Seawoll pursed his lips and I realised with a shock that he was really considering whether to bring Nightingale in. Which annoyed me because it meant he didn’t trust me to do the job and unsettled me because there’d been something comforting about Seawoll’s resistance to any kind of ‘magic wank’ impinging upon his investigations. If he started to take me seriously then the pressure was going to be on me to deliver.

‘I heard Lesley’s joined your mob,’ he said.

Ninety-degree change in direction of the conversation – classic police trick. Didn’t work because I’d been rehearsing the answer to that question ever since Nightingale and the Commissioner came to yet another ‘agreement’.

‘Not officially,’ I said. ‘She’s on indefinite medical leave.’

‘What a waste,’ said Seawoll shaking his head. ‘It’s enough to make you weep.’

‘How do you want to do this, sir?’ I asked. ‘AB do the murder and I do … the other … stuff?’ AB being the radio abbreviation for Belgravia Police station where Seawoll’s Murder Team was located – we police never like to use real words when we can use an incomprehensible bit of jargon instead.

‘After how that worked out last time?’ asked Seawoll. ‘Fuck no. You’re going to be operating out of our incident room as a member of the inquiry team. That way I can keep my fucking eye on you.’

I looked at Stephanopoulos.

‘Welcome to the murder squad,’ she said.

3. Ladbroke Grove

3

Ladbroke Grove

The Metropolitan Police has a very straightforward approach to murder investigations, not for them the detective’s gut instinct or the intricate logical deductions of the sleuth savant. No, what the Met likes to do is throw a shitload of manpower at the problem and run down every single possible lead until it is exhausted, the murderer is caught or the senior investigating officer dies of old age. As a result, murder investigations are conducted not by quirky Detective Inspectors with drink/relationship/mental problems but a bunch of frighteningly ambitious Detective Constables in the first mad flush of their careers. So you can see I fit in very well.

By five twenty that morning at least thirty of us had converged on Baker Street, so we started out for Ladbroke Grove en masse. A couple of DCs hitched a lift with me while Stephanopoulos followed on in a five-year-old Fiat Punto. I knew one of the detectives in my car. Her name was Sahra Guleed and we’d once bonded over a body in Soho. She’d also been one of the officers involved in the raid on the Strip Club of Doctor Moreau, so she was a good choice for any weird stuff.

‘I’m family liaison,’ she said as she climbed into the passenger seat.

‘Rather you than me,’ I said.

A plump sandy-haired DC in a rumpled D&C suit introduced himself after he’d got in the back.