‘I’d say by the way she was dressed, she was a Tom.’
‘I think that’s probably a fair assumption.’
‘Goes off with a punter to a nice secluded spot, he pulls the knife out, puts a hand over her mouth, and the rest is history.’
‘Looks that way, but we can’t tell for sure. A lot of girls go out scantily clad these days. Even in weather like this. The first thing we need to do is identify her. You’re on the squad for this one, Dennis. DC Malik’ll be working alongside you, and you’ll be reporting to me. DCI Knox is the SIO.’
‘I’ve got a lot on at the moment, sir.’
‘You’re going to have a busy week, then. I’m sorry, Dennis, but we’re short on bodies, if you’ll excuse the pun. Very short. And it seems the world’s lowlifes are all busy at the moment. What can I do?’
What could he do? He was right, of course. We were snowed under, and in those circumstances it’s a case of all hands to the pumps. I was already losing my initial enthusiasm, though. It just didn’t look at first glance like it was going to be an easy case. If this girl was a prostitute, it was highly likely we had a sex killer on our hands. If he’d been a clever boy and had worn gloves and avoided leaving any liquid evidence at the scene of the crime, then finding him was going to be an uphill battle. Whichever way you looked at it there was going to be a lot of legwork.
I looked back at the pathetic corpse of the girl. Some mother’s daughter. It was a lonely way to say your goodbyes to the world.
‘I want to get this one solved, Dennis. Whoever did this…’ He paused momentarily, choosing his words. ‘Whoever did this is a fucking animal, and I want him in a cage where he belongs.’
‘I’ll get on to it,’ I told Welland.
He nodded, wiping his brow again. ‘You do that.’
5
At 1.05 that afternoon, I was sitting on a bench in Regent’s Park smoking yet another cigarette and waiting for my rendezvous. The rain had long since cleared and it was even threatening to be quite a nice day. I’d already attended the briefing session back at the station where Knox had worked hard to instil some enthusiasm and grit into the inquiry, not an easy task as no-one felt there was much hope of intercepting the perpetrator quickly. I’d now got Malik on to the task of identifying her, which, if she was a Tom, wouldn’t take too long.
I liked Malik. He wasn’t a bad copper and he was efficient. If you asked him to do something, he did it properly, which doesn’t seem to be a common trait with a lot of people these days. And he wasn’t idealistic either, even though he’d only been in the Force for five years and was university educated, which is usually a pretty dire combination. So many of the fast-track graduates who go shooting up through the ranks have all these big ideas about trying to understand the psychology and economics of crime. They want to find out what motivates and drives criminals rather than simply doing what they’re paid to do, which is catch them.
I looked at my watch again, which is something I do constantly when I’m early for a meeting or the other person’s late. In this case, the other person was late, but then Raymond was never the most punctual of people. I was hungry. Apart from the toast I’d forced down myself earlier that morning, I hadn’t eaten in close to twenty-four hours and my stomach was beginning to make strange growling noises. I was, I decided, going to have to improve my diet and start eating more regularly. One of the DCs had told me that sushi was very good for you. The Japanese eat it all the time and, according to him, they have the lowest incidence of lung cancer in the industrialized world, even though they’re the heaviest smokers. Raw fish, though. It was a high price to pay for a life of rude health.
‘Care to join me for a walk, Dennis?’ said Raymond, interrupting my thoughts. ‘Or would you prefer to continue your meditation?’
There he was, bright as a bell, a wide smile on his big round face, as if the whole world were his playground and all was fair within it. That was Raymond Keen for you. He was one of those big, bouncy guys who simply oozed joie de vivre. Even his haircut, a magnificent silver bouffant of the kind so beloved of middle-aged men who want to put one over on their balding contemporaries, and which sat on the top of his head like a curled up Cheshire cat, seemed designed to tell the world what a jolly character he was, which was a little odd when you considered that one of his more active and lucrative sidelines was running a funeral parlour. But Raymond, as became clear when you got to know him, was a man with a deeply ironic sense of humour.
‘I’ll join you, I think,’ I told him.
I got up and we started to walk across the grass in the direction of the boating lake. Some kids who should have been in school were playing football and a few mothers were out strolling with prams, but other than that the park was quiet.
I didn’t beat about the bush. ‘What the fuck happened, Raymond? You told me I was shooting drug dealers.’
Raymond attempted a rueful smile but he didn’t look overly guilty. ‘Give me a break, Dennis. I could hardly have told you the real targets, could I? You wouldn’t have shot them.’
‘I know I wouldn’t have shot them! That’s the point. You got me involved in
