Business of Dying by Simon Kernick

obviously been taken one after another in one of those photo-me booths you get in railway stations and the occasional department store, because they were essentially the same picture. Two laughing girls, arms round each other, faces pressed together. One of the girls was Miriam Fox, the other was younger and prettier. The younger girl had blonde curly hair cut into a bob and, in contrast to Miriam, a round cherubic face with a cute smattering of freckles. Only the eyes, nothing like as bright as the rest of her, trying to look happy but not quite making it, told you that maybe she too was a street girl. I put her at about fourteen, but she could have been as young as twelve. They were both dressed in thick coats and the younger girl had a winter scarf round her neck, so I guessed the photo was fairly recent.
    They looked like good friends. Maybe this girl, whoever she was, could fill in some of the gaps in Miriam Fox's life. We'd have to try to locate her, if she was still around. I put the photos in my notebook and moved over to a battered-looking wardrobe next to the bathroom door.
    We went over everything bit by bit. Malik discovered a wad of notes: eight twenties, a fifty (howoften do you see one of those?) and a ten. He appeared quite pleased with the find, although I wasn't sure why. A prostitute keeping cash in her flat was hardly a revelation.
    'It means she definitely planned on coming back here,' he told me.
    I told him that that's what I would have assumed anyway. 'If she picked up a punter and he just turned out to be the wrong sort of guy, then there's no question that she went out intending to come back here. Why wouldn't she?'
    Malik nodded in agreement. 'But we're still trying to discover a motive, aren't we?' he said evenly. 'And at least this provides evidence that she wasn't running away from something and got caught before she could escape. It gives more credence to our theory of a dodgy punter.'
    Credence. That was an interesting word. Malik was right of course. It did help to close off alternative theories, leaving us scope to focus our enquiries on certain areas, but I thought that maybe he was unnecessarily complicating matters. Malik was trying to look at it from the angle of Sherlock Holmes, and you didn't need to do that. If a prostitute gets her throat slashed and her genitalia mutilated, and her body's discovered on the edge of a notorious red light district with the clothing interfered with, it's fairly obvious what's happened.
    Or so I thought.
    There was nothing in the wardrobe that told us anything. There were a couple of drawers in there containing various knick-knacks; some books, including two by Jane Austen, which caused me to raise my eyebrows (how many whores read Jane Austen?); a bag of dope; an unopened carton of Marlboro Lights; a jewellery box filled with costume jewellery. Nothing unusual, but no address book or anything like that, which might have thrown up a few clues. The man who'd killed her may well have been one of her regulars, someone who could have been in love with her but whose love was not being reciprocated. Out of frustration, he kills her. Out of rage, he mutilates the corpse. An address book might have contained the details of this man, if he existed. But of course, these days things are a bit different. She might have kept details of her clients in a palmtop PC or on a mobile, rather than writing them down on paper. Obviously, in a block of flats like this you weren't going to keep readily saleable items such as electronic goods on display for your neighbours to pinch, so I presumed if she owned anything like that, and it seemed highly likely that she had, she would have hidden it somewhere in the flat.
    'Did she have a mobile on her when they found her body?' I asked Malik.
    'I don't think so,' he said, shrugging. 'But I'm not sure.'
    I thought about phoning and asking Welland, then decided it would probably be easier just to look for it. I couldn't recall him