Chapter Six

McLusky scooted into the bathroom. Now that it was definitely winter, he’d have to buy another heater. The Montpelier flat he rented above Rossi’s, the Italian greengrocer’s, had once had open fireplaces in every room. They had later been replaced by gas fires, and these in turn had been removed and replaced with nothing. The two-bar electric heater he had bought when he moved in couldn’t hope to heat even one room, let alone the whole flat.

In the meantime he lit the ancient stove in the kitchen, turned the oven to gas mark eight, put the kettle on the hob and scooted around until he was showered and dressed. He had managed to acquire a few more sticks of furniture, which meant the sitting room could now accommodate three people sitting down, which didn’t happen often, and he could breakfast at the kitchen table should the fancy take him. That didn’t happen often, either.

This morning ritual of rushing around was made more difficult by the fact that he was required to wear a suit to Albany Road and keep it spotless until he could accompany DSI Denkhaus to a lunch at the Isis.

The Isis was arguably the finest, certainly the most expensive, restaurant in town, where they were to be dined, wined and bored rigid by a few prominent businessmen – definitely all men, Denkhaus had confirmed – who liked to deliver their opinions to the police force in person and in a more congenial atmosphere than even headquarters could provide. All were sponsors of charities close to the Chief Constable’s heart.

McLusky had fought hard to try to wriggle out of it. ‘Why would they want to meet me? Surely there are more suitable officers around …’

‘For once I agree wholeheartedly, DI McLusky. I can assure you that you were not my first choice, or anyone’s first choice, to go to this lunch. Neither was I, for that matter. They didn’t really want to talk to anyone below Assistant Chief Constable, but the ACC just can’t be …’ Denkhaus breathed deeply, swallowed down his indignation. ‘So I got lumbered with it. They are interested in our fight against drugs because businesses worry about the level of drug-related crime in the city. And our hosts want to meet someone who was part of the team that put Ray Fenton behind bars.’

‘I only played the most marginal role in that investigation.’

‘I’m aware of it. But in the absence of DCI Gaunt, you’ll have to do.’

‘Claire French distinguished herself in that operation, as I recall.’

‘I can’t turn up with a DC in tow. Besides, French is quite … Well, anyway, there we are, stuck with it. What we need to get across is that we are doing all we can, that prevention is better than cure and that progress is being made.’

When H-hour arrived McLusky was glad that he had kept his tie in his jacket pocket and brought a spare shirt, since the one he had put on that morning had acquired a mysterious stain, as he had known it would.

Denkhaus, wearing his uniform, was in energetic, upbeat mode. A large silver-grey BMW with police driver had made an appearance, a sweetener sent by the ACC perhaps. McLusky felt no better about being driven, though by the time the car glided to a stop outside the Isis, he had to admit it had been quite the smoothest journey through Bristol traffic he had experienced without the aid of sirens. For many, lunch at the Isis, especially if paid for by others, would have been a memorable occasion, but no one at Albany Road had envied him the invitation. McLusky himself was fond of good food, though he rarely got it. When he did, he preferred to eat it in relaxed surroundings and in the company of his choice.

The restaurant’s designers had achieved an understated opulence that bordered on the minimal and yet managed to instantly suggest privilege. Part of it, he decided, came from the strange sensation that the room swallowed sound. Every table was taken, conversation was animated, yet the place seemed quiet and gave the impression that all was simply a setting for your own entrance. The other noticeable thing about the place was the age of its clientele; with a few glamorous exceptions, the diners were on the whole male and over fifty. Perhaps it took that long to earn enough money to eat here, McLusky thought as they were led to the table by an immaculately groomed creature. With dismay he realized that what he had envisaged as a long dining table full of local businessmen chatting over their food, where he would be required to merely nod and pretend to agree with Denkhaus, turned out to be just three men who now rose to greet them.

In his sixties, the oldest and largest of the three, Paul Defrees appeared to be the mover of the enterprise. ‘Ah, Superintendent, I’m so glad you could find the time …’ He had a sonorous voice, very little hair and preternaturally white teeth. McLusky had heard the name more than once in the past but until now couldn’t put a face to it. Defrees ran the largest private security firm in the West Country, among other things providing staff for commercial premises, night patrols for wealthy property owners and security for festivals. A lot of his initial money, however, had come from running gangs of wheel clampers, operating mainly on private land. He introduced his two companions. Frank Walden, a disappointed-looking man in his fifties with a hint of dampness in his handshake, was a property developer who had run projects all over the south-west of England and in the south of Wales. The youngest of the three, James Cullip, had tightly curled dark hair and quick, intelligent eyes. His business interest went far beyond Bristol and included holdings in Europe, mainly France.

McLusky had decided to stick to non-alcoholic drinks, which also relieved him of any stress he might otherwise have felt over the intimidating wine list. The lunch menu was difficult enough, since his French was non-existent, but he settled on confit of duck liver to be followed by roast quail. Once the starters arrived, he began to relax. The three men seemed genuinely interested in the policing of the city. Cullip, who owned two bars in Bristol, one in Millennium Square, was particularly worried about the level of street crime and complained about it in a low, scratched voice. ‘I like Bristol a lot. I’m from London, you see, but I chose to move here. I believe the quality of life is much better than in the capital. Bristol is going places. But when you have interests in the catering business, then street crime affects it directly. My customers need to be able to walk safely at night and my staff need to get home very late. Two of my bar staff were mugged last month. One of them decided not to work evenings any more. ‘

Defrees agreed. ‘Bristol must clean up its act. It’s not enough to tart up the centre. If there is to be sustained investment, then crime must fall. A reputation for drug crime is always bad for a city. Businesses are highly mobile now; there is no reason why many of them couldn’t move north or south.’

McLusky soon found that Denkhaus had come extremely well prepared, and that his own role was more or less to agree with him and to provide some colour. The superintendent had the statistics of crime reduction – always reduction – at his fingertips. But time and again the talk returned to drugs.

Mandatory life sentences for drug-dealers was Cullip’s solution; compulsory rehabilitation for addicts was Walden’s. McLusky was tempted to throw forced deportation into the ring but stopped himself in time.

‘What I can’t understand,’ Defrees said as he speared some venison and chased it through the jus on his plate, ‘is why they can’t stop the drugs trade at its source. Why is it so difficult to eradicate the poppy fields?’

‘And how would you do that?’ McLusky asked.

‘Surely a good dose of weedkiller should do it. We’ve got helicopters, haven’t we?’

McLusky wanted to say what a brilliant idea that was and how naturally nobody had ever thought of it before, but instead he said: ‘A few thousand hectares of opium poppy are enough for the entire heroin consumption of western Europe. You could grow it in Belgium and we’d be hard pressed to find it.’

Defrees looked unhappily at him, but Denkhaus came to his rescue. ‘And heroin is politically complicated. Most of ours comes from Afghanistan. It’s grown by very poor people who couldn’t make a living from the acreage they are farming if they grew, let’s say, wheat or millet. And many are being coerced into doing it anyway, so even if you paid them to grow something else, it wouldn’t work.’

‘As long as people want to get off their faces on heroin, there’ll be poppy fields,’ McLusky said. ‘Anyway, heroin isn’t really our main problem any more. Crack is.’

While a minor squabble broke out over this assertion, McLusky surreptitiously reached for his mobile and activated his get-out strategy. From inside his jacket pocket he sent a pre-prepared text to Austin, the signal to call him. Two minutes later his mobile chimed.

‘I thought I asked you to keep that turned off?’ Denkhaus hissed.

‘Sorry, sir, it’s the station, could be urgent.’ He answered it. On the other end was Austin, saying: ‘A man walks into a bar …’ Keeping a straight face while listening to one of Austin’s invariably bad jokes, he gave a few grunts, then said: ‘Send someone else … Oh, I see.’ He terminated the call. ‘I’m sorry, sir,’ he said to Denkhaus, who looked at him suspiciously and struggled to hide his annoyance. ‘Something’s come up and no one else can deal.’ He rose. ‘Thank you, gentlemen, for an excellent lunch. I’m sorry about the disappearing act.’

In the taxi back to Albany Road, McLusky mused on how far removed the Isis had felt from the streets where crime and drugs had made their home. His hosts’ ideas about how to solve the problems of the city were correspondingly unrealistic. There was no magic bullet, which was what Defrees and his friends were hoping for.

He found Austin in the station canteen, sitting in front of the ruins of a ham and pineapple pizza. ‘Thanks for the rescue.’

‘How bad was it?’ Austin wanted to know.

‘Remind me not to seek promotion beyond DCI. At least I could run away. Denkhaus is stuck there. He looked murderous when my phone went.’

‘But the food must have been something special.’

McLusky shook his head. ‘The confit of duck was okay, but I thought the roast quail was quite average.’

Upstairs he walked into the CID room to make coffee. With the kind of shock a person feels when discovering that their car has been stolen from the drive, he came to a sudden halt in front of the yawning gap where the kettle and tea things had sat.

He looked around to see where they had been moved to. ‘Claire, where’s the kettle?’

DC Claire French looked up reluctantly from her keyboard, where she’d been busy chasing biscuit crumbs between the keys with a moistened fingertip. ‘Gone, sir.’

‘Gone where? To a better place?’

‘Hadn’t you heard?’

‘No. Did I miss the funeral?’

‘It’s not that. We’re no longer allowed kettles.’

‘What?’ McLusky’s voice carried quiet menace.

‘Health and safety, sir. You should have had a memo.’

‘I didn’t want a memo, I wanted coffee. What’s wrong with kettles all of a sudden?’

French shrugged. ‘Water and electricity? Steam? We might give ourselves an electric shock. Or something.’

‘Really.’

‘Yes. They’re quite happy for us to tackle violent criminals jacked up on crack with nothing but a tin of pepper spray, but health and safety draw the line at tea-making. Far too hazardous.’

‘Marvellous.’

‘We’re supposed to use the drinks machines.’

‘I see. They’re not by any chance owned by health and safety, are they?’

McLusky had always assumed that instant coffee was the worst the planet had to offer, but that was before he had tried the drinks machine offering. In his office he sipped machine coffee and brooded over his list of emails and messages. There was naturally nothing from the mortuary on the BMW driver, but there should have been at least something from the vehicle search, even if only to say they’d found nothing. Sometimes police work was like wading through treacle: you had to adjust your stride accordingly or you constantly felt the drag. He picked up the phone to call about the examination of the car when a knock on the door stayed his hand. It was Austin.

‘Don’t think you’re leaving any of those in here,’ he told the DS, who was heavily burdened with files and folders.

‘All mine, I’m sorry to say.’ Much intelligence and information had long migrated to the computer, only no one trusted computers, so half of it existed on paper as well. Making sure that both were up to date was double the work. ‘We had a call about the BMW. Preliminary forensics says minute traces of class A, on the seats and in the boot. Also some herbal.’

‘Any ID on the driver yet?’

‘Nothing so far.’

Sergeant Lynch had been positive their customer had to be known to them. ‘Why not? Drugs, ammo clip and a cloned car? He can’t have just dropped from the sky. Hang on, perhaps that’s how the accident happened; we never thought of that, did we?’

‘He’s just not come to our attention before. There has to be a first time for everyone. In his case, of course, it was also the last time. Or perhaps he had no previous because he was too clever for us.’

McLusky nodded theatrically. ‘Sure. That’s why he took his airbags out and drove without a seat belt.’

‘Oh, okay, a bit thick but slippery.’

‘Let’s hope the car can tell us some more. Of course we didn’t find the missing gun?’

The files were getting heavy. Austin rested them on the edge of the desk. ‘Nope, nothing. The whole surrounding area was searched and gone over with a metal detector. He either didn’t have it on him or it was pinched.’

‘That’s all we need, some opportunist lowlife armed with a gun. What type was the magazine for?’

Austin riffled through some papers. ‘I got it here … Beretta 92 FS.’

‘Marvellous.’ McLusky didn’t know much about guns, but this was a common enough model. He knew it held fifteen rounds. Sooner or later the counter staff at a post office, a shopkeeper or a police officer was going to be looking down its barrel.

‘Where exactly was the ammunition clip found?’

‘In the glove box.’

‘Could be a spare.’ McLusky nodded inconclusively and took a sip from the plastic cup. The contents had cooled to an unpleasant temperature. ‘Oh, yuck. Talking of unsolved crimes, have you heard about the kettle? We’re supposed to drink this muck now.’ He theatrically dropped the half-empty cup into the metal dustbin.

‘I know, it’s quite mad. There’s always the canteen …’

‘By the time you’d carried your cup to your desk it’d be cold. No, Jane, something has to be done. This job’s hard enough without jobsworth making it harder.’

Behind Austin, DC French stuck her head through the open door. McLusky quite liked French, though he thought she might qualify as the plainest-looking woman he had ever met. Unless she was in the same room, he could never remember quite what she looked like. She was waving a piece of notepaper. ‘We had a call from a member of our adoring public. A dog-walker up in Leigh Woods.’ Austin and McLusky’s symphonic groans didn’t put her off her stride. ‘Her dog stumbled upon human remains.’ She gently laid the note on top of Austin’s pile of files and patted it. ‘Control have already dispatched some uniforms up there, but this appears to be yours.’

Austin looked past McLusky out of the window, where thick mist drifted in from the River Avon. ‘Great, and me not wearing my thermals today.’

Leigh Woods was, if anything, colder, damper and mistier than before. Not only did they once more find themselves down the same forester’s track, but McLusky’s heart sank even further when he recognized the dog walker as the same woman who had called them out two days earlier, only this time she was standing by her car wearing a definite I-told-you-so expression. PCs Pym and Purkis had already cordoned off the find, some thirty yards further into the trees. Giving the dog-walker a cowardly berth, McLusky aimed straight for the cordoned-off piece of ground guarded by the officers. The area looked suspiciously small.

‘Please tell me you’re standing by the very small body of a very old person, complete but for one missing ear. And preferably clutching their bus pass so we know where to send the remains. You’re just not, are you?’

‘I’m afraid not, sir,’ said PC Purkis, keeping a straight face for the benefit of the woman, who was looking across at them.

McLusky stopped at the police tape and looked down on the rectangle of leaf litter. In the centre lay a mangled piece of human tissue. ‘What exactly am I looking at, Purkis?’

‘You can see it more easily from this side, sir.’ She made room for him and squatted down. ‘See?’ she said as McLusky joined her. ‘It’s part of a hand. Left hand. Two last fingers and part of a palm.’ She seemed unperturbed by the unpleasant sight.

McLusky looked as closely as his breakfast allowed. He could clearly see now that it was part of a hand, dark, dirty and chewed. Ants were crawling over it, and through it. It looked like it had belonged to a man. He thought he could catch a nostrilful of its sickly smell and quickly straightened up. ‘You need sharp eyes not to walk straight past that. How does that woman walk her dog, on all fours?’

‘Do you want me to ask her?’ Austin hadn’t bothered to get close to the find; he was happy to take everyone’s word for it. Bits of body. He could imagine it, thanks.

‘Her dog found it,’ Pym said.

‘All right, this time we’ll get all the manpower we need for a systematic search. We’ll go over the whole area, including the part we covered ourselves; there were so few of us, we could have missed it.’ He walked back with Austin. ‘Get the surgeon to take a look at it and get it bagged up before the ants make off with it.’

‘Could still turn out to be just a walker who died of natural causes, of course. Keeled over in the wood somewhere.’

McLusky sniffed the air. Despite the mist and cold he had to admit the place smelled better than the city centre. ‘No. It’ll be a shallow grave. Somewhere back there.’

The dog-walker stood her ground beside her silver car. Her Jack Russell stared out through the back window of the hatchback. ‘Thank you for calling us promptly today, Mrs …’ Did he know her name?

‘Walker.’

Appropriate. ‘Mrs Walker. Has someone taken a statement from you yet?’

‘Yes, the woman constable took a long statement, asking all sorts of irrelevant questions.’

‘Then there’s no need for you to remain here.’

‘I know that, Inspector.’

McLusky walked with Austin to their cars. ‘Let’s get back to the nick. We’ll get a search organized, and you and me can sit this one out until they find the rest of the body.’

The call came through late that afternoon. ‘They found the body of a man. Shallow grave, remains disturbed by animal activity.’

Just as McLusky had suspected, they had completely missed the body in the mist and gloom. Things looked different now. The track was choked with vehicles; generators and arc lights had been set up. Despite the mist, the scene was thrown into sharp focus by the lights and the occasion.

‘You lot must have walked straight past it,’ DSI Denkhaus told McLusky as they were donning protective gear beside the scene-of-crime tape. A white tent had already been erected over the body. ‘If you hadn’t missed it two days ago, it would have saved a dozen officers a lot of man hours.’

McLusky got on with kitting up, putting on overshoes and face mask. He knew that the less you contradicted Denkhaus, the sooner his lectures petered out. Sometimes he suspected the superintendent simply thought it was part of his remit to harangue junior officers.

Inside the cordoned area a narrow path had been established along which everyone and everything now travelled to avoid further contamination of the site. A suspicious death always invited the professional attention of scores of people: police officers of all ranks, from the bored constables guarding the site against unauthorized persons to the senior investigation officer; crime-scene co-ordinators to manage the site, surgeon, pathologist, scene-of-crime officers, forensics technicians and CID, from freshly minted detective constables up to superintendent. As he followed Denkhaus along the path to the tent, it struck McLusky just how crowded this lonely spot in the woods had become. Many people wouldn’t attract such attendance figures at their funerals, especially if they had died quietly of natural causes, and would get shorter notices in the papers, too.

Just then the surgeon dived from the tent, pulled off his mask and took a few gulps of cold, uncontaminated air.

‘Is it bad?’ Denkhaus asked.

‘It’s pretty rank, yes, Superintendent. I’ll never get used to the smell of human decay, I’m afraid.’

‘In that case, aren’t you in the wrong job, Doctor?’

‘I don’t do this all day, you know. They don’t pay me enough as it is. Anyway, I’m finished. The pathologist is here, and he’s the one with the fat pay cheque. I doubt they pay you enough, though,’ he added as he squeezed past them.

Inside, the tent was busy. Three scene-of-crime officers were in there, one taking video shots under a glaring light. They made room around the body for Denkhaus and McLusky. Coulthart, who was squatting next to the remains, greeted them curtly. ‘Rob … McLusky.’

Denkhaus remained standing while McLusky squatted down on the stony ground, joining the pathologist, who was using a plastic spatula and tweezers to probe the flesh of the corpse. ‘We can safely rule out accidental death, then,’ McLusky murmured.

‘Oh, quite,’ Coulthart agreed. ‘Unless he somehow put a bag over his head, then tied his hands together and buried himself.’

The corpse had been mauled by scavenging animals. With the hands entirely chewed away, the first thing that struck McLusky was that the victim had been tied by the wrists with thick, brutal wire. The bag that originally covered his head was made from natural fibres and had been torn open by sharp teeth. The head was badly chewed. The whole area looked a filthy mess to McLusky, who found it hard to distinguish any features. He thought he could glimpse bits of skull where nose and eyes ought to be.

‘How long’s he been dead, Doctor?’

‘A rough estimate would be four to five weeks. Direct contact with the forest floor allowed rapid insect access, but the exceptionally cold weather kept down bacterial activity and helped to preserve the body somewhat.’

If this was what Coulthart called a ‘somewhat preserved’ corpse, then McLusky never wanted to see a rotten one. In his eight years on the force, he had come across more than one body that had had time to start decomposing, but this was his first disinterred corpse. The sickly, cloying stench was so intense that it made thinking of anything else difficult.

‘What kind of a bag is this, do you think?’ It had been tied around the victim’s neck with what looked like green garden twine, which was now almost completely black from having soaked up many types of fluid.

‘It appears to be some kind of shopping bag made of rough canvas or similar. If you look closely, you’ll see it had handles once. They’ve been cut or torn off.’

McLusky’s eyes followed Coulthart’s pointing spatula to the frayed stumps of twisted rope handles. ‘Any idea as to the cause of death?’

‘I wouldn’t want to hazard a guess at this stage; it is too difficult to establish out here which traumas are pre- and which post-mortem. I heard you found parts of a hand?’

‘Yes, it’s what led us to him.’

McLusky had kept his breathing as shallow as possible, but all this talking had made it necessary to take great lungfuls of death, and his stomach was now in revolt. ‘I’ll take a quick breather, Doctor, if you don’t mind.’

‘Not at all, go ahead. I don’t blame you, Inspector, especially since your boss fled some minutes ago.’

Once outside the tent, McLusky walked quickly along the designated path and ducked under the crime-scene tape. It wouldn’t do to throw up inside the cordon. After a few deep breaths in the cold forest air, the danger of vomiting receded. He strove to keep his mind clear of the images from the tent, and memories of the canteen lasagne he had eaten for lunch. He found Denkhaus behind the wheel of his Range Rover, the engine running. The superintendent had shed his protective gear, which meant he had no intention of returning to the locus. He didn’t invite McLusky to join him in the warmth; instead he rolled the window down a few inches.

‘What does it look like to you, McLusky?’

‘Hard to say. We’ll know more when they come up with the cause of death.’

‘I hope so. How long’s he been there?’

‘Up to five weeks. SOCO tried to get fingerprints off the partial hand we found, but changed their minds when they saw it. If he has previous, we’ll ID him from his DNA; if not, there’s always dental records.’

‘Good.’ Denkhaus put the car in gear. ‘Okay, McLusky, it’s all yours. We don’t expect DCI Gaunt back for several weeks, so you’ll report direct to me.’ The window slid up as the large engine surged and sped the car along the track. A few press photographers, corralled beyond the police vehicles, flashed their cameras at it, mostly from boredom.

As McLusky ducked back under the scene-of-crime tape, Austin emerged gasping from the tent. He stared hard into McLusky’s eyes for a few moments while he greedily filled his lungs with pure forest air.

‘Well done,’ said McLusky.

‘Only because you insisted. I didn’t last long in there. Why did they have to put a tent over it? It just concentrates the smell. Coulthart is still happily poking around among the maggots. People like that worry me.’

‘Now that you’ve seen the body – any immediate thoughts?’

‘I definitely want to be cremated.’

‘Anything beyond that?’

‘His end must have been absolutely terrifying. Presumably they didn’t put the bag over his head after he’d died. They tied his wrists with galvanized wire.’

‘Yes. I think if someone ties your hands with fencing wire, you more or less know you’ve had it. Whoever has got you has no intention of letting you go.’

‘I suppose not.’

McLusky heard the pathologist call his name and nodded his head towards the tent. ‘I’ll go back in for a last look. You go on ahead and set up at Albany.’

Inside, the pathologist was waiting for him beside the corpse. More of it had now been uncovered. ‘Do you see this slant? The way the body seems to rise up?’ He ran the spatula alongside the body, downwards towards the knees. Here, the leaf litter and earth cover was still undisturbed. He stabbed the spatula into the ground below the knees. ‘I expected the legs to continue there under the ground, but they don’t. They disappear into the ground at right angles.’

McLusky signalled to one of the SOCOS. ‘Right, let’s have the chap’s legs out. Can we first dig down alongside them to see what’s going on there, please?’

The scene-of-crime officer started excavating carefully with a hand trowel, throwing leaves and earth on to a waiting tarpaulin, where it would later be sifted. Nothing would remain unexamined. It made McLusky think of Laura and her archaeology studies. What they were doing here had much in common with field archaeology, and the disciplines shared many techniques. He wondered if right now she was also out in the cold somewhere, on a dig perhaps, or sitting in a cosy lecture hall, taking notes in her neat, always legible handwriting.

‘It’s very tightly packed around the legs,’ said the SOCO.

‘What about around the rest of the body?’ McLusky asked.

‘It’s much looser there. As burials go, it wasn’t very deep. Or even well done. Not exactly shallow, but very … lumpy. Uneven. Except here. I’m nearing the bottom now.’

The last few scrapes with the trowel revealed stained boots. ‘Timberland,’ McLusky said. ‘Not cheap, those. The jeans didn’t come from a supermarket either. Okay, why are his shins in a deep hole? Was that just conveniently there?’

‘No. It was dug. The soil layers are disturbed and mixed up and there’s a definite cut edge to the hole.’

‘It looks to me,’ said Coulthart, ‘as though someone started digging a grave of a decent depth, then couldn’t be arsed to do it for the whole length of the body.’

‘Probably underestimated how long it takes to dig that deep a hole. Okay, I’ll look forward to your reports, gentlemen.’ McLusky had seen and smelled enough. Outside, he shed his paper suit, overshoes, mask and gloves into a waiting bin liner and walked towards his car. A few flashes went off, and two or three journalists shouted questions at him, all of which he ignored. The press office would give a sanitized version of what had been found and the papers would simply invent the rest – dead men don’t sue.

The car was an ice box. With the heater on full, he bumped over the rough ground and on to the track, then drove off past the reporters as fast as the terrain allowed. Further on, close to the junction with the road, stood a woman in a long black coat, her neck and chin muffled with a silver scarf. She was drawing large clouds of smoke from a hundred-millimetre cigarette without the aid of her gloved hands. As he drew close to where she was standing, she took a step forward on to the track and stuck an ironic thumb out like a hitchhiker.

Between cigarettes Philippa Warren worked as a reporter for the Bristol Herald. She was brighter, sharper and more dishonest than most of her colleagues; she and McLusky had made use of each other in the past, in an easy-going atmosphere of mutual distrust.

He stopped and rolled down the window three inches. ‘What do you want, Warren?’ he asked through the ungenerous gap.

‘Lift into town? My car’s at the menders and the guy who gave me a lift out here took off without me.’

‘Professional courtesy is dead.’

‘Thanks,’ she said when McLusky cleared papers and cigarette packets off the front seat for her. ‘Blimey. It’s colder in your car than out there.’

‘I can drop you at a bus stop, Warren, if you prefer.’

‘You can call me Phil, like everyone else.’ She drew her coat closer around herself. ‘First his hand, now the rest; tell me about it.’

‘Who told you about the hand? That’s not supposed to be general knowledge.’

‘Responsibly sourced. Like line-caught fish. And we’re not printing it until you release it, that’s how responsible we are at the Herald.’

‘Naturally.’ McLusky turned on to the road and speeded up. He wondered how Warren had got hold of that information. Pym? Purkis? She probably paid retainers to several officers who sold information to the papers. It could never be stopped completely, not while the rank and file felt undervalued and underpaid. McLusky himself occasionally leaked bits of information to the press, but only if he thought it helped his own investigations. ‘It’s a dead male. Shallow grave. Hasn’t been there all that long. We’ve no idea who he is yet.’

‘Not even a suspicion? Who’s missing?’

‘Someone’s son, that’s all I know.’

‘Cause of death?’

‘That I genuinely don’t know.’

‘Meaning the rest you just told me was lies?’

McLusky didn’t bother to answer.

‘You’re smiling, that’s always a bad sign. A body in the woods is what people want to read about. No one wants to know about dead junkies in toilets.’

‘You know about that as well?’

‘Come on, he was found in a public toilet. Funny thing was, though,’ she said with exaggerated carelessness, ‘he was rushed off to the mortuary, where he was autopsied immediately. Not normal procedure, is it? Who cares about dead junkies? I wonder.’

McLusky was further peeved by Warren’s knowledge of the immediate autopsy, and kept quiet while he mulled this over.

‘Hey, talk to me, I’m a journalist. It’s my job to know stuff.’

‘It’s your job to help sell advertising. I’m not concerned with dead junkies. Not my department. You’re talking to entirely the wrong guy here.’

‘I’m beginning to think so myself.’

They were approaching the triangle. ‘Where do you want me to drop you?’

‘Anywhere near Brown’s, actually.’

‘Sure.’

‘Thanks for the lift, Liam,’ she said and waved McLusky off from outside the restaurant. Then she took the first cab she found back to Leigh Woods, where her car was parked.