The Murder Exchange by Simon Kernick Page A

was how
Ivj'd summed it up. Fair enough, I suppose. He was
right.
    It was day six of the heatwave and day seven of
the Matthews murder inquiry, and we had plenty
to keep us busy. Knox, who wasn't coming in until
later, had dropped on my desk a note with a photograph
of a hard-looking blonde with Myra
i iiiidley's haircut and the same sort of amiable,
light-up-the-world expression. The note identified
her as Jean Tanner, a former call-girl, two of whose
partial prints had been recovered from Matthews's
flat, one of them on a coffee mug, suggesting she'd
been more than simply a passing punter after some
gear. Knox had supplied us with the address,
somewhere up in Finchley, and had instructed us to
go round, take a statement from her and find out
what she'd been up to there. Like a lot of the work
on a murder investigation it was routine stuff, but
something that had to be done. He signed off by
telling us to continue trying to track down Fowler,
whose prints had also been found on a number of
items in Matthews's flat, even though he'd claimed
the two had never socialized.
    Before we collared Ms Tanner, we drove over
to the Priory Green estate to show her photo to
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Matthews's neighbours and see if she was the
blonde woman identified by two of them as having
gone to his flat more than once in the past few
weeks. This, at least, would give us something to
throw at her if, for some reason, she proved
uncooperative.
    The estate itself, a medium-rise collection of red
and greybrick buildings just north of the NatWest
building on Pentonville Road, was leafy, quiet and
relatively well kept. A few years earlier it had
received a large cheque from the National Lottery's
Heritage Fund to spruce things up, and there was
still a lot of building work going on. So far the
money looked to have been pretty well spent,
which isn't always the case with construction
projects. Priory Green had none of the menace of so
many of London's sixties- and seventies-designed
council estates, those graffiti-stained fortresses with
their mazes of darkened walkways so beloved of
muggers everywhere, that for a copper always feel
like enemy territory. Bad things might have gone
on here, but they were done in quite a pleasant
setting.
    Things got off to a good start as well. Both the
witnesses - a young black woman with a very fat
baby and several other yowling kids in the background,
and an elderly man who insisted on
haranguing us about the estate's supposed litter
problem - were in residence and able to confirm
that they'd seen the woman in the photo going
either in or out of the flat on several occasions,
though not in the past couple of weeks. The elderly
man thought he might have seen her three times,
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but he couldn't be sure. While we were there we
knocked on a few other doors to see if we could jog
some memories but, where anyone bothered to
answer, we were given the kind of welcome usually
reserved for Jehovah's Witnesses, and no-one could
provide any help.
    I wasn't sure how much use it was finding out
that Jean Tanner, ex or current prostitute, had
vi'itcd the flat of a known drug dealer on more than one occasion, even if he had supplied her with
coffee, but at least it was something. However, our
good fortune, if good fortune it could be called,
didn't last very long. On the way to Jean's place
there was an accident on the Caledonian Road that
held us up for getting close to half an hour in
^..aJily increasing heat. Then Berrin, who was
in charge of navigation on the basis that I didn't
trust him behind the wheel in the state he was in,
got us lost in the backstreets of East Finchley. By the
time we finally tracked down the address - a flat in
an ultra-modern, heavily alarmed four-storey block
that sat like an eyesore between the Georgian townhouses
on either side of it - it was almost half
eleven. And, after all that, she wasn't in.
    We had six more addresses to visit that day, all of
them doormen who had worked at one time or
another in the