadn't thought about last night's activity since my meet with Raymond. It might sound callous, but I'd been too busy. I felt a short rush of regret when Malik mentioned it, but it was a lot weaker than it had been earlier. I felt bad at what had happened, but what was done was done. Time can sometimes be a rapid as well as a great healer.

'Yeah, I did. I reckon there's more to that one than meets the eye.'

'So do I. I've got a friend, a guy I used to go to college with. He's a DC up in Hertford. They're handling the case. For the moment anyway.'

'Yeah, I heard. What's he got to say about it so far?'

'I haven't spoken to him yet. I expect he's under the cosh a bit. Same as us. I thought I might try him this evening, that's if they're letting him home for the night.'

I took an easy gulp of my pint, knowing that I was going to have to approach this carefully. 'When you do speak to your mate, find out a bit more about this case. It intrigues me.'

'And me. It's an interesting one. Looks like a gangland hit. It makes you wonder what those customs men were investigating.'

It did that, all right. 'Whatever it was, it must have been pretty big.'

'Well, you'd think so, wouldn't you? I think the key lies in finding out who the guy with them was. The civilian. When you know what his involvement was, I think you'll have the motive, and with something like this, once you've got the motive, you're two thirds of the way there.'

'It's proving it, though, isn't it? This was obviously well planned so you'd assume whoever was behind it has covered their tracks pretty well. You might find out who they are, but it's building a case against them that matters.'

Malik nodded. 'You've got to get someone to talk, that's always the key. Something like this, there's got to be a fair few people involved, and one or two of them are bound to get cold feet.'

I thought of Danny. Would he break? I doubted it. He'd known what we were going to do and had been happy enough to get involved. But Malik was right. There were a fair few people involved, some of whom I didn't know from Adam. Any one of them could end up talking, although it was a bit late to worry about that now. I was glad that, through Malik, I at least had a means of finding out how well the investigation was going.

'One way or another, it's going to be a difficult one to crack,' I added. 'Time-consuming.'

'Perhaps. But definitely interesting. I'd love to talk to the man who did it. You know, the one who actually pulled the trigger.'

'Why? What'll he tell you? I expect he did it for money; something nice and mundane like that.'

Malik smiled. 'I'm sure he did – it's almost certainly a professional hit – but it takes a special kind of man to shoot dead three people without a second's thought. Just like that.' He clicked his fingers to signify his point. 'People he's almost certainly never met before. People who've never done him any harm.'

'You'd probably find that whoever did it was pretty normal underneath it all.'

'Normal people don't murder each other.'

This time it was my turn to smile. 'Normal people murder each other all the time.'

'I don't agree with that. Most murderers might look normal, but there's always something rotten inside that makes them do what they do.'

'I don't know. It's not always as cut and dried as that.'

Malik stared at me intensely. 'It is always that cut and dried. Murder's murder, and the people who commit it are bad people. There's no two ways about it. It's a black-and-white issue. Some murders aren't quite as horrific as others, but none of them are justifiable. Under any circumstances. They're just different shades of black.'

I could tell he felt passionately about what he was saying and thought it best not to say too much more on the matter. You never know when such conversations can be regurgitated and used against you somewhere down the line. So I conceded the point and the conversation drifted on through the awkward avenues of small talk before inevitably coming back to the case. After all, what else was there to talk about?

We both concluded that Welland was right about momentum. If we didn't turn up clues in the next few days, and it really did turn out to be someone unknown to the victim – which I have to say is what everything seemed to point to – then the bottom would fall out of this case very quickly and we'd be left with nothing. Either waiting for our mystery perpetrator to strike again (a worrying enough scenario in itself) or losing him for ever amid the vast ranks of the unsolveds, which somehow I felt would be even worse.

Malik stayed for two drinks to give him the opportunity to buy me a brew back, then it was time for him to return to the family seat in Highgate where his pretty wife and two young children awaited him. He offered to share a taxi with me but I decided to stay put for a while. I was hungry, but I fancied one more drink before I headed back to the flat. I'd got the taste of beer now.

One of the regulars, an old guy with a raspy voice whom I knew vaguely, came and joined me and we chatted about this and that for a while. Normal shit: football results, the price of beer, what a fuck-up the government was making of everything. Sometimes it's nice to talk to civilians. It doesn't require you to rack your brains in case you missed something. Things just flow along nice and easy. But when the guy started going on about his wife's pickled-onion-sized bunions, and I started thinking that I hoped I'd be dead by the time I got to his age, I knew it was time to go.

It was eight o'clock when the cab dropped me off outside my front door. The iron-grey cloud cover that had sat above the city most of the morning had now broken up completely; you could even make out the odd star. The temperature had dropped accordingly and the night had a pleasant wintery feel about it.

The first thing I did when I got inside was phone Danny, but he wasn't at home. I tried him on his mobile but got diverted to the message service, so I left one telling him to be in at five p.m. the next day so that I could drop the money round to him. Then I showered, washing off the dirt of the day, and thought about food.

I found a carton of something called creamy prawn risotto in the freezer. It said 'ready in twenty minutes' on the sleeve and the photo didn't look too unappetizing so I defrosted it in the microwave. While it was cooking, I took my usual seat on the sofa and switched on the TV, turning straight to the news channel.

Two passport-type photographs dominated the screen. They were of the Cherokee driver and his front-seat passenger. The driver looked different from the previous night. In the photo he was smiling broadly and there were laughter lines around his eyes. It gave you the impression that he'd probably been quite a nice bloke when he was alive. Old greasy face next to him looked better as well. He was still staring moodily at the camera, like he'd just been told off by someone twenty years his junior, but he'd lost the shiftiness he'd been exuding the previous night, and it looked like he'd washed his hair and given it a decent comb, which had improved his appearance no end.

The report named the driver as Paul Furlong, a thirty-six-year-old father of two young children, and his passenger as forty-nine-year-old Terry Bayden-Smith, who'd been with customs since leaving school. Bayden-Smith was divorced and presumably had no kids because none were mentioned.

Their faces disappeared from the screen to be replaced by a male reporter in a fleece coat standing outside the Traveller's Rest. There was still police tape everywhere and the Cherokee remained where it had stopped beside me, but activity had dwindled. A uniformed officer stood in the background guarding the scene, but he was the only person I could see. The reporter said that there'd been more than sixty detectives assigned to this case and that the police were confident of finding the killer. There were apparently a number of ongoing lines of inquiry but the reporter quoted a senior police source as saying that a quick result was unlikely.

I wondered if Raymond had been telling the truth when he'd said they'd been corrupt. Would it make what I'd done any better? Probably not. Once again I found myself wishing I hadn't got involved. Corrupt or not, there was going to be a huge amount of pressure on the investigating officers. Unlike us, they'd get all the resources they needed as well, always the way in high-profile cases where the public are clamouring for arrests. Again, very little mention was made of the third victim of the shooting, and they still weren't naming him, which surprised me. I was going to have to press Raymond to find out who he was. By now I was fairly certain he was more than just another piece of pondscum.

The murder of Miriam Fox didn't get a look-in, not even on Ceefax. I suppose a dead prostitute just doesn't carry the same kind of glamour, although that would certainly change if another Tom went the same way. There's nothing the public likes more than a serial killer, especially when he's not targeting them.

I ate my food while watching Family Fortunes. As always, Les Dennis did his best with only limited resources, kind of like the Metropolitan Police. Neither family was over-bright and the Dobbles from Glasgow had accents so thick that you had to wonder how they'd made it through the auditions. Les made a few jokes about needing a translator and laughed heartily as he tried to keep things going, but you could tell he was getting a bit tired of it. In the end they lost to the English family whose name I forget, and who went on to win the car.

After that I watched a film. It was a romantic comedy and it would have been quite entertaining but I had difficulty concentrating. I kept imagining the family of Paul Furlong huddled together in their living room, their faces red and tearstained. In my mind, the kids were a boy and a girl and they had blond hair. The boy was the older, maybe five, and the girl was a pretty little thing, about three. The boy kept turning to his mother, who had her arms round both of them, and asking why their dad was gone and where he had gone to. The mother, her voice breaking with emotion, said that he'd gone to heaven because sometimes that's where you have to go if God wants you for a particular reason. I thought of myself as a young kid and wondered how I would have felt if someone had snatched away my dad. My dad was dead now. He'd died five years ago, and it had been a blow even then, because I'd always held him in high esteem. When I was five, he'd been king of the world because he'd known everything there was to know about anything. It would have torn me apart if someone had taken him away then.

In the end, I could torture myself no more. Sitting alone in a poky flat, wallowing in the guilt of depriving kids of their father, was always going to be a recipe for disaster. So when the film finished, and the couple who hadn't been able to stand the sight of each other at first predictably got together and disappeared off into the sunset, I went to bed. It was a measure of my exhaustion that I was asleep almost before my head hit the pillow.