Gun Baby Gun. Iain Overton

      1. THE GUN

       Brazil – a murder in São Paulo – a child’s sorrow and a dead mother – the descent into a police arms cache – a revelation – a journey conceived – Leeds, UK – a secret museum and a meeting with an expert – to a Swiss canton to visit an oracle

      It began with a death.

      The five-year-old had lain alone with his lifeless mother all night long, curled up at her cold feet. It was only when the thin light of dawn lifted some of the darkness from the bedroom that the neighbours had heard the boy’s cries. And only then did people realise what had happened in those sunless hours before.

      The bullet had entered the left side of the young woman’s temple and exited at the back of her head, splattering flecks on the leprous wall. There had often been wild-voiced arguments in that cramped house, but no one ever thought it would come to this.

      After the boy was found the police arrived quickly, but the murderous lover had already fled that Brazilian city and, like the gun he had used, he was nowhere to be found.

      By the time we reached the quiet roadside home the child had also been spirited away, covered in a blanket – lifted from his dark pietà and carried out into the light. His mother was still inside.

      Cars passed, leaving São Paulo for the north, and we stood awkwardly and watched them go. They slowed down and watched us too, a huddle of cops and a documentary crew crowded beside a white ambulance that was never really needed. A dog barked in the distance, and I took out my video camera and walked inside.

      The dead woman had run a small shop out the front, and it was filled with packets of coloured sweets and warm bottles of luminescent drinks. On the counter was a tray of Catholic pendants, which she had sold to the weary lorry drivers who would stop here. But these plastic icons had not helped her last night, and now she lay beyond, past a dusty glass counter, down a narrow corridor, there in a pool of silence.

      They say death smells sweet. That’s what I thought as I walked into her bedroom. A taste touched my mouth and reminded me of the orange-tinted bottles that lined the shop’s walls or the citrus chocolate puffs that lay neatly arranged in their shiny little packages. The air was thick with this smell. It had been over twelve hours since she had died, and this was the start of summer.

      Her name was Lucicleide, and she was naked. I was not expecting that, but death rarely grants us dignity, so her breasts hung to the side and the rest was uncovered. There was not much blood, save for a smear above her pinched, sallow face. Finding a corner, I set up my tripod and got to work; the police did not tell me to stop filming, but by now I was not even sure why I was doing this. My footage would never end up on the evening bulletins. The film I was making with Ramita Navai – an Anglo-Iranian journalist who was used to witnessing such things – was about the toll of violence in one of Brazil’s deadliest cities, but Britain’s Channel 4 News could never show such intimate and murderous detail.

      I felt I had to do something, though.

      So I focused on her unfurled hands and on the trinkets that lined the top of her chipped cabinet and shifted the lens onto the face of a purple bear I imagined her lover had once bought her. And the whirr of the tape in