He was found in the shrubbery in front of the Word of God House in Albatross Road, West Five. It was the thirtieth of March, during the evening rush-hour. It was bloody cold; and an office worker had tripped over the body when he was caught short going home. I don't know if you know Albatross Road where it runs into Hanger Lane, but if you do you'll appreciate what a ghastly lonely area it is, with the surface-level tube-station on one side of the street, and dank, blind buildings, weeping with damp, on the other. That evening there was yet another go-slow on, and when I arrived at seven there were people still massing to get down the tube stairs to the trains, which were running very rare.
It was pelting with rain on an east wind when I got there. I found Bowman from Serious Crimes standing over the corpse with a torch, talking to the two coppers off the beat who had been called by the man who had stumbled on him. Water ran off the brim of Bowman's trilby and dribbled down the helmets of the wooden-tops to end up in their collars. Bowman handed me the torch without a word and I bent over the dead man. His eyes were open—one only just—the surfaces peppered with the grit that an east wind hurls at you off London streets. He was wearing a cheap grey suit with cigarette burns down the front and a tatty raincoat. He was medium height, with thin hair turning grey and a boozer's nose, aged between fifty and sixty. Both his arms were broken, and one leg; the bone poked out blue through the trouser cloth. His head had been battered in below the hairline and brains had slopped down his left cheek into the mud. I got the impression, though, that despite his injuries he hadn't died at once. In the dull eyes there was still a flicker of some memory that he meant to take with him wherever he was going.
When I had finished I stepped back with a last glance at his face. They had left some of it, I will say, whoever they were. It wasn't a strong face, but one that had seen everything and then not understood it until it was too late. I've seen plenty of violent deaths, but never anything worse than this one. His wounds were multiple, but not random. They weren't consistent with a hit-andrun or even a casual robbery (who would trouble to rob him, though?). No, he had been systematically beaten by one, or more likely two practitioners who knew exactly how to do it. Specialists, you might almost say. Villains, you might almost say.
‘What do you think?’ said Bowman.
‘I think they weren’t joking.’
‘They?’
‘There must have been more than one. No one man could have done all this. And wherever it was done, it wasn’t here— there’s hardly any blood under the body.’
‘Oh, I’d noticed that,’ said one of the size nines in a tone of exaggerated patience. Like all these clever coppers who wanted to make detective-constable but never did, he had been moving around sussing things out. ‘For my money he was done in a motor, then he was dragged out here—you can see the marks in the ground—then dumped to make him look like a derelict hit-anrun, see?’
‘You’re a murderer,’ said Bowman coldly. ‘You’re one of the special kind, a killer that don’t want to get caught. You beat a bloke to death in a motor—blood all over the fucking place. Next, I’m you. I come round to your place and I say, can I have a look at your motor, please? Routine inquiry, sir. Blood everywhere, you berk.’
‘I hadn’t thought of it like that, sir.’