They all looked at each other and shrugged their shoulders. The young boy was about to say something, but his mother tugged at his arm and he said nothing. Their attitude annoyed Bradfield even more, especially as they hadn’t made a real effort to look at the photographs. He flung them down on the lap of the David Bowie lookalike and ordered two of the uniform officers accompanying them to round everyone up and contain them in the front room of the house. He told the group that he would be searching the premises for some time so they could all take a good look at the photographs to see if they helped jog their memories.
The hallway had bare floorboards and the rooms leading off it had nailed-up makeshift curtains made from tatty old bits of sheets and other badly stitched-together materials. Threadbare mattresses, stained sleeping bags and broken furniture littered every room; beer and Coke cans lay in corners and takeaway cartons of rotting food spewed out of old plastic bags. Jane shuddered and gagged slightly as she saw a plate of rancid food crawling with maggots. Gibbs laughed and said they’d be good for fishing. She could see he and Bradfield had become hardened to searching disgusting slums. The smell of incense from smouldering joss sticks permeated the air, but still failed to disguise the heavy scent of marijuana.
In one room a young girl with silk flowers pinned to her long blonde hair was sitting cross-legged peeling potatoes, the multitude of bracelets on her arms jangling as the peel fell onto the soggy newspaper between her legs. She looked no older than sixteen, had eyes like a panda’s and wore a pretty torn floral smock which made her appear innocent.
‘Looking for Terry O’Duncie. Which room is he in?’ Gibbs asked, showing her his warrant card.
‘I don’t know,’ she replied nonchalantly as she sliced a potato into quarters and dropped it into a plastic bowl of water by her side.
Gibbs had another set of photographs which he held in front of her. She continued peeling a potato and said in a very upper-class voice that she didn’t know who had stayed at the squat previously as she’d only been there a couple of days.
Jane followed Bradfield as he checked out the kitchen. It was full of used pans and plates piled in a big sink full of greasy water and broken mugs. A large, filthy-looking disconnected old cooker had a Calor gas stove from a VW camper van on top of it and a big pot of vegetable stew was bubbling away. The windows had newspaper stuck over the broken glass and a bedraggled cat was up on the draining board scavenging for food and licking dirty plates. The numerous open black bin bags stank of rotting food. Jane had been disgusted with the mess left in the station kitchen by the officers but this was far beyond anything she had ever come across, and to think that the squatters were cooking for and feeding the young children, never mind themselves, was shocking. She held her breath as she gave a cursory glance around. Through the cracked window in the back door she could see even more open bags of rubbish left to rot, and presumed there were no dustmen collecting from the house. She couldn’t wait to get out of the foul kitchen. She took a deep breath: if her mother knew where she was and what she was doing she would have heart failure.
The Jimi Hendrix song continued at a deafening level, and having no luck downstairs the team headed up to the first-floor landing. The stairs were strewn with cigarette butts and empty cans of beer. Wine bottles on every other step held different-coloured candles; wax had dripped down the sides of the bottles and onto the stairs.
Posters and prints were pinned up on the yellowing, damp-stained landing walls. The floor was covered with a heavily soiled fitted carpet, which appeared to have once been dark blue and good-quality shagpile. Jane pushed open a bedroom door and undid the wooden shutters of the large double bay window to let in the light. She saw that the walls had been painted bright blue and were patterned with white stars and yellow moons and sprinkled with glitter. Sleeping bags and tatty blankets were strewn over the floor along with tin plates and ashtrays overflowing with cigarette stubs and old marijuana roaches. The smell in the room was a mixture of stale sweat and damp and the heady incense gave off a sickening flowery perfume. Candles of every shape and size stood in pools of hardened wax and a lit amber-coloured cone candle flickered in one corner.
Bradfield stared in disgust. ‘Christ, how many kids are dossing down here? It must be a bloody fire hazard with all these candles.’
Jane bent down to pick up a plastic bag and look inside but Gibbs pulled her hand back. He took a pen out of his pocket to flick the top of the bag open and it was full of used hypodermic needles.
‘You prick your hand on one of those and the next thing you know is you’ll be really sick with hepatitis.’
‘What’s that?’ she asked.
