Read London Noir for Free Online Page A

other instances where I found it imperative to avoid a full-scale investigation. Death, of course, is always the result of the failure of one of the major organs, and according to the legal rule book, what matters is the chain of events leading up to such a failure. In practice, the letter of the law can be safely ignored in favor of its spirit. Only the elderly and homeless die from bronchopneumonia in truly unsuspicious circumstances. Bronchopneumonia is often brought on by a drug overdose, but my colleagues and I will nonetheless routinely treat it as a natural cause of death in a young addict. We see no point in arriving at an accurate conclusion that will only upset and confuse the family of some wastrel who didn’t deserve the loving home she grew up in. Grieving is a difficult process and I’ve done countless decent parents a huge favor by making it possible for them to avoid facing up to the fact that their child was a good-for-nothing junkie degenerate.
    To shift the focus once again to the particular, there wasn’t much in O’Sullivan’s basement flat. Jilly and her pimp Garrett had only lived there for a few weeks. They’d occupied an equally spartan Bayswater bedsit over the autumn. Junkies mainly use possessions as a form of collateral, they rarely hang onto stuff, personal items tend to be stolen and sold as required. However, Jilly’s diary was in the flat and the final entry was dedicated to Garrett:
    COMPUTER IN PURSUIT OF A DREAM
    You lie there, legs straddled, an easy lay
    Like some “gloomy fucker” (your words)
    For hours you have put me through mental torture
    Because I desired you
    Sure I wanted love anyway I could
    But you denied me both fuck & fix
    And then dropping a Tuinal, like an over-the-hill whore
    You became an easy lay
    I knew this nonsense was merely one of many pieces of proof that Jilly’s drug use had been ongoing. That meant jack shit to me because my considered professional opinion was that O’Sullivan’s death was entirely unsuspicious and solely due to natural causes. Any police officer worth his or her salt knows that to lie effectively one must stick reasonably closely to the truth. Therefore, in my official report I wouldn’t gloss over the fact that Jilly had been a long-term drug addict. Aside from anything else, the pathologist couldn’t ignore the track marks on her arms. All I needed to do was claim that her addiction was well in the past.
    After acquiring some cash from Jilly’s landlord in return for overlooking the fact that drug dealing was taking place in his gaff, I phoned my chum Paul Lever to acquire suitable evidence to back up the fictional content of the report I was in the process of compiling. PC Lever had a thick file on Jilly and this included several of the fraudulent job applications he’d directed her to make. Back in the mid-’70s Paul had wanted to know exactly what was going on in various local drug charities, so he’d sent Jilly into them as a spy. He provided me with a copy of a successful application she’d made for a job as a social worker at the Westbourne Project. In this Jilly claimed to have a degree and postgraduate qualifications in philosophy from UCL, despite the fact that she’d left school at sixteen and had never attended a university. Something else that made the document Lever handed me fraudulent was Jilly’s claim that although she’d been a smack addict, she’d cleaned up in 1972. While I knew this was untrue, it placed her long-term drug addiction seven years in the past, which was good enough for my purposes.
    Since the general public is blissfully ignorant of the problems police officers face, people are often surprised to learn of my working methods, should I choose to speak openly about them. What needs to be stressed in relation to this is that since it is impossible for the police to completely suppress the West London drug scene, the next best thing for us to do is control it. Only dealers we approve of are