This time a black girl whose good looks were impossible to verify as the rats had been at her. Detective Z felt nauseous when he got to the scene and was shown the corpse; the stink of death on the breeze, swirling through the long grass and bushes, the tainted molecules lodging in his nostrils. It was a wilderness behind an abandoned smelting works somewhere in the arse-end of Paddington, where she had fetched up. Across the road stood a Victorian gothic church – also derelict. There was a dilapidated security fence, that would deter nobody and beyond he could see that the heavy studded church doors were ajar. Again he had been on the scene first, before the heavy hitters arrived, just him and a couple of uniformed constables. The meeting with Daren Sprawl had somehow provided him with a completely new frame of reference; one that he was admittedly unwilling to adopt, but nevertheless was now stubbornly redirecting his investigative intuition.
