And then a desk clerk clutching a Lemsip spoils everything.
‘Luigi, you’re wanted,’ he croaks from the doorway. I struggle to hear the details as they huddle together – Parnell’s shot-putter bulk blocks out all soundwaves – but I get the gist.
A body. A woman. Leamington Square, by the entrance to the gardens. Just at the back of Exmouth Market.
It looks suspicious. Islington plod have secured the scene. DCI Steele has been notified.
Exmouth Market.
Not strictly our patch, but when the other two on-call Murder teams are up to their eyeballs in bodies and you’re just sitting around eating crap and procrastinating about paperwork, you don’t start quoting boundaries and grid references. I don’t anyway. Parnell gives it a try.
And with a creeping sense of unease that strips away all the notions of sanctuary I held just two minutes ago, I think to myself that it is my patch really. In the umbilical sense, at least.
I spent the first eight years of my life there.
Last I heard, my dad was back there, running our old pub.
Mixing with his old crew again.
Living the Bad Life.
*
At ten p.m. every evening, as punctual as a Swiss clock, Dad would excuse himself from whatever bar-room brawl he’d been refereeing and walk the few hundred yards up to Leamington Square Gardens to smoke his solitary cigarette of the day. Whether he was dodging Mum – an evangelical ex-smoker – or whether he did it for reasons of solitude and sanity, I never really knew, but I’d watch him most nights from my window, quickly throwing down whatever book I’d been reading by the light of my Glow-Worm as soon as I heard his steps crunching across the gravel. Eventually he’d become just a dot in the distance, a flash of a phone or the flare of a lighter, but I felt comforted by it somehow. Happy that he had five minutes’ peace.
He took me with him once. I was only six. Mum was at Auntie Carmel’s so Dad warned me it was ‘a special treat’ which generally meant ‘secret’, along with everything else that happened when Dad was left in charge (crisps for dinner, a very loose diktat on brushing teeth, and illegal poker nights in the back room with the men Mum didn’t like). It was the first time I’d been to the gardens at night – I’d been there often during the day, playing shops in the bandstand, hopscotch on the path – and after we’d been there a while and we’d chatted about Toy Story and my new puffa jacket, Dad asked me if I was frightened being out so late. He said most kids my age would crap themselves and start bawling to go home.
I told him I wasn’t scared of anything when he was with me and he’d ruffled my curls and said that was right.
Tonight I feel scared though, and even with Parnell at my side, as solid as the plane trees that line the perimeter of Leamington Square, I can’t seem to shake the feeling that no good will come of being back here.
Not quite a sense of doom, but one of nagging disquiet.
As soon as we’re parked up by the outer cordon, I walk over to Parnell’s side and let his genial grumpiness soothe me.
‘Forty lousy minutes and it’d have been changeover. Some other sod’s problem, and a hot shower and a cuddle with the wife for me. Jinxed we are, Kinsella, bloody jinxed.’
‘Doesn’t bother me,’ I lie. ‘No one to cuddle up to or switch the hot water on. Might as well be freezing my arse off with you.’
If I say this enough times, I might convince myself. Then I might also be able to convince myself to tell Parnell and Steele that I grew up less than a football pitch away from here. That my dad runs a pub so close you can hear the jukebox on a warm summer’s day when the main doors are open. That I lived above that pub until I was eight years old.
Before everything changed.
But I can’t give Steele any more reasons to ship me out of Murder, not after Bedsit-gate. Not that this is the same, mind. There isn’t anything procedurally wrong with having once grazed your knee on the same spot as a dead body. But then you don’t get to DCI level, with no fewer than four commendations under your belt, without knowing how to exploit an opportunity, and therefore any admission that I’ve got the slightest personal connection to this case and Steele will have me counting beans with the Financial Intelligence crew before I can say ‘Excel spreadsheet.’
As Parnell continues his mournful dirge, I weigh this up one final time, staring at my reflection in the car window. All I see is someone who needs her job in MIT4 as desperately as she needs a fringe-trim and a big dose of vitamin C.
It’s simple. I’ll say nothing.
Steele’s here already, forensic-suited and booted, chatting to two SOCOs as they bob up and down placing evidence markers on the floor.
‘Jesus, she got here quick,’ I say. ‘Doesn’t she live over Ealing way?’
Parnell rummages in the boot, his voice is muffled but the square is convent quiet. ‘I keep telling you, she’s not human. She doesn’t have a shower and get dressed like you and me. She regenerates, like the Terminator.’ He straightens up and waves over to Steele, tossing me a pair of shoe covers and a protective suit with the other hand. Steele signals for us to hurry up, pointing at a hunched figure standing by the entrance to the forensic tent. ‘Oh brilliant. Is that the back of Vickery’s head?’
‘Not in the mood for being patronised in sub-zero temperatures, no?’
Joking aside, I don’t have an issue with Mo Vickery. Hats off to anyone who can stand in a ditch for eight hours collecting maggots and call it a vocation. And when you’re twenty-six, rosy-cheeked and you’ve hitched your wagon to one of the most hierarchical organisations in British society, being patronised is kind of par for the course, really. A rite of passage you can either embrace or ignore.
We suit up in silence. Parnell struggles with his zip while I scrape every last strand of my hair into a bun before Mo Vickery tells me again that she’d sooner I ‘piss on her porch’ than come anywhere near her crime scene with my thick Celtic thatch.
‘So what do you reckon?’ I say, nodding towards Steele. ‘Must be bad to get her out of her jim-jams.’
Parnell grabs his e-cig out of the car door and takes a fast, deep draw, his face etched with longing for a big-boy cigarette. ‘Chief Super gets twitchy around Christmas,’ he says. ‘Joe Public doesn’t like the idea of someone’s presents going begging under a tree while they’re being carved up in the morgue so he always brings the big guns in.’ He blows out a plume of something sickly, apricots maybe. ‘Although it could be a tramp for all we know. Some old dosser who’s shuffled off to the great cardboard box in the sky, right at the end of my bloody shift.’
‘All life is sacred, Sarge.’ I grin the grin of the lapsed Catholic.
‘Yeah well, so are my testicles, and Mags will be using them as baubles if I end up working another Christmas.’
He slams the car door and the noise has a finality to it, like the hammer at an auction. We walk across the square and duck down under the inner cordon. Parnell’s knees click loudly and he groans even louder.
I suppress a laugh, almost.
‘Yeah, all right, never get old, kiddo.’ I nod towards the tent, a reminder that not everyone gets the chance. ‘OK, never get fat then,’ he adds, sheepish. ‘And take your cod liver oil every day – the liquid, though, not the tablets, there’s more vitamin D in the liquid, it’s better for your joints.’ He looks satisfied, his good deed done for the day. ‘Don’t say your Uncle Lu doesn’t teach you anything .?.?.’
‘Masks,’ booms Vickery, not bothering to turn around. ‘He’s already handled her. We can do without any more contamination, thank you.’
I aim a sympathetic look towards ‘he’, the young PC manning the cordon, but he doesn’t look fazed.