The Invisible Code (14 page)

He figured he had less than ten minutes before her father thought of searching the park and all hell broke loose.

‘Why are we here?’ Lucy asked, clutching her pink poodle. ‘You said you knew about the witch.’

‘I do, Lucy, I just wanted to ask you something very quickly before we go back to your daddy.’ He crouched beside her, reducing his height to something more
manageable and safe. ‘About the lady who went into the church. The one on Saturday.’

‘It wasn’t my fault,’ Lucy warned him. ‘Tom agreed with me. His father works with my father. I’m nine months and seven days older than him, and I know all the rules of the game because my brothers used to play it, but they got bored with it and gave it to me.’

‘What game? Is this the game you were playing on Saturday morning?’ Waters checked over his shoulder, watching the plaza steps, expecting to see Mansfield appear on them at any minute.

‘Yes,’ said Lucy loudly and clearly in her best explaining voice, which you had to do because adults were slow. ‘It’s called
Witch Hunter
and you have to find the witches and kill them. And me and Tom looked for a witch and found the lady who was one, and we put a curse on her to make her die.’

‘How did you put a curse on her, Lucy?’ Waters’s sight-line remained fixed on the steps, watching for a distraught father.

‘You have to make her pass a test,’ said Lucy. ‘The man showed me how to do it.’

‘What man?’

‘He works with my dad but I don’t know his name. He brings the food.’

‘What do you mean, he brings food?’

‘You know, pizzas. He has a big bike.’

‘What exactly happened?’ asked Waters. ‘I mean from when you saw the lady?’

‘She was sitting eating a sandwich and she was reading a book about how to eat babies.’

There was a sudden movement across the road. Mansfield’s Ray-Bans flared in the sunlight. He was running down the steps, taking them in pairs, watching the traffic, seeing when he could cross the road to the park.

‘Shit,’ said Waters under his breath, rising.

‘You mustn’t say that,’ said Lucy.

‘I have to go. You mustn’t mention this to anyone, do you understand? It has to be our secret. Like your game.’

Lucy remembered the rules of
Witch Hunter
and smiled. ‘All right.’

He turned and checked the park for cover. It was a bright, clear afternoon, but there was deep green shade beneath the immense plane trees and oaks that lined the path to the petting zoo.

‘That’s him,’ said Lucy softly, ‘he’s here.’ But Waters didn’t hear her.

A young man in a black motorcycle jacket and black jeans was shifting out of the shadows, moving swiftly towards Waters. Judging by the bulk of his chest he’d either been in jail or spent his life on a bench press.

Waters was still checking Mansfield’s progress across the road. He stepped back from the little girl and waved her away. ‘Lucy, I can see your daddy, he’s coming to get you right now, and it’s very important you don’t say anything about us being—’

He didn’t finish the sentence.

The motorcycle rider was up close and turning Waters to him. A slender blade found an entry point between the photographer’s ribs, slicing directly into the chambers of his heart. Waters tried to finish his warning but hot coppery blood filled his throat and he was frightened of spitting it on to her, so he dropped as quietly as he could to his knees, trying not to fall on his injured side. It was important to him that the girl didn’t see there was something wrong. She was safe; she had her back to him now.

The knife was smoothly extracted and reinserted. The searing heat appeared further up, then again to the right, and all he could think was
She didn’t see, she got away
, because he could hear the girl running back to her father, back into the sunlight where she belonged.

14

CONNECTIONS

THE MOCK-GOTHIC WINDOWS
of the St Pancras Mortuary and Coroner’s Office peered out on to a Victorian graveyard gilded with scrolled gates. The Regent’s Canal wound around it, sparkling in the milky evening sunlight. Beyond was an Edwardian crescent of terraced houses, a third-century church, giant blue cement tanks preparing to create a new town square and several six-floor blocks of council flats, crammed into a messy collage so typical of the capital city that Londoners never noticed its strangeness.

Inside the coroner’s office, Giles Kershaw was thinking about knife wounds. ‘There’s a mandatory minimum four-month prison sentence for sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds found guilty of aggravated knife offences now,’ he said, checking over his new arrival. ‘Every Tory government returns to the old “lock ’em up” policy eventually, just as every Labour one tries to introduce a more liberal penal attitude to stabilize the prison population.’

‘Will either of them stop kids from tooling up?’ asked John May.

‘Unlikely. The anti-knife campaigns are endless and well meaning but they don’t make it any easier for a kid to walk down a street at night, staying out because his mum’s got a new boyfriend.’

On the steel tray before Kershaw was the stripped body of Jeffrey Martin Waters, a grey plastic mesh sheet arranged above his hips. He was lying face down, so his wounds were not visible from this side. It looked as if he was waiting to have a massage.

‘We were about to bring Waters back in,’ said May. ‘We interviewed him yesterday but didn’t get very far. He knew more than he was willing to tell us.’

‘So he knew his attacker?’

‘It looks that way.’

‘Before we get into the question of how you managed to pre-empt a murder victim, John, let me quickly outline what happened,’ said Kershaw. ‘I can turn him over – do you want to see?’

‘Not unless the killer signed his work,’ said May.

‘Good. He’s a big lad and I put my back out last week playing squash. There are five narrow but very deep puncture wounds over and around the heart, no serrations on the blade. At first I thought the weapon had penetrated so deeply because it had been incredibly well sharpened, but then I found traces of oil inside the wound. The blade had been sprayed with WD40 and all the cuts were pointing towards the heart itself. Waters was wearing a baggy T-shirt and a jacket with lots of pockets, so stabbing should have been a hit-and-miss affair. This was someone attacking with a decent knowledge of anatomy and an intent to kill, not wound. That’s pretty rare. Knives are kept to be brandished, to ward off, to mark territory. This one was … well, you remember that business with Mr Fox and his sharpened skewer? I don’t suppose he’s out on the streets again.’

‘He’s safely behind bars,’ said May.

‘OK, but it’s someone like that. I’d say he set out to remove your witness and did a very neat job. How did Waters get into Coram’s Fields? You’re not allowed inside the perimeter without a child.’

‘He had a little girl with him,’ said May. ‘Coram’s Fields has several CCTVs around the outer railing. Unfortunately, Mr Waters was standing behind a very large plane tree when he was stabbed.’

‘Then how did his attacker get in?’

‘He vaulted the fence covered by some bushes – the council had been due to cut them back – and made his way straight towards Waters. He knew his target.’

‘Waters was with – who, his daughter?’ Kershaw’s interest always extended beyond the bodies on his table.

‘We don’t know. We’ve got a muddy shot of a girl running away, maybe nine or ten years old, that’s all. We’ve only just started piecing together the witness reports. She ran off moments before he was attacked and carried on until she reached the far side of the park railing. It looks like Waters warned her away. We’ve got a brief shot of his arms outstretched, then we lose him.’

‘Did you get a description of the killer?’

‘It’s useless,’ May said. ‘Black motorcycle helmet, black leathers, boots, broad build, young and obviously fit. Thanks to the helmet we don’t even know if he was Caucasian. No branding on the jacket, which is unusual. Probably removed it to avoid identification, which also suggests intent.’

‘Well, I think our crime scene manager is probably going to disappoint you on particle evidence, assuming we can afford any proper tests. There isn’t much to go on. I get the feeling our man stuck his right arm out, gripped with the left, hauling Waters into close contact by keeping him off balance. You can’t see anything on the CCTV?’

‘Not a sausage. My guess is he knew where the cameras
were positioned, and avoided walking on the grass, so there are no prints to speak of.’

‘About the intent to kill. I’d say Waters was targeted and dropped as neatly as a bull at a corrida. There’s a fresh abrasion on the left knee.’ Kershaw picked up his telescopic indicator – a bequest from his predecessor – and flicked it at the corpse’s leg. The Victorian device served no real purpose but was a trade accessory, like a journalist’s pencil. ‘It’s a textbook army hit.’

‘So you think it was a professional job?’

‘It seems the likeliest scenario. Do you want to tell me what this is all about? You interviewed a – what, suspect, witness? – who was then murdered. And you don’t have the case, because it came to me direct. So what on earth’s going on?’

‘You remember Oskar Kasavian?’

‘Of course. Is he still trying to close the unit down?’

‘He commissioned us to investigate his wife. She’s been suffering from behavioural problems and has turned into a security risk. She was being shadowed by Waters here, who was commissioned to take photos of her, but we think she told him something that got him killed. Oh, and his killer matches the description of the man who mugged Arthur’s biographer, Anna Marquand.’

‘Well, that’s as clear as creosote,’ said Giles, covering the body. ‘It’s a bit of a tenuous link, isn’t it?’

‘Not at all. There were two murders in London today, in a city of eight million people. One was the victim of a gang stabbing on a Tower Hamlets estate and the other was Waters, who appeared in my office just a day before he was killed. I’d say we have a link, wouldn’t you?’

‘Then where does the kid fit in?’

‘No idea yet. There’s no reason to assume there’s a connection between her and Mrs Kasavian, although I’m sure Arthur is looking hard. I’ve sent Dan Banbury
over to Waters’s apartment to retrace his final day on earth. He enjoys jobs like that. I have to say, it feels like we’re pulling on threads that may unravel something big.’

‘Like what?’ asked Giles.

‘I don’t know,’ May admitted gloomily. ‘Something that’ll probably come down and crush us all.’

Dan Banbury was the only member of the unit who still knocked on the door of Bryant and May’s shared office, or at least he knocked on the lintel, as the door had been removed by the decorators because it was sticking and had yet to be put back because they had lost the screws between the floorboards. ‘I’ve got Waters’s movements for the full day,’ he said. ‘Do you want to come and see?’

‘Why can’t you just print them out?’ asked Bryant, looking over the top of his spectacles. He was completely surrounded by loose pages with scrawled-in margins, Prospero marooned on his island of books.

‘Because nobody uses paper any more.’

‘Well, I do.’

‘You mean you want me to create a document and print it so that you can read it, screw it into a ball and then throw it away? That’s very old-fashioned and wasteful.’

‘So am I. Just do it.’

Banbury sighed and returned a minute later, setting the sheet on Bryant’s desk. ‘Waters wasn’t driving to assignments, because they’re usually all in the centre of town and he hates paying the congestion charge. He took the Tube, and touched in and out with his Oyster card. So we get eight fifty a.m. out of Belsize Park, then just after one p.m. back in at Belsize Park, touching out at Blackfriars. The cameras picked him up in Fleet Street, Salisbury Court, then St Bride’s Church—’

‘He went into St Bride’s?’

‘He was inside for about five minutes. Cameras show
him waiting around but you can’t see much in the courtyard because of the trees. It’s a problem at this time of the year, most of them should have been trimmed back but the weather—’

‘Get on with it.’

‘OK, the next one is Piccadilly Circus, then back in at Oxford Circus, suggesting he walked up Regent Street, but I can’t get access to those cameras at the moment because the Met’s using the footage to find a gang of Ukrainian shoplifters, then out at Russell Square at four fifteen p.m., which points him in the direction of Coram’s Fields. I think he spent the day looking for the kid or waiting to get her alone, and it might not have been the first time he did that. His Tube card has similar times and destinations on other days.’