EXCERPT from Chapter 1
He stopped short of the white crime tent, its sides flapping like sails in the icy wind, and sniffed at the air. London owns a unique smell, a skin-permeating odour of clean linen tinged with the smoke of a million coal fires. He liked the smell, felt at one with it.
Guided toward the murder scene through the pre-dawn darkness by the flashing blue lights of squad cars, Detective Inspector Tom Carver crunched the frostbitten grass of Regents Park beneath his scuffed black brogues.
Killers were damned inconsiderate. Why couldn’t they wait for summer and give a hardworking copper a break?
However, the stench that struck him upon lifting the entrance flap was a stomach-churning potpourri of dried sweat, urine and stale booze. Twenty years with the force had desensitised him, preventing his rushed breakfast of jam on burnt toast from splashing the ground.
Breath steaming, he tugged a latex glove over his frozen right hand, crouched, lifted back the plastic sheet and studied the corpse. Blood matted the middle-aged vagrant s thinning black hair. The well-tailored, dark brown pinstriped suit, shabby and stained with vomit and alcohol, was not the usual attire of a tramp. A spent nine-millimetre shell was wedged between his mauve lips like a cigarette butt. Most professionals marked their kills, and would display the heads on their walls like big-game trophies given the chance.
With a decisive but gentle touch, he turned the shattered skull. “An execution. Close up. Single bullet through the brain entering at the back of the neck.” He peered up at his detective sergeant. “Benny, who the hell would sanction a contract on a wino? And why the hell do it on a freezing January morning when I ought to be home snuggled in with the wife.”
Benny shoved his hands into his duffel coat pockets and stomped his feet. “You were divorced two years ago, Tom.”
