Deadlight Read Free

shift this morning. No phone call. No e-mail. Nothing. The supervisor sent someone round and here we are.’
    ‘He had a key?’
    ‘Didn’t need one. He banged on the door a couple of times and then found a window open at the front.’
    Faraday followed Willard’s pointing finger. One of the small top windows in the downstairs bay had been open overnight. Reaching in, Coughlin’s colleague had managed to unfasten the bigger window beneath. The room was still curtained but the smell had been enough to warrant further investigation.
    Faraday frowned. Even with the central heating on, it took at least twelve hours for decomposition to set in.
    ‘He’s been dead a while?’
    Willard shook his head.
    ‘He was at work until five last night. The smell was vomit. Coughlin had puked all over the carpet. His mate thought he must be ill.’
    The CSM snapped his mobile shut. The Home Office pathologist had finally responded to his pager and would be putting a call through to the morgue to book a slot for the post-mortem. Since last month, despite the rash of local murders, all post-mortems had been transferred to Southampton General, twenty miles to the west, where the facilities were judged to be better. The fact that this transfer also halved the pathologist’s journey time to the dissecting slab was – in Faraday’s judgement – no coincidence.
    ‘Today would be good,’ Willard grunted. ‘Where are we with the body?’
    The CSM began to detail progress inside. The police surgeon had certified death and gone on to his next job. The photographer from Netley had burned through five rolls of 35mm film and was now committing the scene to video. Clear plastic bags had been secured around Coughlin’s feet, hands and head, and the corpse was about to be readied for transfer to the mortuary. The guys from the undertakers were waiting with their casket in a Transit down the street and the CSM planned thehandover inside the shared hall. In the interests of good taste, the neighbours would be spared the sight of a sixteen-stone body bag.
    Willard nodded, his eyes following a young WPC up the street, and Faraday realised what a difference a couple of years in charge at Kingston Crescent had made. With his sheer physical bulk, and absolute refusal to accept excuses, Willard had set new standards for the dozen or so men and women at the heart of the Major Crimes team. His insistence on painstaking detective work, allied to the incessant pressure of events, had put a couple of the weaker souls to the sword but over the last eighteen months Major Crimes had posted some famous victories.
    Willard wasn’t the kind of man to wear success lightly. His taste in well-cut suits now extended to an expensive bespoke tailor in Winchester, and lately – after the attentions of a hairdresser called Roz in a Southsea salon – he’d begun to look positively sleek. Gossip amongst the first-floor suite of offices at Kingston Crescent suggested that there was more to this relationship than a ten-quid tip, but Faraday had yet to be convinced.
    Willard took him by the arm and stepped back on to the pavement, pausing beside the BMW for a kerbside conference. Time was moving on. He wanted Faraday back at Kingston Crescent to keep the lid on the pot as the inquiry team gathered. He’d been on to Operational Support at HQ for a couple of dozen DCs to kick-start the investigation. With luck, they’d manage twenty. House-to-house enquiries would be number one, Personal Description Forms for every address, and it would be down to Faraday to fix the parameters. He’d told the Prison Liaison Officer – a DS on division – that he wanted an interview team into Coughlin’s nick and he’d just put in a personal call to the governor to smooth the way. Bloke was a hundred per cent on-side, no-nonsense guy, old school. He’d promised to make arrangementsfor a secure office and would provide a list of Coughlin’s work colleagues. Back at Kingston Crescent,