THE INJUN INSPECTOR

Geoff  Kennet was the victim’s name. He was found in the driver’s seat of his black taxi with severe bruising to the neck and torn-out pages of the London A-Z stuffed into his gaping mouth.  The meter was still running, and showed a touch under £90. 

The first policeman on the scene, Sergeant Jim Brewis, joked that the murder must have occurred in the last ten minutes as the meter hadn’t gone over £100 yet.  But to Jim’s superiors, this was no joking matter – Geoff Kennet, 56, of Balham, South London was the third cabbie to meet a similar end in the last month.

‘Bit of a rarity.’ said Brewis as he went through the dead man’s glove compartment, searching for a contact number. ‘A cabbie willing to go south of the river, even if it was just to go home.’

Martin Proud-Fox was a member of the Sioux Nation, one of a new breed of Native Americans, who’d abandoned the reservations, fought his way through police academy and found himself the first redskin in the Kansas City homicide department where he’d earned a reputation for bringing killers to justice.  Now he was on a 747 to London Heathrow on his way to a non-existent conference on forensic methods.