Jerome tipped his head slowly and menacingly to one side, scrutinizing Larry from mere inches away. ‘You tell that evil little slut that I’m on to her. She owes me, more money than anyone’s ever owed me before and lived. Tell her to watch her fucking back cos, make no mistake, I am gonna hurt her. Now piss off out of here.’

Larry obliged with alacrity, running so fast down the stairs that he bashed his bike handlebars on every corner, and almost fell several times in his haste to be as far away as possible. Shit shit shit, he thought at every step. She’s really done it now.

Chapter 8

Chapter 8
Patrick – Day 2

The sun was shining in the park in which the body had been found. Patrick and Carmella stepped out from beneath a canopy of horse chestnut trees and the strong sunshine caused spots to dance before Patrick’s eyes. He paused, took a drag on his e-fag and almost swooned as the nicotine and bright light hit his exhausted brain. Shadows swayed and stretched on the cracked earth at his feet and he stood still, focusing on the trunk of the nearest tree, waiting for his vision to return to normal. His left ear was whistling crazily, his tinnitus turned up two notches.

‘If this is Frankie Philips or Isabel Hartley,’ Patrick said, ‘by the end of today this place is going to be the centre of the biggest shit storm south-west London has ever seen.’

‘I’ve got an umbrella in the car,’ Carmella said. She looked almost as sick as he felt. For the past week, he had known this moment would come. In cases like this, when seven days had passed, there were only two outcomes. A body. Or nothing, ever.

There were three unmarked cars and a van full of cops waiting behind them, and the Home Office pathologist had been alerted. But Patrick and Carmella were going in first.

‘You’re going to need the biggest umbrella ever when the media get wind of this,’ he said.

For the past couple of years, the existence of the travellers’ encampment in Crane Park in Twickenham had been one of the hottest – no, most incendiary – topics among locals. It was rare for the local paper to run without a story about the travellers, who had been blamed for everything from a dip in property prices to a surge in petty crime, with endless miniature moral panics whipped up by journalists, whether it was down to sanitation or the travellers’ dogs crapping in the park, taxpayers’ money being spent on benefits or the cost of towing away abandoned vehicles that had been dumped outside the encampment, rumours of ‘drug-dealing gypsies’ selling weed to local teens, or people complaining that they feared letting their children play in the park.