‘The front of the shop is all glass, so the counter and eating area are exposed to the street.’
‘No.’ May pointed up at several pairs of hooks in the corner of the ceiling. ‘They’ve taken blinds down. A lot of the shops and pubs around here have wooden shutters.’
‘There’s a pile of strong plastic sacks in the back that look like they might have been used for something.’
‘What makes you think that?’
Bimsley scratched his snub nose. ‘Dunno. They’re in the wrong place. Like someone’s shifted them around to kneel on.’
‘It would have made a mess, taking off the body identification.’
‘You reckon he was murdered off-site, and this place was convenient?’
‘I didn’t say he was murdered. He could have died, and it’s in the interest of someone to keep his identity a secret, at least for a few days. I’d have thought he died here. You don’t drag a body to a place like this in a busy high street when there’s a huge deserted industrial site just up the road.’
‘The Met won’t give us this, will they?’ asked Colin.
‘No, why should they? We’re nobody anymore. You’d better take your friend outside, he doesn’t look very well.’
May was itching to disturb the site and make a careful examination of the space, but he no longer had authority to call in a forensic team. Besides, who would he be able to summon? As soon as they found out he was interfering on their patch, the Met would kick him out and take Mr Abd al-Qaadir into custody.
He looked back at the freezer. The lid had provided a partial seal, so the decay would have been created largely by internal bacteria. How would that affect pinpointing an accurate time of death? The previous tenants of the store had known there was a freezer sitting here. Either it was empty when they left, or they had hoped that the discovery of its contents would occur long after they had gone. At least he had a starting point.
May swung the front door back and forth, trying out the lock. It looked shut from outside, but you could pop it with a little pressure. If it was someone who knew the area, they’d know that the shop was vacant, even if it had its blinds down—except …
Except it wasn’t his case. In fact, if Bimsley had stumbled across a pile of corpses thirty feet high, it would have nothing to do with any of them. He opened the lid once more and studied the blue-red-grey neck, the stump so neatly cut around the bone that he could have been looking at a surgical amputation. Finding a body in an area like this was not exactly a rare event: King’s Cross was a confluence of five railway stations and as many major roads, where thousands of commuters, students and tourists daily crossed paths. There was always something bad happening nearby…
Slowly, a plan began to form in May’s mind. He called Bimsley back in. ‘Colin, I need you to hang on here,’ he explained. ‘Keep the doors shut and don’t admit anyone until I return. And don’t let Mr Abd al-Qaadir out of your sight.’
‘Do you want me to start searching for the head? I could have a look around—’
‘—and fall over something. No, don’t disturb anything. Try to get hold of Dan Banbury; have him come over if you can. You’d better stress that this is entirely unofficial—make sure he doesn’t say anything to anyone about where he’s going. I doubt you’ll find the head on the premises. There wouldn’t be much point in removing the victim’s most visible feature then leaving his face in a cupboard.’
‘Maybe he was wearing an unusual hat,’ said Bimsley. ‘What are you going to do?’
‘I have to take someone to afternoon tea,’ May replied.
Leslie Faraday enjoyed the rituals of his working day, starting with a cup of Earl Grey and some biscuits, preferably Lincolns, Garibaldis or Ginger Nuts, as he thumbed through his correspondence; café au lait mid-morning as he broke down his departmental expenditure into the kind of detail that could make the collected works of Anthony Trollope look like a fast read; then a nice carb-heavy luncheon in the office canteen, preferably the kind of pudding or pie that would take him back to his days at boarding school; and a nice mug of builder’s tea mid-afternoon, served with a slice of Battenberg cake or Black Forest Gateau. He was pear-shaped by habit, physically and mentally. His brain operated like a traction engine, slowly but with an inexorable progress that flattened everything in its path. No detail, however small, escaped his attention, and as the budget overseer of London’s specialist police units he was fully entitled to poke his nose into everything.