Free Redemption of the Dead by Luke Delaney Page A

having dealt with the worst they could throw at him. He was a detective inspector in charge of one of South London’s Murder Investigation Teams, dedicated to dealing with violent death. The killers hunted their victims and Sean hunted them. He drove with the window down and doors unlocked.
    Less than an hour earlier he’d been asleep at home when Detective Sergeant Dave Donnelly called. There’d been a murder. A bad one. A young man beaten and stabbed to death in his own flat. One minute Sean was lying by his wife’s side, the next he was driving to the place where a young man’s life had been torn away.
    He found the address without difficulty. The streets around the murder scene were eerily quiet. He was pleased to see the uniformed officers had done their job properly and taped off a large cordon around the block the flat was in. He’d been to scenes before where the cordon started and stopped at the front door. How much evidence had been carried away from scenes on the soles of shoes? He didn’t want to think about it.
    There were two marked patrol cars alongside Donnelly’s unmarked Ford. He always laughed at the murder scenes on television, with dozens of police cars parked outside, all with blue lights swirling away. Inside, dozens of detectives and forensic guys would be falling over each other. Reality was different. Entirely different.
    Real crime scenes were all the more disturbing for their quietness – the violent death of the victim would leave the atmosphere shattered and brutalised. Sean could feel the horror closing in around him as he examined a scene. It was his job to discover the details of death and over time he had grown hardened to it, but not immune. He knew that this scene would be no different.
    He parked outside the taped-off cordon and climbed from the isolation of his car into the warm loneliness of the night, the stars of the clear sky and the street lights removing all illusion of darkness. If he had been anyone else, doing any other job, he might have noticed how beautiful it was, but such thoughts had no place here. He flashed his warrant card to the approaching uniformed officer and grunted his name. ‘DI Sean Corrigan, Serious Crime Group South. Where’s this flat?’
    The uniformed officer was young. He seemed afraid of Sean. He must be new if a mere detective inspector scared him. ‘Number sixteen Tabard House, sir. It’s on the second floor, up the stairs and turn right. Or you could take the lift.’
    ‘Thanks.’
    Sean opened the boot of his car and cast a quick glance over the contents squeezed inside. Two large square plastic bins contained all he would need for an initial scene examination. Paper suits and slippers. Various sizes of plastic exhibit bags, paper bags for clothing, half a dozen boxes of plastic gloves, rolls of sticky labels and of course a sledgehammer, a crowbar and other tools. The boot of Sean’s car would be mirrored by detectives’ cars across the world.
    He pulled on a forensic containment suit and headed towards the stairwell. The block was of a type common to this area of London. Low-rise tenement blocks made from dark, oppressive, brown-grey brick which had been thrown up after the Second World War to house those bombed out of old slum areas. In their time they’d been a revelation – indoor toilets, running water, heating – but now only those trapped in poverty lived in them. They looked like prisons, and in a way that’s what they were.
    The stairwell smelled of urine. The stench of humanity living on top of each other was unmistakable. This was summer and the vents of the flats pumped out the smells from within. Sean almost gagged on it, the sight, sound and smell of the tenement block reminding him all too vividly of his own childhood, living in a three-bedroom, council owned maisonette with his mother, two brothers, two sisters and his father – his father who would lead him away from the others, taking him to the upstairs bedroom