Read London Noir for Free Online

Although Garrett was scum he wasn’t stupid, so I didn’t need to tell him it would be a good idea if he found a new place to live. Likewise, I had absolute faith in his ability to find some fool to rip-off in order to provide PC Lever with his cut from the drug money I’d purloined and cover various other debts he simply couldn’t avoid meeting if he wished to remain alive and in reasonable health. While I was in Observatory Gardens I also took the opportunity to touch Garrett’s junkie host and co-dealer, Scotch Alex, for a few quid.
    Marianne May, the woman who’d called the authorities to report Jilly’s death, was middle-class and respectable. What Marianne had in common with Jilly were some bizarre New Age religious interests. Aside from this she was the ideal person to have found the body since she created the impression that O’Sullivan’s friends at the time of her death were middle-class professionals. In all likelihood, prior to Marianne’s arrival, a stream of junkies had called at the flat hoping to score, and having found the door open and Jilly dead in bed, departed without telling the authorities there was a corpse stinking up the bedsit. Garrett wouldn’t have left his drug stash in the pad, and there probably wasn’t anything else worth stealing. If there had been it would have disappeared long before my arrival.
    There wasn’t much I needed to ask May, but for the sake of appearance I had to make it look like I was doing my job properly. I told her to wait upstairs with Jilly’s neighbors while I made some further investigations. I was able to go through the flat and remove used needles and various other signs of drug use before the medics arrived. I then examined Jilly’s body. As you’d expect it was cold to touch. O’Sullivan was lying on her side, naked on the bed.
    After the corpse had been loaded into an ambulance I went upstairs and told May she could go home, saying I’d contact her if there was anything further I needed to ask. I had no intention of troubling Marianne again, but since she was a middle-class professional, I had to make it look like I was doing everything by the book. May had fine manners and excellent verbal skills, so there was an outside chance that if she was moved to make a complaint about my investigation, what she had to say would be taken seriously.
    Because Jilly certainly had traces of heroin in her body, it was important I arranged things so that any need for toxicological analysis was avoided. That said, since I knew O’Sullivan was an intravenous drug user, there was nothing to worry about in terms of a purely visual inspection of the body. Indeed, even in instances of suicide brought about by the ingestion of pills, evidence of a drug overdose is only visually detectable in fifty percent of such cases. Likewise, there is necessarily a good deal of mutual understanding between all those involved in the investigation of a death, one which is sometimes greased by the circulation of used fivers. I have many good reasons to request a particular result from a pathologist, and the croaks I work alongside know this without my having to spell it out. Aside from anything else, I don’t have time to properly investigate the circumstances surrounding every death that occurs on my beat. It would waste a considerable amount of taxpayers’ money and my time if the circumstances in which every miserable junkie overdosed were fully investigated. Every pathologist understands, regardless of whether or not a fistful of fivers are being pressed into their greasy palms, that the police know what’s for the best.
    Given that I wished to avoid an inquest into Jilly O’Sullivan’s death, it wasn’t much to ask of medical science that it should back up my false contention that she’d died from natural causes. Something will invariably be found in the lungs after death, so bronchopneumonia would provide a suitable explanation of Jilly’s passing, as it had in so many