The Babylon Rite (12 page)

Imagine living with a view like this, every day. This kid had
everything
. Youth, brains, education, all the money he could need, even a thriving business. And this magnificent home.

Why kill yourself?

‘Sir.’

Ibsen swivelled. It was DS Larkham.

‘I was about to call, sir. You should take a look at this. I’ve been going through Klemmer’s laptop. His pictures.’

Ibsen followed his eager junior into a large bedroom. He glanced at the wardrobes: wall to wall. A beautiful suit, just returned from the dry cleaners, judging by the clear plastic wrap, hung from one door. He couldn’t help wondering as to the exact make of the suit. It looked properly canvassed, with hand-sewn buttonholes, and real hornbutton cuffs. Savile Row, probably. Gieves & Hawkes perhaps?

And then he realized something much more interesting. Why would someone intent on suicide collect a beautiful bespoke suit from the dry cleaners? So that he could look smart at his own funeral?

This didn’t fit. The suicide was apparently an impulse. Yet the man had bought a chainsaw, so it
wasn’t
an impulse. Yet it must have been an impulse, otherwise why the suit? Was it, therefore, truly a suicide?

‘Sir. Here we go—’

Another computer, another batch of files: this time photos.

Briskly, Larkham paged through the snaps.

‘They’re from his sex parties, I’m guessing,’ Larkham explained. ‘But there’s no full-on scenes. Just people drinking and laughing, the odd kissing couple. Maybe he needed photos like this for his website, to attract punters.’

‘So what’s the interest for us?’

‘Here.’

Larkham gestured. Ibsen tilted the laptop to get a proper look. This latest photo was slightly different from the others. It showed a happy group of partygoers sitting around a dining table. They were lifting up champagne glasses and toasting themselves; they looked drunk and young and exuberant.

‘I still don’t see it.’

‘Bloke at the far end.’

The DCI made a second pass. The photo had obviously been taken at the end of a big boozy dinner. There was a slight sense of dishevelment. The men had removed their dinner jackets, and rolled up their white sleeves. The tall, faintly smiling man at the far end had what looked like tattoos on his arms. Ibsen felt the buzz, at once.

‘Christ.’

‘Yep. And it’s a high-res shot, and I already enlarged the tatts.
Look.
’

Larkham clicked the photo editor and the enlarged section of the photo offered up the crucial detail: the man’s tattoos comprised a pair of elaborate and grinning skulls.

Ibsen gestured intently at the photo. ‘Trace all these people.
All of them
. We need to speak to every single person. They
must
know something.’ He paused. ‘And they might not realize what danger they are in.’

Larkham nodded and pulled out his phone. DCI Ibsen walked, pensively, to the large windows and gazed out over the dark, twilit park. Once again he got the strange, foolish, infantile sense that something dreadful was out there. Watching.

Nina was dressed again in black: she had come straight from her father’s funeral.

Adam hadn’t had a chance to ask her how it went, whether or not she had spoken with her stepmother. He had been sitting in his overheated hotel room, digesting an overcooked hotel breakfast, wondering quite what to do, thinking about the previous night’s events in Archie McLintock’s flat when he had got a call from Nina.
I’m going to see the police again, try and get some sense out of them. After the funeral. Will you come with me?

Then he’d know at once what to do: help her. He wanted to help her as much as he wanted to get at the root of this peculiar, and now menacing, situation.

But the police – as Nina had lucidly predicted when they walked into the stumpy, redbrick, 1970s-style divisional headquarters of the local cops – were somewhat obstructive, or at least very obviously uninterested.

The Detective Chief Inspector, who gloried in the splendidly Italo-Scottish name of Lorna Pizzuto, had practically rolled her eyes at her colleague as Nina and Adam had walked through the door. As if to say:
here she comes again, the nutter who thinks her dad was murdered.

And now Adam sat in his plastic police chair, feeling uncomfortable.

Nina repeated her earlier question. ‘Have you examined the car? Properly?’

Detective Pizzuto put a hand to her forehead as if she was warding off a migraine. ‘Yes, Miss McLintock. As we told you last Tuesday, and indeed last Wednesday, we have taken it apart, piece by piece. There is absolutely no evidence of any tampering, the car was almost new, the wrapping was barely off. The brakes were perfectly functional.’

Nina leapt on this statement, her green eyes fierce. ‘But what about that? A new car? How did he afford a new car?’

Lorna Pizzuto sighed. ‘That is not our proper
concern
, Miss McLintock. We can’t investigate a man’s entire life and finances, no matter how tragic his demise, if we have no due cause. We have neither the manpower nor the remit.’

Adam felt the need to say something. He was starting to feel sympathy for the
police –
and that was unjustified by the facts. The man with the tattoos. The break-in at the flat
. A secret that gets you killed.

‘But Detective, you now have direct evidence of an intruder? Last night?’

‘Yes. And we’ll investigate this. But, I have to say, burglaries like this, are not exactly unknown.’

Adam rejected this. ‘It’s just another crime? How can you be so dismissive?’

Pizzuto interrupted. ‘Because you’re not
listening,
Mr Blackwood. These particular burglaries are horribly common. What I mean is: criminals actually wait for the obituaries. That’s how it goes. You can surely imagine it, some thief reads about the death of Miss McLintock’s father in the papers. Then he thinks: ah, look at this, Morningside, rich district, well-known author, just died, there’ll be money, antiques, distracted relatives, or even a nice empty home, so easy to crack. It’s cruel but true.’

‘But the description? The man I saw?’

‘The tattoos? It sounds like some local lowlife. We’re on it. We will, however—’ her direct and honest gaze switched to Nina, ‘—have to talk to Rosalind McLintock, the householder. She – your stepmother – will need to know that you both were, ah, shall we say, clandestinely on her property?’

Nina waved a hand at the idea, ‘S’all right. I told her. Go ahead and talk to her.
Knock yourselves out.
’

The detective permitted herself the faintest smile. ‘We will.’

There was another hiatus. Adam seized the moment to ask his own questions, again. ‘What about the previous break-in, the one we heard about? The stealing of the notebooks?’

The junior policeman spoke up, for the first time. ‘It wasn’t reported.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘To be frank, we don’t know it even happened.’

‘But the landlady, what’s her name … Sophie Walker. She said Archibald was freaked. Scared.’

‘Yes,’ the junior policeman persisted calmly. ‘But it’s just hearsay. She heard it from him. He didn’t report a break-in
,
so we have no evidence of a break-in. And of course, unfortunately, we can’t interview him now.’

Adam felt as if he was trapped in a maze of impermeable logic. Everything the police were saying was entirely reasonable and rational. Yet he felt frustrated. But maybe his frustration was illogical: maybe
he
was the irrational person here. Him, and Nina?

Pizzuto took over. ‘Again, we will ask Rosalind McLintock if she knows anything about the theft of,’ her eyebrows drifted upwards, by a sarcastic fraction, ‘the theft of these “notebooks”, and this “break-in”.’

‘Don’t bother.’ Nina spat the words. ‘I asked her today. Again. Says she knows nothing.’

The two police officers exchanged a wearied frown.

Adam had one last go, trying to remember his training in news journalism in Sydney. Always ask the obvious questions. Get straight to the heart of the matter.

‘He seemed happy that day. In Rosslyn. Why would he kill himself?’

Pizzuto eyed Adam. ‘You mean he was smiling? Cheerful?’

‘Yes!’

‘But you said yourself, Mr Blackwood, he was also behaving “oddly”. Saying strange things. No?’

‘Yes, but—’

‘We have it on tape. “He seemed a little unbalanced, he was behaving oddly”. I’m sorry to be so brutal but these are your words.’

‘So why, then?
Why
did he do it?’

The detective sighed. ‘Please. As you must know, that’s not our territory. You know that, as a journalist. And if I may explain something, because you might be unaware, as an Australian, Britain has differing legal systems. Remember you are in Scotland, not England. There is no coroner here. We have something roughly similar: a procurator fiscal. She, or he, will gather evidence. If anomalies or grounds for further investigation are found there may be a Fatal Accident Inquiry, where these issues can be aired. But, I have to say,’ she turned to Nina, giving her an expression of genuine sympathy ‘if you want my honest opinion, and I feel you deserve it, Miss McLintock – then there probably won’t be an FAI. Why? Because this was a suicide. All the evidence points that way.’ She raised a conspicuously wedding-ringed hand, preventing Nina from interrupting, and continued. ‘I know this is distressing, Miss McLintock. No relative, and certainly no child, wishes to hear that their parent may have killed themselves. Suicide is a tragedy
for the survivors
. You will have feelings of deep guilt and confusion, as well as grief. Guilt that you didn’t spot the clues as to his moods, guilt that you didn’t do something. You feel helpless. It is only natural to hope, paradoxically, for a different explanation. Murder is easier to deal with, emotionally, for close relatives, than suicide, however odd that sounds. I’ve seen it before. But, again, all the evidence we have – and I am a fairly experienced police officer – tells me this was a suicide. I am sorry. But there it is.’

The discussion was over, it seemed. DCI Lorna Pizzuto was already standing, putting documents in a briefcase, then offering a handshake.

Nina accepted the gesture, in a way that said eloquently,
I still don’t believe you.

Their walk to the door of the police station was short and silent. Outside, Adam inhaled the Edinburgh air, on busy Craigleith Road. The cold winter breeze was malted, carrying the distinctive tang of the breweries nearby. Yellow Edinburgh buses queued at the junction. He thought, inadvertently, and piercingly, of Alicia, crushed by a bus: King’s Cross in Sydney. How easily it happened, how easily death just took you, flippantly, crazily; with no logic, no logic at all.

It was an interlude of sadness and of awkwardness. Adam didn’t know what to say, or do. Believe the police, or believe Nina? Carry on, or go home? He didn’t want to think about Alicia, he didn’t want to brood.

‘You believe
them,
don’t you?’ Nina said at last.

‘I …’ He wondered whether to lie and decided against. ‘To be honest, I don’t know.’

‘Come on.’ She took his arm. ‘Let me show you something. It wouldn’t mean anything to the cops. But it might just mean something to you.’

She was already hailing a cab. He followed, bemused.

Ten minutes of light Edinburgh traffic found them in Grassmarket, climbing another set of tenement stairs to another flat: Nina’s own.

The flat was pleasant but spare, chic but austere. The flat of someone who wanted to live quietly and unfussily, or of someone who expected to be moving again soon. He sat down at her request in a leather chair. What was she going to show him?

She returned with two mugs of tea, in Rangers Football Club mugs.

‘Nice flat.’ He didn’t know what else to say.

Nina looked around the living room, appraisingly, as if she were an estate agent estimating the value. ‘Yeah well.’ She shrugged again. ‘I can only afford it because I sold up in London. Sold my ill-gotten gains.’ She sipped her tea. ‘I used to work in the City. But the job was so intense I quit.’

He gazed at her, wide-eyed; she laughed, ruefully. ‘Ach. You didn’t take me for a banker, did you?’

‘Well …’

‘You’re right. I wasn’t. Took me five years to realize it. I don’t know what the hell I am but I’m pretty sure I’m not one of nature’s bankers. But I made a bit of cash so I’m set. I guess. For a while.’

It occurred to Adam that, stupidly, he hadn’t ever asked her what she
did
. Her job: the most basic and essential of questions. The darkening whirl of drama meant he had neglected the primaries of his craft. Get the facts, all the facts, especially the most basic: age, job, race, marital status and hair colour if you are writing for a tabloid.
Pretty Nina McLintock, 27-year-old brunette, spoke of her father’s death …

‘What do you do then, now?’

‘Charity work. Atoning for my sins.’

‘What kind of charity work?’

‘Scottish Shelter. For homeless people. I help them raise and make money, because I know how to handle money.’

‘Full time?’

‘Three days a week. The pay is dreck but that doesn’t matter, right now. Anyway, I’ve taken some time off, since Dad.’

‘Of course.’

Nina set the tea on the table. ‘Enough. Look at us! Reduced to bourgeois chit-chat.’ Her smile was terse. ‘Let me see if I can engage you.
Re-engage
you? Do you want to see what I’ve got?’

‘Yes, please.’

She stood and crossed the room to a cupboard. Opening a large drawer, she pulled out a plastic shopping bag. Then she dropped the bag on the coffee table between them. It was apparently stuffed full of small slips of paper.

Adam stared.

‘Remember last night?’

‘Not something I’m going to forget.’

‘Remember I ran into the kitchen—’

‘Of course.’

‘I went to get
this
.’ Nina gestured at the bag. ‘Receipts. Hundreds of receipts. Maybe thousands.’