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him,” Gilbert reminded us as his mobile phone chirruped into life. He placed it to his ear and introduced himself. After a few seconds of subservience from the super I deduced that it was the coroner on the phone. Gilbert outlined what we’d found, told him I was on the job and nodded his agreement at whatever the coroner was saying. Probably something along the lines of: “Well for God’s sake don’t let Charlie touch anything.” Gilbert closed his phone and told us: “We can move the body when we’re ready.”
    “We haven’t certified the poor bloke dead yet,” I informed him.
    “Well he’d just better be,” he replied.
    A white van swung into the street, at the head of a convoy . “Here come the cavalry,” I said. “In the nick of time, as always.”
    As soon as Sam Evans, the doctor, confirmed that the man on the kitchen floor was indeed dead, and had been so for about an hour, we let the photographer and scene of crime loose in the place. They tut-tutted and shook their heads disapprovingly when I confessed to turning off the gas ring. Sam’s opinion, only given when requested, was that death was possibly induced by the dagger sticking out of the deceased’s heart. Police doctors and pathologists are not famed for their impetuous conclusions.
    I asked Sam if he’d go to the station and give an opinion about the state of mind of Anthony Silkstone, the chief suspect , and he agreed to. The doc’s an old pal of mine. I’ve plenty of old pals. In this job you gather them like burrs. Some stick, some irritate, most of them fall off after a while.
    As we hadn’t set up an incident room we had our initial team meeting with lowered voices in the late Mr Latham’s back garden. I sent the enquiry team, all three of them, knocking on doors to find out what they could about the dead man. Except that they wouldn’t have to knock on any doors because everybody was outside, standing around in curious groups, wondering if this was worth missing Coronation Street for or if it was too late to light the barbecue . We wanted to know if anybody had seen anything within the last three or four hours, the background of the deceased, and anything about his lifestyle. Visitors, girlfriends , boyfriends, that sort of thing. I was assuming that the dead man was the householder. As soon as someone emerged who was more than just a neighbour I’d ask them to identify the body.
    We knew that Silkstone had the opportunity, now weneeded a motive and forensic evidence. He might retract his confession, say he called in to see an old friend and found him dead. Maybe he did, so if he wasn’t the murderer we needed to know, fast. Gilbert went back to the station to set up all the control staff functions: property book, diary, statement reader, etcetera, plus vitally important stuff like overtime records, while I stayed on the scene to glean what I could about a man who aroused passions sufficiently to bring about his elimination.
    The SOCO was doing an ESFLA scan on the kitchen floor, looking for latent footprints, so I had a look around the upstairs rooms. It was a disappointment. There was nothing to indicate that he was anything other than a normal , heterosexual bloke living on his own. No gay literature, no porn, no inflatable life-size replicas of Michelangelo’s David . Except that the bed was made. His duvet was from Marks and Spencer and his wallpaper and curtains probably were too. It all looked depressingly familiar. I promised myself that from now on I’d lead a tidier life, just in case, and dispose of the three thousand back issues of Big Wimmin that were under my bed.
    There were ten suits in his wardrobe. “That’s nine more than in mine,” I said to myself, slightly relieved to discover a discrepancy in our lifestyles. And he had more decent shirts than me. The loo could have been cleaner but wasn’t too bad, and the toilet paper matched the tiles. He’d changed his underpants recently, because the old ones