The Babylon rite

30

Canonbury Square, Islington, London

He was thwarted. For almost the first time in his police career, DCI Mark Ibsen felt utterly defeated, and also at fault. Why had he even agreed to this tail, when he’d known the risks? There was always the likelihood that the suspect would limbo neatly under the radar — slip their feeble knot. And so it had turned out.

Morosely, he gazed out of the Met Police Lexus at the snowbound Georgian terraces of Canonbury Square. They were parked in a part of old London made more beautiful by the flurries and eider feathers of snow, now settling contentedly on every lateral surface.

‘Maybe we’ll get a visual, sir,’ said Larkham from behind the wheel, sounding entirely unconvinced. Their suspect had absconded with disdainful ease.

‘Yes,’ said Ibsen. ‘We’ll get a visual when we find the next body, with its fucking head hacked off, pretending to be a suicide.’

This was harsh and overdone. Ibsen didn’t care. A freezing cold December night had fallen on his hopes. He picked up his iPad. He’d been doing this on and off for the last hour as they sat here, helpless, waiting for Kilo team to pick up the scent of Antonio Ritter, who was somewhere out there, in Islington, doing whatever it was he did. Persuading people to cut their own limbs off.

The image of the girl in the wardrobe returned to him, uninvited. The pure horror. He needed to work. Deftly, Ibsen Googled the words ‘death cult’. A number of rock bands topped the screen. Southern Death Cult. Monolith Death Cult. Horizon Death Cult. Lots and lots of death cult metal bands. This was useless. He turned and asked his junior a question.

‘Larkham. Do you ever think of jumping under a train?’

The answering silence was amplified by the muffling snow. Eventually Larkham shrugged and said, ‘Not really, no. Except when I am changing my ninety-eighth nappy of the day. Why d’you ask?’

‘I’m just thinking about suicide — as a concept. I wonder if we are all capable of it at some time or other.’

A solitary pedestrian scrunched past the parked police car. The man was dressed as for an Arctic walk to a remote Inuit village.

Larkham spoke up again: ‘Actually, sir, there was this one…’ He scratched his nose: the universal body language of uncertainty.

‘Go on?’

‘I remember, when I was a kid, my grandfather had this old well in his back garden. It was very deep and mysterious, and kind of scary. We used to drop stones and coins down it when we were kids, me and my sisters, listening for the plop when it hit the water. Took ages. And I used to have nightmares about that scary old well. About falling down it and not being able to get back up. And yet… sometimes I think a bit of me wanted to fall down the well. Just to know what it was like, how horrible it would be, never able to get back up. I guess that may be the same thing? Some kind of internal death wish? Bit ghoulish!’

Ibsen gazed at his driver. ‘Yes,’ His voice was low. ‘Yes, it is. A bit ghoulish. But interesting.’

The car was quiet. London was quiet. Quietened by the ward sister of snow, hushing everyone, tucking them all up in stiff white quilts, then turning off the lights.

He glanced at his radio, as if looking at it would make it crackle into life. Nothing. Kilo team were drawing a blank. Larkham was lost out there, in the icy wastes of failed police work, trudging towards the North Pole of pointlessness.

He switched on his iPad again. But Larkham was sighing impatiently. Ibsen glanced across.

‘Everything OK?’

‘I could slaughter a coffee.’

‘So why not go and get a coffee?’

‘You always get to the heart of the matter, sir. That’s why I respect you so much.’

‘Ditto your sarcasm, Larkham. I’ll have an espresso.’

Larkham laughed, and climbed out; the car door slammed shut behind him. Ibsen bent to his iPad and typed ‘Islington cult’. Of course he drew a zero. ‘Islington murders’ was equally unfruitful, not least because Detective Chief Inspector Ibsen already knew all the murders in Islington.

‘Islington suicides’ seemed just as unproductive. But Ibsen read the citations anyway. There were a lot of suicides. An old lady in a care home. A kid with some pills. Not rich, just a kid. Then a Scottish academic with Islington relatives, who drove into a wall.

This Scottish guy even had a Facebook page, cached; the page itself had been deleted. Ibsen scanned the contents and one of the photos struck him, but he wasn’t sure why. It was just a photo. And so he moved on, and glanced at some more examples. And then he stopped.

The sudden, retroactive realization impaled Ibsen.

There was something about that photo. Something he had seen, subliminally maybe. What was it? Quickly he paged back through his history to the cached Facebook page and read the text carefully.

Archibald McLintock had driven himself into a wall. The daughters thought it was not suicide. They had set up the Facebook page. They were appealing for information. Their father was an elderly but distinguished historian who had no cause to blah blah.

Now Ibsen went to the Contacts. One daughter was called Hannah McLintock. She was an ‘economist, living in Islington’. The Facebook page gave no other info, and no phone numbers, just an email address. So what was it about this photo that had so struck him?

With a flick of two fingers he enlarged the photo. It showed the suicide victim, the late Archibald McLintock, sitting in some kind of study. It was a portrait of a scholar in his work room: behind him were shelves and cases full of old books, in front of him was a big, handsome desk. It was a very posed photo, presumably a publicity shot, for the jacket cover of the guy’s own history book, maybe.

Ibsen looked closer. What was that? On the desk?

Another protraction of two fingers enlarged the photo further.

There. Sitting on the desk, was a very strange pot. The strange, old-looking pot showed a man in a loincloth kneeling at an altar.

Both of his feet had been cut off.

Ibsen swore out loud, cursing himself for allowing Larkham to wander off. This was it; this was it. They needed to get going now, right this minute, not wait around as they did with Imogen Fitzsimmons. And they needed to go in hard, mob-handed, and with armed response: Ritter was very dangerous.

But finding Hannah McLintock could take hours.