The Memory of Blood Read Free Page B

striding into the Unit’s smart new open-plan office in the warehouse at the corner of Caledonian Road. Over the weekend it had been painted arctic white and filled with furniture, admittedly secondhand, but it provided the staff with a communal space.
    Land was pleased to see that the holes in the floor had been repaired. The workmen had almost finished redecorating the building. Broken windows had been replaced. There were no longer bare wires hanging down from the ceiling. There was a door on the toilet and a banister on the staircase. The coffee machine was finally working. The funny smell had gone from the Evidence Room. He slapped his hands together with an approximation of good cheer and beamed hopefully around the place.
    His joy was not reciprocated.
    ‘What are you so bloody happy about?’ asked Jack Renfield, not bothering to look up. The sergeant was crunching indigestiontablets and checking his emails, attacking his keyboard with great bearlike paws.
    Land looked pathetically expectant. ‘It’s the start of a new week, the sun’s out, summer’s on the way, nice new paintwork everywhere, we haven’t been blamed for anything awful in nearly a month. Makes you feel glad to be alive.’
    ‘There’s a bad storm coming,’ said Meera Mangeshkar. ‘It’s going to be chucking it down by noon. We’ll have to put the lights on.’
    Land felt he had every reason to be in a good mood. He and his wife, Leanne, were going on a sailing holiday around the Isle of Wight at the end of the week. His desk had already been cleared in readiness. His monthly budget had been met. The Home Office was leaving him alone. The crime figures were down. Only the staff seemed fed up, but they always looked like that when he came into the room. A more sensitive chap might almost doubt they were pleased to see him.
    ‘Come on, you lot,’ he jeered, ‘perk yourselves up a bit. You should be thankful. You’ve got a nice new office, and the mean streets of King’s Cross are quiet for once.’
    ‘We’d rather be busy,’ grumbled Mangeshkar, flicking a rubber band at the cat. Colin Bimsley was making a paper sculpture of a flamingo from old witness statements. Dan Banbury was reading Forensic Analysis in the Home—Volume 4: Drains .
    Land found it hard to share Meera’s sentiment. Being busy at the PCU usually meant risking his career, health and sanity. He still fantasized about running a police department in a sleepy Spanish village, the kind of place where the most exciting thing that ever happened was a cow wandering into a shop.
    London was not much smaller than New York but averaged around 130 murders a year, compared with the Big Apple’s rate of over 460 in the same period. Most of the London cases were handled by the CID, but the more troublesome crimes were reluctantlyplaced in the hands of the PCU. Raymond Land had inherited the worst of both worlds; the cases that the Home Office preferred the CID not to handle were the most awkward and unsolvable, and were also the least likely to win public praise for their solution. The PCU received no help from the Met divisions, which meant that they effectively operated in a vacuum.
    Land liked order. He liked graphs and bar charts and Venn diagrams, and Excel spreadsheets of policing figures, even though he didn’t really know how to use them. He didn’t understand waffling academics and weirdos, and disorganisation and mess, and strange, elliptical ideas that led to investigative dead ends.
    He didn’t understand the PCU.
    Sticking his hands into his pockets, he wandered over to the window and sat on the ledge. ‘I thought you’d all be happy,’ he said plaintively. ‘For once, everyone thinks we’re doing a good job. You can take it easy. You don’t have to spend the week going through someone’s rubbish or sitting in a car all night staring at a front door. You can go home at the normal time, catch up on your emails, watch some telly, cook a meal that doesn’t