The other murder, of a derelict down behind the railway station, was found to have been committed by four hooligans spaced out on crack cocaine.
‘It’s clearly murder,’ Gordon Windsor said over the phone after a cursory inspection of the body wrapped in blankets. He and Isaac had worked together before, and if Windsor said it was murder, then it was. Isaac, as the senior officer in the department, knew it was time to bring the Murder Investigation Team back to full mobilisation, even though, after so many years, the death could be classified as a cold case.
‘Your initial evaluation?’ Isaac asked.
‘The body’s been here for thirty years, I’d say.’
‘Did you say thirty years?’
‘That’s a guess at the present moment. We found some old newspapers under the body.’ Gordon Windsor, the crime scene examiner, had been out to the scene within two hours of the body being discovered. The first person at the scene, a local detective inspector who had responded to a phone call from a distraught woman.
‘What’s the story?’
‘Unusual. The owners are renovating the house. They removed an old wooden structure that had been built around the fireplace. That’s when they found it.’
‘Male or female?’
‘Probably male, judging by the clothes.’
‘Age?’
‘Indeterminate. I’ll hazard mid to late thirties.’
‘Who’s there at the present moment?’
‘There’s a uniform out the front of the house, plus a local detective inspector, Larry Hill. He says he knows you.’
‘We’ve worked together,’ Isaac replied.
‘You’d better get down here before we remove the body.’
‘Give me twenty minutes.’
***
‘We only moved in six weeks ago, it’s not what you expect to find,’ Trevor Baxter, who had rushed home from work, said.
‘Sorry about that, but now it’s a murder investigation,’ Isaac Cook said.
‘Does that mean we’ll have to move out?’
‘For a few days.’
‘I don’t want to stay here,’ Sue Baxter said. ‘I never want to come back here again.’
‘I can understand your sentiment,’ Isaac Cook said. ‘It’s easier to deal with in time.’
‘Are you sure it’s murder?’ Trevor Baxter asked.
‘Wrapped up in a couple of blankets, tied with rope and thrust in a fireplace.’
‘You’re right. What else could it be?’
The husband was correct with his question, the DCI conceded. So far, there had been no cause of death, no weapon, no inspection of the body, other than of a leg bone which had fallen out when the tradesman had investigated the blankets in the fireplace. There were too many indicators to believe it could be anything but murder. Gordon Windsor would be working overtime to follow up on a definitive cause of death. If it was not murder, then the concealment of the body indicated foul play, and failing to report a death was still a crime.
The Baxter family checked into a hotel for the night, while a full investigating team went over the house with a fine-tooth comb. There was a lot of work to do before the house would be available for habitation again. The history of the house needed to be checked: who had lived there, who had owned it, and who may have had a motive for concealing a body. Bodies always give off an odour as the decaying process commences, so someone must have smelt something, or the house was empty, which seemed unlikely.
***
Forty years earlier, Bellevue Street, where the body had been found, had been no more than a seedy part of London, where the influx of immigrants from the Caribbean, Africa, and the Indian subcontinent had been deposited in slum dwellings. Isaac Cook’s parents had lived in a ground floor room in a similar street when they first arrived in the country from Jamaica at that time. By the time Isaac had been born, their situation had improved, and they had secured a loan on a two-bedroom flat not far from Hyde Park. He remembered their conversations on how hard it had been on their arrival, with the aggressive landlords and their escalating rent demands. He was thankful that the protection of the tenant had improved dramatically since then, although he had had a difficult landlord before buying his flat in Willesden.
Isaac Cook had planned an early night, but that was clearly off the agenda now. He was hopeful that Jess would be sympathetic. They had met on a previous case, and she had moved in with him. He had been confident that the romance would last, but even now it was looking shaky. There had been a few arguments in the last couple of weeks, and every time, as he had expected, the name of Linda Harris had been brought up. ‘You slept with her, and don’t give me that nonsense that it was vital to the case. When does screwing form any part of a police investigation?’
He always knew it would cause a problem, even though they had not been an item then, merely a flirtation, but Jess never saw it as that.
***
Isaac summoned his team together. Detective Chief Superintendent Richard Goddard, their boss, attended as well. The addition of ‘Chief’ to his title had come about a few months previously, after a particularly trying case, where Isaac had met and bedded Linda Harris, and flirted with Jess O’Neill. Since that one night, Isaac had not heard from Linda except for a brief phone call, when she stated that she had not murdered anyone, but he was never sure as to the truth. Even though he wanted to settle down with Jess, he could see that the romance was heading to an inevitable conclusion.
Larry Hill was pleased when Isaac offered him the vacant detective inspector’s position in his team. He would be transferred officially to Challis Street Police Station within the next
