2

       Thursday morning

      It was 3 a.m. and Detective Inspector Sean Corrigan drove through the dreary streets of New Cross, south-east London. He had been born and raised in nearby Dulwich, and for as long as he could remember, these streets had been a dangerous place. People could quickly become victims here, regardless of age, sex or colour. Life had little value.

      But these worries were for other people, not Sean. They were for the people who had nine-to-five jobs in shops and offices. Those who arrived bleary-eyed to work each morning, then scuttled home nervously every evening, only feeling safe once they’d bolted themselves behind closed doors.

      Sean didn’t fear the streets, having dealt with the worst they could throw at him. He was a detective inspector in charge of one of South London’s Murder Investigation Teams, dedicated to dealing with violent death. The killers hunted their victims and Sean hunted them. He drove with the window down and doors unlocked.

      Less than an hour earlier he’d been asleep at home when Detective Sergeant Dave Donnelly called. There’d been a murder. A bad one. A young man beaten and stabbed to death in his own flat. One minute Sean was lying by his wife’s side, the next he was driving to the place where a young man’s life had been torn away.

      He found the address without difficulty. The streets around the murder scene were eerily quiet. He was pleased to see the uniformed officers had done their job properly and taped off a large cordon around the block the flat was in. He’d been to scenes before where the cordon started and stopped at the front door. How much evidence had been carried away from scenes on the soles of shoes? He didn’t want to think about it.

      There were two marked patrol cars alongside Donnelly’s unmarked Ford. He always laughed at the murder scenes on television, with dozens of police cars parked outside, all with blue lights swirling away. Inside, dozens of detectives and forensic guys would be falling over each other. Reality was different. Entirely different.

      Real crime scenes were all the more disturbing for their quietness − the violent death of the victim would leave the atmosphere shattered and brutalised. Sean could feel the horror closing in around him as he examined a scene. It was his job to discover the details of death and over time he had grown hardened to it, but not immune. He knew that this scene would be no different.

      He parked outside the taped-off cordon and climbed from the isolation of his car into the warm loneliness of the night, the stars of the clear sky and the street lights removing all illusion of darkness. If he had been anyone else, doing any other job, he might have noticed how beautiful it was, but such thoughts had no place here. He flashed his warrant card to the approaching uniformed officer and grunted his name. ‘DI Sean Corrigan, Serious Crime Group South. Where’s this flat?’

      The uniformed officer was young. He seemed afraid of Sean. He must be new if a mere detective inspector scared him. ‘Number sixteen Tabard House, sir. It’s on the second floor, up the stairs and turn right. Or you could take the lift.’

      ‘Thanks.’

      Sean opened the boot of his car and cast a quick glance over the contents squeezed inside. Two large square plastic bins contained all he would need for an initial scene examination. Paper suits and slippers. Various sizes of plastic exhibit bags, paper bags for clothing, half a dozen boxes of plastic gloves, rolls of sticky labels and of course a sledgehammer, a crowbar and other tools. The boot of Sean’s car would be mirrored by detectives’ cars across the world.

      He pulled on a forensic containment suit and headed towards the stairwell. The block was of a type common to this area of London. Low-rise tenement blocks made from dark, oppressive, brown-grey brick which had been thrown up after the Second World War to house those bombed out of old slum areas. In their time they’d been a revelation − indoor toilets, running water, heating − but now only those trapped in poverty lived in them. They looked like prisons, and in a way that’s what they were.

      The stairwell smelled of urine. The stench of humanity living on top of each other was unmistakable. This was summer and the vents of the flats pumped out the smells from within. Sean almost gagged on it, the sight, sound and smell of the tenement block reminding him all too vividly of his own childhood, living in a three-bedroom, council owned maisonette with his mother, two brothers, two sisters and his father – his father who would lead him away from the others, taking him to the upstairs bedroom where things would happen. His mother too frightened to intervene – thoughts of reaching for a knife in the kitchen drawer swirling in her head, but fading away as her courage deserted her. But the curse of his childhood had left him a rare and dark insightfulness – an ability to understand the motivation of those he hunted.

      All too often the abused become the abusers as the darkness overtakes them, evil begetting evil – a terrible cycle of violence, virtually impossible to break – and so the demons of Sean’s past were too deeply assimilated in his being to ever be rid of. But Sean was different in that he could control his demons and his rage, using his shattered upbringing to allow him insights that other cops could only dream of into the crimes he investigated. He understood the killers, rapists and arsonists – understood why they had to do what they did, could interpret their motivation – see what they had seen, smell what they had smelt, feel what they had felt – their excitement, power, lust, revulsion, guilt, regret, fear. He could make leaps in investigations others struggled to understand, filling in the blanks with his unique imagination. Crime scenes came alive in his mind’s eye, playing in his head like a movie. He was no psychic or clairvoyant, he was just a cop – but a cop with a broken past and dangerous future, his skill at reading the ones he hunted born of his own dark, haunted past. Where better for a failed disciple of true evil to hide than amongst cops? Where better to turn his unique tools to good use than the police? He swallowed the bile rising in his throat and headed for the crime scene – the murder scene.

      Sean stopped briefly to acknowledge another uniformed officer posted at the front door of the flat. The constable lifted the tape across the door and watched him duck inside. He looked down the corridor of the flat. It was bigger than it had seemed from the outside. Detective Sergeant Donnelly waited for him, his large frame filling the doorway, his moustache all but concealing the movement of his lips as he talked. Dave Donnelly, twenty-year plus veteran of the Metropolitan Police and very much Sean’s old school right-hand man. His anchor to the logical and practical course of an investigation and part-time crutch to lean on. They’d had their run-ins and disagreements, but they understood each other − they trusted each other.

      ‘Morning, guv’nor. Stick to the right of the hallway here. That’s the route I’ve been taking in and out,’ Donnelly growled in his strange accent, a mix of Glaswegian and Cockney, his moustache twitching as he spoke.

      ‘What we got?’ Sean asked matter-of-factly.

      ‘No sign of forced entry. Security is good in the flat, so he probably let the killer in. All the damage to the victim seems to have been done in the living room. A real fucking mess in there. No signs of disturbance anywhere else. The living room is the last door on the right down the corridor. Other than that we’ve got a kitchen, two bedrooms, a separate bathroom and toilet. From what I’ve seen, the victim kept things reasonably clean and tidy. Decent taste in furniture. There’s a few photies of the victim around the place − as best I can tell, anyway. His injuries make it a wee bit difficult to be absolutely sure. There’s plenty of them with him, shall we say, embracing other men.’

      ‘Gay?’ Sean asked.

      ‘Looks that way. It’s early days, but there’s definitely some decent hi-fi and TV stuff around the place, and I notice several of the photies have our boy in far-flung corners of the world. Must have cost a few pennies. We’re not dealing with a complete loser here. He had a decent enough job, or he was a decent enough villain, although I don’t get the feel this is a villain’s