A Commonplace Killing Read Online Free Page B

accumulation of grubby scraps of paper on the hall table for a pencil and, having found one, attempted to scribble on the wall the address that Lucas was giving him. He cursed again when the lead snapped.
    “I’ll send a car, sir,” said the detective inspector with an audible sigh; then there was a click and everything went dead.
    Cooper dropped the receiver on to the rest, ran his hands through his hair and cursed again.
    He had known it would be something bad, but this was terrible. A random sex killing is every detective’s worst nightmare : they have the tendency to shatter the precarious routine of your life, eighteen hours a day for the foreseeable future; then there are the newspaper reporters; the misguided and the lunatic coming forward with their false leads and confessions, all of which must be checked out; and let us not forget Upstairs applying the thumbscrews. But worse than any of this is that every detective knows–even before he embarks on the investigation –that the chances of ever resolving a random sex killing are about as good as your chances of marrying Ingrid Bergman.
    Caledonian Road. Cooper mused upon the rotten blasted luck of that. A few streets to the west or south and his opposite numbers in neighbouring “G” or “Y” Divisions would be thumping the wall in frustration. There was no comradeship: the Metropolitan Police Force was in the middle of an unprece dented crime boom; the number of offences committed since VE Day was more than twice that of 1939 and, despite numerous enticements, the force was still seven thousand men short. Scotland Yard could be depended upon to supply fingerprint experts, photographic boys and the boffins in the lab at Hendon, but the only way HQ would concern itself any further with such a commonplace matter as the murder of a tart in a bad area was if the DDI buggered up. And Jim Cooper was unlikely to do that.
    He had not a single blemish on his conduct record; it had taken him just five years to make CID; and he had been the youngest ever DDI in London when he took over “N” Division at thirty-nine. No doubt they’d have preferred a family man, but it was war-time and most of the family men had joined up. He had not joined up, a despicable fact which in his more self-pitying moments made him want to grind his fists into his temples. His reasons for not joining up were lamentable, pathetic even. He had no wife and family to think of, and other men who did had thought nothing of making the gesture. He had done his bit in the last lot, drowning a thousand times a day in Passchendaele mud; but so had plenty of others who hadn’t thought twice about joining up again. It was hard not to hate yourself for that. All through the war, every day, he must have asked himself a hundred times: “Am I a coward?” Of course, policing was a reserved occupation – some poor bloody idiot had to ensure that law and order were enforced after all–but this did not excuse him in his own mind. It counted for nothing when you walked into a pub and a chap in uniform looked you and your lounge suit up and down and muttered, “Some people!” as he pushed past you on his way out. The disgust conveyed in those two words…
    And so, it didn’t matter to Cooper that his appointment as DDI was as solid as they come; that everybody reckoned that he was among the very best when it came to the delicate tasks of tailing spivs and extracting information from narks; that even the most determined crooks had a sneaking regard for him. London was doubtless lucky that he had stayed behind and helped to see her through her darkest hour, but he took no personal pride in the fact. He knew every dismal inch of his manor from St Ann’s Road to Highbury Vale, thousands of villainous faces were etched into his memory, he had sent many deserving souls to prison, recovered hundreds of thousands of pounds’ worth of stolen property, but as far as he was concerned none of it counted one jot.
    He