Broken Homes Read Free

that the blood is human,’ said Manderly. ‘And that it came from a body in the early stages of rigor mortis.’
    ‘So not a kidnapping then,’ said Nightingale.
    ‘No,’ said Manderly.
    ‘Where is Mr Weil now?’ asked Nightingale.
    Manderly narrowed his eyes. ‘He’s on his way here,’ he said. ‘But unless you have something substantial to add to his interview I’d rather you left it to us.’
    Now that it was clear that we weren’t going to relieve him of this troublesome case he wasn’t going to let us near the prime suspect until he had that case tied up in a neat bow.
    ‘I’d like to talk to Constable Slatt first,’ said Nightingale. ‘I assume that Weil’s home has been searched already?’
    ‘We have a team there,’ said Manderly. ‘Is there anything specific you’re looking for?’
    ‘Books,’ said Nightingale. ‘And possibly other paraphernalia.’
    ‘Paraphernalia,’ said Manderly.
    ‘I shall know it when I see it,’ said Nightingale.
    The principal difference between town and country policing, as far as I could tell, was one of distance. It was thirty kilometres back up the A23 to Crawley where Robert Weil lived, which was further than I drove in a working week in London. Mind you, without London to get in the way we made it in less than half an hour. On the way we passed the spot where the accident had taken place. I asked Nightingale if he wanted to stop, but since Weil’s Volvo had already been towed we pressed on to Crawley.
    In the 1950s and ’60s the powers that be made a concerted effort to rid London of its working class. The city was rapidly losing its industry and the large numbers of servants who were needed for the Edwardian household were being superseded by the technological wonders of the age of white goods. London just didn’t need that many poor people any more. Crawley, which up until then had been a small medieval market town, had sixty thousand residents dumped on it. I say dumped but in fact they went into thousands of sturdy three-bedroom semis which my mum and dad would have loved to have lived in, if only they could have brought London’s jazz scene with them, and Peckham market, and the Sierra Leonean expatriate population, or at least the half my mum was currently still talking to.
    Crawley had managed to avoid the blight of out-of-town shopping centres by the simple expedient of dumping one in the middle of the town. Beyond this were the council offices, the college and the police station, all clustered together as neatly as something from a game of SimCity.
    We found PC Slatt in the canteen which was as reassuringly unimaginative as its London counterparts. She was a short, red-headed woman who filled out her stab vest like a three-bedroom semi and had clever grey eyes. She said she’d already been briefed by her inspector. I don’t know what she’d been told, but she stared at Nightingale as if she expected him to grow an extra head.
    Nightingale dispatched me to the counter, and when I got back with the tea and biscuits PC Slatt was describing her actions at the crash site. Spend any time around traffic accidents and you have no trouble recognising blood when you see it.
    ‘It glistens when you shine the torch on it, don’t it?’ she said. ‘I thought there might have been another casualty in the car.’
    It’s quite common for people who’ve been involved in car crashes to escape from their vehicles and wander away in a random direction even with severe injuries. ‘Only I couldn’t find a blood trail and the driver denied there was anyone else in the vehicle.’
    ‘When you first looked in the back of the vehicle did you notice anything odd?’ asked Nightingale.
    ‘Odd?’ she asked.
    ‘Did you feel anything unusual when you looked inside?’ asked Nightingale.
    ‘Unusual?’ asked Slatt.
    ‘Weird,’ I said. ‘Spooky.’ Magic, particularly strong magic, can leave a sort of echo behind it. It works best with stone, less well on