a bit like taking a shit, when you think about it,’ said Clive, his mouth grinding away on a Wimpy quarter pounder.
Flanked by over-lit pastel walls and screwed-down metal seats, we could have been in the canteen of a children’s correctional centre. Welcome to the Wimpy burger bar – the British McDonald’s but with a unique selling point: table service.
‘Thank you garçon,’ I said, as I watched my order slide from stained tray to half-wiped melamine.
‘Bon appetit,’ he grunted and I silently congratulated acne for turning his face to pizza.
A quick glance at my chicken burger revealed it to be simply that: no sauce, no salad – just cartoon-flattened white meat clamped between two constipating white buns.
‘Hard to imagine that pecking in the yard,’ I said, ‘landing on this table is probably the furthest it ever flew.’
‘Isn’t it though, Donal?’ said PC Clive Hunt, my forty-something beat partner who came from one of those Northern English towns that begins with either B or W and all sound alike.
Incredibly – at least to me – we’d walked past a McDonald’s to get here. Clive’s nostalgic bond to Wimpy once again had proved unshakeable. This was one of the countless things I failed to understand about the English – they get nostalgic about things that were crap in their time: TV shows with shaky sets like Dr Who and Crossroads; British-made cars that always broke down; the Second World War, for Christ’s sake.
McDonald’s might have been wiping Wimpy off the face of the earth, but it would never get Clive’s custom. You see, no one lamented London’s lack of chips-based meals more than Clive. How many times had I heard how, up North, you can get gravy with your chips, curry with your chips, mushy peas with your chips.
The moment a McDonald’s worker cheerfully informed Clive that they didn’t stock vinegar, his Golden Arches crumbled and fell. After several wordless seconds, he calmly placed his tray back on the counter, turned and marched out, never to return.
I relented. ‘What’s like taking a shit?’
‘Eating burger and chips,’ he said, chewing, his mouth a toothy cement mixer.
Clive swallowed hard, burped urgently into his hand, desperate to enlighten: ‘You eat some chips, then you eat all of the burger, then you finish off yer chips.’
He could see I wasn’t getting it.
‘It’s like you piss a bit, then you take your dump, then you piss again to finish.’ He beamed in satisfaction.
My radio scrambled, its frenzied fuzz cutting short Clive’s scatological musings.
It was a T call demanding immediate response to an incident on Sangora Road, just round the corner. I almost had to beat the burger out of Clive’s hand.
We were the first uniforms on the scene. A young woman with dark curly hair was going bonkers in the street. A crowd had gathered, some panicking, some nosy, some trying to comfort Ms Hysteria. When she saw us, she pointed at a house and gasped in a nasal South East London accent: ‘My friend Marion’s inside. I think she’s dead.’
A surge of adrenaline slowed the world down to a hi-definition dream. The front door to number 21 hung open, but there were no signs of a forced entry. I noticed two buzzers: the property had been divided into flats. Inside the communal hallway, a chiselled, red-haired man in his twenties looked ashen. ‘I don’t know what happened,’ he said in a remarkably high-pitched Irish accent, pointing to a door.
‘I don’t know what happened,’ he squeaked again.
‘Well you’ll know soon enough,’ mumbled Clive.
The door was on the latch. I pulled it open. The door fought back, forcing me to use both hands. I planted an elbow against its over-sprung resistance so Clive could follow me in.
‘Try not to touch anything,’ hissed Clive, and I thought about letting the door slam into his thick head.
I floated up the stairs towards the first floor flat, adrenaline numbing my feet to the carpet beneath.
She lay on the landing, on her side, an untamed red mane of hair sprawled almost ceremonially across the carpet. Her moon-white face lay awkwardly on her outstretched arm; her bloodshot blue eyes staring into nothingness. She looked no more than twenty-five, probably younger.
Her sad mouth had cried blood. One trail made it all the way down to her slender white throat. Her flowery summer dress was laddered with stab wounds – still fresh. My head swooned. I leaned back against the wall of the landing, exhaled hard.
Clive bent down and placed a reluctant finger to her porcelain neck.
‘She put up a hell of a fight,’ he said flatly, ‘but she’s dead.’
He backed away apologetically. My eyes fastened upon her limp hand, focusing upon the nail hanging from her little finger which had almost been completely ripped off. Sadness flooded me. My stinging eyes blinked and shifted to the floor next to her: a set of keys, a handbag, her jacket, some post.
‘She must have let her killer in,’ I squeaked, sounding every bit as shocked as I felt.
‘Looks like it,’ said Clive, reassuringly unmoved.
‘Right,’ he added brightly, ‘best get back downstairs. We don’t want to contaminate the crime scene.’
A cold breath chilled the right side of my face. I turned to see a small window on the landing, slightly open. ‘Fuck,’ I said. All this time, I’d been standing between her newly dead body and an open window. Where I came from, this spelt doom. I shivered, then snapped myself out of it. There was work to be done.
I’d never understood officers who said that, in really stressful situations, ‘your training kicks in’. I did now. Clive started questioning Chiselled Ginge and taking notes. His name was Peter Ryan. He was twenty-eight. The dead woman was his wife of thirteen months, Marion, aged twenty-three. She usually got home before six. He and Karen – a colleague from work – got back just after nine and found her like that on the landing. Police officers and forensics were wandering in, so I went outside to find Karen.
In the darkening, humming summer night, Sangora Road flashed blue and red, a grotesque carnival of morbid curiosity. Neighbours who’d never shared a word before chatted intently: lots of ‘apparently’ and ‘oh my God’. The petite, curly-haired brunette I assumed to be Karen was being comforted by a group of middle-aged men. One edgy-looking sleaze ball in a wife-beater vest and school-shooter combats rubbed her upper arm vigorously. He looked like a man who spent his life hunting down any kind of a leg-over whatsoever.
‘Karen?’ I asked. She looked up sharply, surprised by the sound of her own name. ‘PC Donal Lynch. Sorry, but I’m going to have to ask you a few questions.’ Her arm rubber – a Poster Boy for Families Need Fathers – glared at me, ready to back up his potential new squeeze against the filth.
Karen took a long deep breath and nodded. Instead of structured questions, I let her ramble. In a quivering, child-like, barely audible voice, she told me the following: her name was Karen Foster, twenty-five, from Lee in South East London, a colleague of Pete’s at the Pines old people’s home in Lambeth. She told me Pete was
