Fenn and Vanderpoel stepped out of the car and into the cold night air, wearing dark raincoats over their uniforms. ‘Who saw this?’ they demanded, but there was no answer from the residents of a city where talking to the police was rarely a good idea. They’d seen a few members of the crowd slip away as they strode towards the scene. The rain was still coming down hard.
Fenn was the more experienced of the two officers – a slender man in his late 00s whose brown hair was soon plastered to his forehead by the downpour. He pushed the onlookers back behind a wooden fence that separated the sidewalk from the road. Then he walked over to Dent, bent down close to him and wrapped his fingers around the man’s wrist to check his pulse. His skin felt cold.
The crowd held its breath as the officer crouched there by the body and the only sound was ‘the slap of rain on concrete’. Fenn stood up with a grim expression and turned to his partner. ‘Suppose you make the calls,’ he said. ‘I’ll stand watch here and get started.’
Vanderpoel nodded and went to look for a police box or a house with a phone so he could call into the station and get the coroner and the Homicide Squad to the scene. Fenn took off his raincoat and draped it over the body, but Dent’s pale hands were stretched out over his head and stuck out of the top. He stooped again to adjust the shroud.