Early Sunday morning in casualty is always a joy, what with the blood and the screaming and the recriminations as the booze wears off and the pain kicks in. Any police officer who’s feeling public-spirited enough to show his face can get himself involved in half a dozen exciting altercations often involving Ken and his best mate Ron and it weren’t like we were doing anything, Officer, honest, it was like totally unprovoked. So I stayed in the treatment cubicle with my nice quiet dead body, thank you very much. I borrowed a pair of surgical gloves from a box in a drawer and went through his wallet.

Mickey the Bone’s full name was, according to his driver’s license, Michael Adjayi. So a Nigerian family then, and according to his date of birth Michael had just turned nineteen.

You’re mum’s going to be really pissed with you, I thought sadly.

He had a slew of cards, Visa, MasterCard, bank card, and one for the Musicians Union. There were a couple of business cards including one from an agent—I jotted the details down in my notebook. Then I carefully returned everything to the evidence bag.

It wasn’t until quarter to three that a junior doctor turned up and finally pronounced Michael Adjayi definitively dead. It took another two hours, once I’d declared the body a crime scene, to get the doctor’s particulars, obtain copies of the relevant documentation, the paramedic’s and the doctor’s notes, and get the body downstairs and safely into the mortuary there to await Dr. Walid’s tender ministrations. That just left me with the joyful last part where I contact the victim’s loved ones and break the news to them. These days the easiest way to do that is to grab someone’s mobile and see what comes up on the call log. Predictably Mickey had had an iPhone. I found it in his jacket pocket, but the screen was blank and I didn’t need to open it up to know that the chip would be trashed. I put it in a second evidence bag but I didn’t bother labeling—it would be going back to the Folly with me. Once I was sure that nobody was going to interfere with the body, I called Dr. Walid. I didn’t see any reason to wake him so I rang his office number and left a message for him to get in the morning.

If Mickey really was a second victim then it meant that the magic jazzman killer, and I was going to have to think of a better name for him than that, had struck twice less than four days apart.

I wondered if there’d been a similar cluster among Dr. Walid’s lists of deaths. I’d have to check when I got back to the tech-cave at the Folly. I was just debating whether to go home or fall asleep in the mortuary staff room when my phone rang. I didn’t recognize the number.

“Hello.” I said.