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impinging upon his investigations. If he started to take me seriously then the pressure was going to be on me to deliver.
    ‘I heard Lesley’s joined your mob,’ he said.
    Ninety-degree change in direction of the conversation – classic police trick. Didn’t work because I’d been rehearsing the answer to that question ever since Nightingale and the Commissioner came to yet another ‘agreement’.
    ‘Not officially,’ I said. ‘She’s on indefinite medical leave.’
    ‘What a waste,’ said Seawoll shaking his head. ‘It’s enough to make you weep.’
    ‘How do you want to do this, sir?’ I asked. ‘AB do the murder and I do … the other … stuff?’ AB being the radio abbreviation for Belgravia Police station where Seawoll’s Murder Team was located – we police never like to use real words when we can use an incomprehensible bit of jargon instead.
    ‘After how that worked out last time?’ asked Seawoll. ‘Fuck no. You’re going to be operating out of our incident room as a member of the inquiry team. That way I can keep my fucking eye on you.’
    I looked at Stephanopoulos.
    ‘Welcome to the murder squad,’ she said.

3
    Ladbroke Grove
    T he Metropolitan Police has a very straightforward approach to murder investigations, not for them the detective’s gut instinct or the intricate logical deductions of the sleuth savant. No, what the Met likes to do is throw a shitload of manpower at the problem and run down every single possible lead until it is exhausted, the murderer is caught or the senior investigating officer dies of old age. As a result, murder investigations are conducted not by quirky Detective Inspectors with drink/relationship/mental problems but a bunch of frighteningly ambitious Detective Constables in the first mad flush of their careers. So you can see I fit in very well.
    By five twenty that morning at least thirty of us had converged on Baker Street, so we started out for Ladbroke Grove en masse. A couple of DCs hitched a lift with me while Stephanopoulos followed on in a five-year-old Fiat Punto. I knew one of the detectives in my car. Her name was Sahra Guleed and we’d once bonded over a body in Soho. She’d also been one of the officers involved in the raid on the Strip Club of Doctor Moreau, so she was a good choice for any weird stuff.
    ‘I’m family liaison,’ she said as she climbed into the passenger seat.
    ‘Rather you than me,’ I said.
    A plump sandy-haired DC in a rumpled D&C suit introduced himself after he’d got in the back.
    ‘David Carey,’ he said. ‘Also family liaison.’
    ‘In case it’s a big family,’ said Guleed.
    It’s always important to get to the victim’s relatives quickly, partly because it’s just common decency to give them the news before they see it on TV, partly because it makes us look efficient but mostly because you want to be looking them in the face when they hear the news. Genuine surprise, shock and grief being hard to fake.
    Rather Guleed and Carey than me.
    Notting Hill is three kilometres west of Baker Street, so we were there in under a quarter of an hour and would have been faster if I hadn’t got turned around near Portobello Road. In my defence, at night all those late-Victorian knock-off Regency town houses look the bleeding same, and I’ve never spent that much time in Notting Hill outside of Carnival. It didn’t help that Guleed and Carey both had their phones on GPS and took it in turns to give me contradictory directions. I finally spotted a landmark I recognised and pulled up outside the Notting Hill Community Church. It has a Pentecostal congregation and is just the sort of noisy and fervent place my mum favours on those rare occasions when she remembers she’s supposed to be a Christian.
    My dad only attended a church if he rated their band, so you can imagine how often that happened. When I was really young I liked the dressing up in the good clothes and there were usually other kids to play with, but