‘Thanks, Sophie. I love you. You’re the best.’

‘I love you too, Mum,’ said Sophie, rolling her eyes up to the ceiling.

3

Tunde Okuma pointed a short, stubby finger towards the end of the line of cars parked along the quiet Peckham side street and sighed. ‘One day,’ he said with his thick Nigerian accent and a dreamy look in his eyes, ‘one day, my friend, I am going to have one of those for myself.’

His colleague Matt Dunn squinted over at the gleaming silver Mercedes and grinned. ‘You mean you’re going to give up work and start stealing cars for a living?’

‘Funny. But you won’t be smiling when my dream comes true.’

As long-suffering traffic wardens for the London Borough of Southwark, Dunn and Okuma always saw more than their fair share of cars. But in such a deprived area, luxury models like the Merc were something of a rarity. The local drug dealers and pimps had long ago learned that flashy motors brought too much police attention, while any resident able to buy one legitimately would do so only if they had a garage to park it in.

Up until then it had been a good morning. Between them the pair had issued five PCNs apiece, their first break was fast approaching, and to top it all off the sun was shining. However, the side street looked as though it was going to be a dead loss until Okuma reached the Mercedes. His eyes lit up immediately when he saw there was no ticket displayed on the windscreen.

‘Result,’ he said eagerly, reaching for the machine hanging from his belt.

‘Wait up,’ said Dunn, hurrying over from the other side of the road. ‘Better make sure it hasn’t dropped down somewhere.’

‘Who cares?’

‘It’s a nice car. And you know the rule. The nicer the car, the bigger the prick behind the wheel. I don’t want any trouble if the driver turns up and we’re still on scene.’

Trouble was something both men had come to expect as part of the job, but Okuma was by far the more wary of the two. The previous day he had been on patrol at a local authority car park near a busy shopping centre. He spotted a young woman in a filthy VW manoeuvring her car so badly that she ended up taking up the space of two bays. Okuma made his way over to her just as she was climbing out of the car, planning to ask her politely to repark her car so that he wouldn’t have to give her a ticket.

She wore ill-fitting lycra leggings and a faux leopard-skin top and turned to face him as he approached. He had barely opened his mouth when the woman began screaming at him, a stream of abuse and filth pouring out of her mouth. He was a prick, an arsehole, a fucking Nazi and more. She would not shut up and would not listen to anything he had to say. It was impossible to get a word in edgeways to explain that he was only trying to be nice.

Eventually, with a menacing-looking crowd beginning to gather in order to see what all the commotion was about, Okuma gave up and walked away, leaving the woman to think she had managed to get out of a ticket that Okuma had had no intention of issuing in the first place. It was the sort of incident that seemed to be happening more and more often, especially when the driver concerned had a nice car.

Since becoming a warden, Okuma had been kicked in the shins, spat at, had a tin of processed peas thrown at him and been called every name under the sun along with a fair few that seemed to have come from an alternative universe. The last time he’d ticketed a Merc the burly owner had threatened to cut his balls off. If Dunn wanted to hang about, Okuma decided it would be better for his colleague to take the lead.

Okuma stepped back as Dunn cupped his hand against the side window and peered inside. A fraction of a second later Dunn leaped back in surprise. ‘Fuck! Scared the shit out of me.’

‘What is it?’

‘There’s someone inside. On the back seat. Looks like they’re sleeping. Must have been out on the town and got too pissed to drive home.’

Okuma stepped forward to see for himself. There was no mistaking it. A figure was curled up on the rear seat in the foetal position. The upper half of the body was covered in a thick woollen blanket. Two legs, visible only from the knees downwards, emerged from the other end. They were clad in dark trousers, grey socks and finished off with polished Oxford cap shoes.

Okuma began tapping at the window. ‘Sir, excuse me, sir, but you can’t leave your car here without a valid ticket.’ There was no response. He tapped louder. ‘Sir? Sir!’ Still nothing.

It was then that he noticed the small black cylinder on the inside of the window was in the raised position: the door was open. He tugged at the handle and was immediately hit by a wave of warm, fetid air. The smell of soft leather and wood polish was mixed with something unspeakably awful. Something unmistakable. Something no longer alive. The smell of decay. The smell of death.

‘Oh, Jesus,’ he gasped.

Okuma was almost in a trance as he reached forward to grab the edge of the blanket with trembling fingers. He pulled it back. His eyes needed only an instant to take in the ragged skin at the top of the neck, where a grey ooze seeped out in place of a head, the cavernous opening in the centre of the bloated chest and the stiff arms ending in bloody, mutilated stumps.

Okuma turned away and threw up violently, gulping down desperate lungfuls of fresh air. Then he reached for his radio.

When the call about a headless, handless body had first come into the Murder Investigation Team office at Peckham, Collins had not been surprised that it had been assigned to one of the other DIs on the unit. It had been more than six weeks since her interview – or should that be interrogation – with the DPS; yet, despite receiving assurances that she would face neither criminal nor disciplinary charges over her dealings with Jack Stanley, she knew that she remained firmly in the doghouse so far as her superiors were concerned.

It was clear that DCI Anderson, the newly appointed head of the MIT, did not rate her as a detective at all, and the two cases she had worked on since he began had given her precious little opportunity to stand out from the crowd.

The first had been a so-called ‘self-solver’ – one of those murder cases in which the identity of the prime suspect is known from the outset and a full confession is blurted out soon after the moment of arrest. Even the most junior, inexperienced detective could not fail to get a result under such circumstances.

The second case had involved the drive by shooting of a shady businessman who had made so many enemies that it was almost impossible to whittle down the massive list of potential suspects. To make matters worse the victim himself, only lightly injured in the attack, had refused to cooperate, rapidly forcing the attempted murder investigation into a stalemate.

All of which made it hugely surprising that, less than an hour after his arrival at the latest murder scene, DCI Anderson had put in a request for DI Collins and other members of the team to join him there.

The obvious question – why? – played on her mind as she steered her BMW through the South London streets. In Collins’s experience, such an early call for more resources could mean only one thing: that the victim was a celebrity, somebody who mattered, and that maximum manpower was being called in to crack the case.

The first forty-eight hours of an investigation are by far the most crucial. Memories of potential eyewitnesses are still fresh, forensic samples have not degraded, and those responsible for the murder are still likely to have crucial evidence in their possession. By bringing in the whole team, Anderson was clearly hoping to get a quick result and therefore cement his position as the new team leader. Collins thought back to the Jill Dando murder inquiry, when more than a hundred detectives had been brought in to track down the killer of the popular BBC presenter.