himself — a pair of dark eyes, fragmented against the streets of Edendale. Automatically, he swept back the stray lock of hair that fell across his forehead, before focusing beyond his own image to the side door of the house across the street.
‘Someone home, I think.’
‘There’d better be. The boss won’t be happy if it’s all a wasted effort.’
Despite the rain, Cooper would always prefer to be outside, rather than shut up in the office with a mountain of paperwork. That was why he’d managed to talk himself into this assignment, though he hadn’t anticipated finding himself trapped inside a car instead, with the atmosphere growing stale and his breath steaming the windows.
‘We’ll get into the property, whatever,’ he said.
‘We need an arrest, though.’
‘Right.’
He could feel an itch developing under his stab-proof vest. Right underneath, where he had no chance of reaching it without taking the thing off completely. No amount of twisting his body and squeezing a hand into the gap would do the trick. That was the trouble with sitting doing nothing, waiting for the action to start. You began to develop unreachable itches. You began to think about things.
His colleagues were fidgeting and grumbling beside him in the car, trying to reach itches of their own, or ease the cramp in their legs. They might have been better waiting outside in the rain, except that Kevlar was said to disintegrate when it got wet. Cooper didn’t know whether that was true, or just a canteen-culture myth that had survived the death of the canteen. He had no urge to be the first one to try it out, though. An itch was better than a knife in the guts.
‘What are we waiting for now? Who’s running this show, anyway?’
‘Laurel and Hardy, by the look of that entry team.’
‘Jesus. They’ve got the Michelin Man on ram.’
Cooper watched four officers in overalls and riot helmets exiting their unmarked van and approaching the house. Well, no one looked good in a stab vest; Cooper had an uncomfortable feeling that he had put on a few pounds in the wrong places himself. Despite the muscle he’d been building up in the gym, too much good food had staged a kind of counterattack and his waist was now pushing uncomfortably against the inside of the vest. That would be Liz’s fault, he reckoned. She wasn’t a bad cook, and every time she made a meal for him, he felt obliged to return the favour with a visit to a decent restaurant. What a fatal spiral. At this rate, he’d be the Michelin Man himself before too long.
He watched the bulky figure of the entry team officer swing back the ram. The big red key, they called it. It opened any door, if you used it right.
A couple of liveried Traffic cars moved into position to close off the road. Cooper had done his five years in uniform before he joined CID, but he’d never been tempted by Traffic. Funny, when it was the job that got you out and about the most, instead of wearing out a chair in the CID room. Even without his twelve years in the force, he had more local knowledge than the rest of his shift put together. Well
… one day, maybe, when the paperwork finally wore down his resistance.
‘Here we go, lads.’
And then suddenly everything was happening at once. Cooper threw open the door and jumped out of the car. Immediately, he was surrounded by noise — the thump of boots on the pavement, an Alsatian barking furiously, a radio crackling with messages, and the first shouts of ‘police’ as the entry team burst into the hallway of the house. As he ran, he could hear his own breathing, feel his heart pounding in his chest. This was the moment many police officers lived for — the sudden rush of adrenalin, the surge of excitement, the blood pumping through the veins at the scent of danger. It was like a high for some of them, a feeling they couldn’t get enough of. Dangerous, in its own way.
Almost before he was inside the door, he caught the distinctive odour. An officer at the top of the stairs signalled a find. So intelligence had been on the mark, after all. Upstairs, a bedroom would have been converted into a small-scale cannabis factory, with its windows boarded up, an air vent protruding from the attic, possibly hundreds of plants under cultivation, releasing that unmistakable smell. There was no way of disguising all the tell- tale signs in a suburban street like this one. How did they think they could fool anyone? Well, he supposed they relied on a code of silence, the closing of ranks against the authorities. No snitching.
And that was why more than sixty per cent of cannabis sold in the UK was home-grown now. Latest bulletins showed an average of three factories a day raided around the country. The owners of this house would appear at magistrates’ court tomorrow charged with cannabis cultivation, and would probably be remanded in custody.
Cooper entered the living room, where two male suspects were already being handcuffed by the entry team. Somewhere in another room, a female suspect was screaming — a hysterical, high-pitched noise that penetrated the walls and rattled the windows. He helped the sergeant in charge of the operation to search one of the men, removing keys and a mobile phone from a pocket. Vital seizures, these — the keys would lead to a vehicle containing more evidence, the phone would provide contacts for the enquiry teams to follow up.
‘Can you escort a prisoner, Ben?’ asked the sergeant.
‘No problem.’
Cooper looked around the room while he waited for the man to be read his rights. He could hear the woman sobbing now, in between outbursts. For him, this was the worst moment. After that surge of adrenalin at the start of a raid, there was this uncomfortable feeling that came over him when he found himself standing in someone’s home, an intruder into their lives, turning over the belongings and poking into the hidden corners. He always felt he had to avoid the accusing eyes, though he knew the feeling of guilt was irrational. He always prayed there would be no children in a house like this. Children were the worst. No amount of explanation would make it right for the children.
But this was something he couldn’t really share with his colleagues. He looked at them now, more of them entering the house, intent on their jobs, professional and calm. Did any of them experience the same feelings?
Long before his prisoner was in the car, the female suspect had stopped screaming. Yet the sound still seemed to echo in Cooper’s head long after the shouting had died down and the barking had stopped, and the adrenalin surge had drained from his body.
By the time the ME and the crime-scene manager allowed her to get near the body in the field, Diane Fry was glad to climb into a scene suit. She followed the line of stepping plates laid down by the SOCOs and examined the victim as closely as she could. There would be much more detail in the SOC and ME’s reports, and in the photographs. But personal impressions could still be vital, whatever the benefits of science.
The first thing she noticed was how much blood there was on the victim. His hair was matted with it, and it had run down his temple and into his ear. His shirt collar was stained, and the waxed cotton was darkened by more than rain.
‘The victim is in his mid-forties,’ said Murfin, rustling alongside her with his notebook. ‘He seems to have been in reasonably good health, though a little overweight. Well, that describes a perfect specimen of manhood, if you ask me.’
Fry glanced at him, noting the way his scene suit bulged and sagged unflatteringly around the middle.
‘Matter of opinion, Gavin.’
Murfin sniffed. ‘Approximately six feet tall, brown hair, brown eyes; the blood is from a rather nasty head wound.’
‘I can see that.’
Scalp wounds always bled dramatically, even a surface cut. But in this case, Fry could see the damage to the skull, where it had been crushed a few inches above and behind the left ear.
‘No ID in his pockets,’ said Murfin. ‘That’s the bad news.’
‘Nothing?’
‘No wallet, no chequebook, no car keys. And no mobile phone.’
‘A robbery victim? Out here?’
‘Could be. Or it might have been an attempt to prevent us identifying him.’
‘The postmortem might find something for us. It would be useful if his fingerprints or DNA are on record, of course.’
The body had been moved by the ME during his examination, but now lay on its back, face turned upwards to
