Broken Homes (PC Peter Grant) (3 page)

‘He had to drag the body,’ said PC Slatt. ‘It left a trail.’

‘He doesn’t sound very prepared,’ I said. The rain was making silver streaks in the beam of my torch as I shone it back to guide Nightingale over.

‘Perhaps it was his first kill,’ he said.

‘God, I hope so,’ said PC Slatt.

The path beyond was muddy but I walked with the confidence of a man who made sure he packed a pair of DM boots in his overnight bag. Town or country, it doesn’t matter, you don’t want to be wearing your best shoes at a crime scene. Unless you’re Nightingale, who seemed to have an unlimited supply of quality handmade footwear that were cleaned and polished by someone else. I suspected it was probably Molly – but it might have been gnomes for all I knew, or some other unspecified household spirit.

On either side of the path were stands of slender trees with pale trunks that Nightingale identified as silver birch. The gloomy stand of dark pointy trees ahead were apparently Douglas firs interspersed with the occasional larch. Nightingale was aghast at my lack of arboreal knowledge.

‘I don’t understand how you can know five types of brick bond,’ he said, ‘but you can’t identify the most common of trees.’

Actually, I knew about twenty-three types of brick bond if you counted Tudor and the other early modern styles, but I kept that to myself.

Somebody sensible had strung reflective tape from tree to tree to mark our path downhill to where I could hear the rumble of a portable generator and see blue-white camera flashes, yellow high-viz jackets and the ghostly figures of people in disposable paper suits.

Back in the dim and distant past, your victim was bagged, tagged and whipped away to the mortuary as soon as the initial photographs were taken. These days the forensic pathologists stick a tent over the body and settle in for the long haul. Luckily, back in civilisation it doesn’t take that much longer. But out in the country there’s all sorts of exciting insects and spores feasting on the corpse. These, so we’re told, reveal ever so much information about time of death and the state the body was in when it hit the ground. Getting it all catalogued can take a day and a half and they’d only just started when we arrived. You could tell that the forensic pathologist wasn’t happy to have yet another random set of police officers interfering with her nice scientific investigation. Even if we were good boys and wore our noddy suits, with the hoods up and masks on.

Neither was DCI Manderly, who’d got there before us. Still he must have reckoned the sooner we were started the sooner we’d be gone, because he immediately beckoned us over and introduced us to the pathologist.

I’ve been racking up some corpse time since I joined the Folly. And after the hurled baby and the Hari Krishna with the exploded head, I’d thought myself toughened up. But, as I’ve heard experienced officers say, you never get tough enough. This body was female, nude and caked in mud. The pathologist explained that she’d been buried in a shallow grave.

‘Only twelve centimetres deep,’ she said. ‘The foxes would have had her up in no time.’

There was no sign of staging. So Robert Weil, if it had been him, had just dumped her in the hole and covered her over. In the harsh artificial light she looked as grey and colourless as the holocaust pictures I remember from school. I couldn’t see much beyond the fact that she was white, female, not a teenager and not old enough to have loose skin.

‘Despite the sloppy burial,’ said the pathologist, ‘there’s evidence of forensic countermeasures, the fingers have all been removed at the second knuckle, and of course there’s the face . . .’

Or lack thereof. From the chin up there was nothing but a pulped red mass flecked with white bone. Nightingale crouched down and briefly got his own face close enough to kiss where her lips had been. I looked away.

‘Nothing,’ Nightingale said to me as he straightened up. ‘And it wasn’t
dissimulo
either.’

I took a deep breath. So, not the spell that had destroyed Lesley’s face.

‘What do you think caused that?’ Nightingale asked the pathologist.

The pathologist pointed to where the top of the scalp was traced with tiny red furrows. ‘I’ve never seen it in the flesh, so to speak, but I suspect a shotgun blast to the face at close range.’

The words ‘Perhaps somebody thought she was a zombie’ tried to clamber out of my throat with such force that I had to slap my hand over my mask to stop them escaping.

Nightingale and the pathologist both gave me curious looks before turning back to the corpse. I ran out of the tent with my hand still over my mouth and didn’t stop until I cleared the inner forensic perimeter where I could lean against the tree and take my mask off. I ignored the pitying looks I got from some of the older police outside – I’d rather they thought I was being sick than that I was trying to stop myself from giggling.

PC Slatt wandered over and handed me a bottle of water.

‘You wanted a body,’ she said as I rinsed my mouth out. ‘Is this your case?’

‘No, I don’t think this is us,’ I said. ‘Thank god.’

Neither did Nightingale, so we drove back to London as soon as we’d stripped off our suits and thanked DCI Manderly for his co-operation – Nightingale drove.

‘There were no
vestigia
and it certainly looked like a shotgun wound to me,’ he said. ‘But I’m minded to ask Dr Walid if he might like to come down and have a look for himself. Just to be on the safe side.’

The steady rain had slacked offas we drove north and I could see the lights of London reflected off the clouds just beyond the North Downs.

‘Just an ordinary serial killer then,’ I said.

‘You’re jumping to conclusions,’ said Nightingale. ‘There’s only the one victim.’

‘That we know of,’ I said. ‘Anyway, still a bit of a waste of time for us.’

‘We had to be sure,’ said Nightingale. ‘And it does you good to get out into the countryside.’

‘Oh yeah,’ I said. ‘Nothing like a day trip to a crime scene. This can’t be the first time you’ve investigated a serial killer.’

‘If that’s what he is,’ said Nightingale.

‘If he is then he can’t have been your first,’ I said.

‘Unfortunately true,’ said Nightingale. ‘Although I’ve never been the one in charge.’

‘Were any of the famous ones supernatural?’ I asked, thinking it would explain a great deal.

‘Had they been supernatural,’ said Nightingale, ‘we’d have ensured that they were not famous.’

‘What about Jack the Ripper?’ I asked.

‘No,’ said Nightingale. ‘And believe me there would have been relief if he had turned out to be a demon or some such. I knew a wizard who’d assisted the police investigation and he said that they’d all have slept far sounder knowing it wasn’t a man doing such terrible things.’

‘Peter Sutcliffe?’

‘I interviewed him myself,’ said Nightingale. ‘Nothing. And he certainly wasn’t a practitioner or under the influence of a malicious spirit.’ He held up a hand to stop me asking my next question. ‘Nor was Dennis Nilsen, as far as I could tell, or Fred West or Michael Lupo or any of the parade of dreadful individuals I’ve had to vet in the last fifty years. Perfectly human monsters every one of them.’

I
f he was our perfectly human monster, then Robert Weil was keeping schtum about it. I kept track of the interview transcripts via HOLMES and in the first round of interviews it’s about what you’d expect. He denies having a body in the back of his car, claims that he went out for a drive and a walk, doesn’t know how the blood got there, certainly has no knowledge of dead women with their faces shot off. As it becomes clear that the forensic evidence is overwhelming, what with blood on his clothes and mud under his fingernails, he stops answering questions. Once he was formally charged and remanded in custody he ceased talking to anyone – even his brief who then recommended that he be psychologically evaluated. Even just skimming the actions list I could feel the MCT’s frustration as they settled into a long hard slog, grinding down every lead into fine powder and then sifting it for clues. The victim stayed stubbornly unidentified and the autopsy revealed nothing more than to confirm that she was white, female, mid-thirties and hadn’t eaten for at least forty-eight hours before her death. Cause of death was most likely a shotgun blast to the face at a range close enough to leave powder burns. Dr Walid, gastroenterology’s answer to Cat Stevens and, as far as we knew, the only practising crypto-pathologist in the world, popped in on his way home with his own autopsy report.

So we had afternoon tea and pathology, sitting in the stuffed leather armchairs downstairs in the atrium. The Folly had last been refurbished in the 1930s when the British establishment firmly believed that central heating was the work, if not of the devil per se, then definitely evil foreigners bent on weakening the hardy British spirit. Bizarrely, despite its size and the glass dome, the atrium was often warmer than the small dining room or either of the libraries.

‘As you can see,’ said Dr Walid laying out pictures of thin slices of brain on the table, ‘there are no signs of hyperthaumaturgical degradation.’ The slices had been stained a variety of lurid colours to improve the contrast, but Dr Walid complained that they remained stubbornly normal – I took his word for it.

‘Nor was there any sign of chimeric modification to any of the tissue samples,’ he said and sipped his coffee. ‘But I have sent off a couple of them to be sequenced.’

Nightingale nodded politely, but I knew for a fact that he only had the vaguest idea of what DNA was, since he was old enough to have been Crick and Watson’s father.

‘I think we may as well consider this case closed,’ he said. ‘At any rate, from our perspective.’

‘I’d like to keep monitoring it,’ I said. ‘At least until we have an ID for the victim.’

Nightingale drummed the table with his fingertips. ‘Are you sure you have the time for that?’ he asked.

‘Sussex and Surrey MCT will produce a weekly summary while the case is ongoing,’ I said. ‘It’ll take me ten minutes.’

‘I don’t think he takes me as seriously as he should,’ Nightingale told Dr Walid. ‘He still slopes off to conduct illicit experiments whenever he thinks I’m not looking.’ He looked at me. ‘What is your latest interest?’

‘I’ve been looking at how long various materials retain
vestigia
,’ I said.

‘How do you measure the intensity of the
vestigia
?’ asked Dr Walid.

‘He uses the dog,’ said Nightingale.

‘I put Toby in a box along with the material and then I measure the loudness and frequency of his barking,’ I said. ‘It’s no different from using a sniffer dog.’

‘How can you be sure of consistency of results?’ asked Dr Walid.

‘I ran a series of control experiments to eliminate variables,’ I said. Toby on his own in a box at nine a.m. and then at hourly intervals for the volume baseline. And then Toby in a box with various guaranteed inert materials for a baseline on that. The third day Toby hid under the table in Molly’s kitchen and had to be lured out with sausages.

Dr Walid leaned forward as I talked – he at least appreciated a bit of empiricism. I explained that I’d exposed each material sample to identical amounts of magic, by conjuring a werelight – the simplest and most controllable spell I knew – and then put it in the box with Toby to see what happened.

‘Were there any significant findings?’ he asked.

‘Toby’s not very discriminating, so we’re talking a wide margin for error,’ I said. ‘But it was about what I expected. And in line with my reading. Stone retains
vestigia
the best, followed by concrete. The metals were all too similar to differentiate. Wood was next and the worst was flesh.’ In the form of a leg of pork which Toby subsequently ate before I could stop him.

‘The only surprise,’ I said, ‘were some of the plastics, which scored almost as high on the yap-o-meter as stone.’

‘Plastic?’ asked Nightingale. ‘That’s most unexpected. I’d always assumed that it was natural things that retained the uncanny.’

‘Can you email me the results?’ asked Dr Walid.

‘Sure.’

‘Have you considered testing other dogs?’ asked Dr Walid. ‘Perhaps different breeds would have different sensitivities.’

‘Abdul, please,’ said Nightingale. ‘Don’t give him any ideas.’

‘He is making progress in the art,’ said Dr Walid.

‘Barely,’ said Nightingale. ‘And I believe he’s replicating work that’s already been done.’

‘By who?’ I asked.

Nightingale sipped his tea and smiled.

‘I’ll make a bargain with you, Peter,’ he said. ‘If you make better progress in your formal studies I shall tell you where to find the notes of the last brain-box who filled the lab with . . . Actually it was mostly rats, but I seem to remember a couple of dogs in his menagerie.’

‘How much better progress?’ I asked.

‘Better than you’re doing now,’ he said.

‘I wouldn’t mind seeing that data,’ said Dr Walid.

‘Then you should encourage Peter to study harder,’ said Nightingale.

‘He’s an evil man,’ I said.

‘And cunning,’ said Dr Walid.

Nightingale eyed us placidly over the rim of his tea cup.

‘Evil and cunning,’ I said.

The next morning I drove up to Hendon for part one of mandatory Officer Safety Training. You’re pretty much expected to do one of these courses every six months until Chief Inspector rank, but I doubt we’ll ever see Nightingale do one. We had a fun lecture on Excited Delirium, or what to do with people who are stoned out of their box. And then role-playing in the gym where we practised how to handle suspects without having them fall down the stairs. A couple of the officers had been at Hendon with me and Lesley, and we stuck together at lunch. They asked after Lesley and I gave them the official version, that she was physically assaulted during the riots in Covent Garden and that her attacker subsequently committed suicide before I could arrest him.

In the afternoon we took it in turns to hide offensive weapons about our person while our colleagues searched us, a contest I won coming and going because I know how to hide a razor blade in the waist band of my jeans and I’m not afraid to go all the way up a suspect’s inner leg. Doing all the physical stuff left me weirdly energised, so when one of the other officers suggested we go clubbing I tagged along. We ended up in a UV saturated cattle shed in Romford where I may, or may not, have got off with the goddess of the River Rom. Not in a serious way, you understand, just a bit of clinch and some tongue. Which is what happens when you overdo the WKD. I woke up the next morning in one of the chairs in the atrium with surprisingly little hangover and Molly looming over me. She looked disapproving. I would have preferred a hangover.