Broken Homes Read Free Page A

concrete and metal and even worse with organic materials – but strangely well with some varieties of plastic. It’s easy to spot the echo if you know what you’re looking for, or if the source is very strong. It’s where ghosts come from, by the way. And it’s a bugger to explain to witnesses.
    Slatt leaned back in her chair – away from us. Nightingale gave me a hard look.
    ‘It was raining,’ said Slatt finally.
    ‘How did he strike you?’ asked Nightingale. ‘The driver?’
    ‘At first, like every car crash victim I’ve ever met,’ she said. ‘Dazed, unfocused, you know how it is – they either babble or go catatonic. He was a babbler.’
    ‘Did he babble about anything in particular?’ asked Nightingale.
    ‘I think he said something about the dogs barking but he was mumbling as well as babbling.’
    Slatt finished her meal, Nightingale finished his tea and I finished my notes.
    I drove as PC Slatt directed me past the train station, over the tracks and through, as far as I could tell, the Victorian bit of Crawley. Certainly Robert Weil’s house was a stumpy detached brick Victorian villa with squared-off bay windows, a steep roof and terracotta finials. The surrounding houses were all Edwardian or even later so I guessed that the villa had once stood proudly in its own grounds. You could see the remnant in the big back garden that was currently the focus of a cadaver dog team – on loan from International Rescue, I learnt later.
    PC Slatt knew the PC on door duty, who signed us in without comment. The house was big enough that its owners hadn’t felt the need to knock down all the intervening walls and had, recently I thought, restored the decorative moulding. The dining room had been abandoned and overrun by their children, aged seven and nine according to my notes, and was treacherous with toys, broken xylophones and DVDs that had come adrift from their cases. The kids were staying with friends but the wife remained. Her name was Lynda, with a Y, with faded blonde hair and a thin mouth. She sat on the sitting-room sofa and glared at us while we searched her house – the locals were looking for bodies, we were looking for books. Nightingale took the study. I did the bedrooms.
    I did the kids’ rooms first, just on the off chance that something interesting was hidden amongst the Lego Star Wars stickers, the Highway Rat and some slightly sticky colouring-in books. The eldest already had a laptop of his own in his room although, judging from its age, it looked like a hand-me-down. Some kids have all the luck.
    The parents’ bedroom had a fusty unaired smell and not much in the way of interest to me. Real practitioners never leave their important books lying around, but you pick up pointers. The key is unlikely juxtapositions. Lots of people read books about the occult, but if you find them alongside books by or about Isaac Newton, especially the long boring ones, then hackles are raised, flags hoisted and, more importantly, notes made in my notebook.
    All I found in the bedroom was a dog-eared copy of the Discovery of Witches under the bed along with the Life of Pi and The God of Small Things.
    ‘He hasn’t done anything,’ said a voice behind me.
    I stood up and turned to find Lynda Weil standing in the doorway.
    ‘I don’t know what you think he did,’ she said. ‘But he didn’t do it. Why can’t you tell me what he’s supposed to have done?’
    It’s good policing, when you’re engaged in other tasks, to avoid interacting with witnesses or suspects and especially with those individuals that might straddle both categories. Besides – I didn’t know what her husband had done, either.
    ‘I’m sorry, ma’am,’ I said. ‘We’ll be finished as soon as we can.’
    We were finished even sooner because a minute later Nightingale called me downstairs and told me that the Major Crimes Team had found a body.
    They’d done it with a wicked bit of policing too. I was seriously impressed.