Amongst Our Weapons

3 Harsh Language

Modern police inquiries are all about information management – extracting it, processing it, and using it to gather even more information and then repeating the process. Unlike response officers, who get to spend their shifts being attacked by drunks, chasing pickpockets and trying to stop members of the public tearing lumps out of each other, detective officers like me spend their shifts asking questions.

Occasionally this involves being physically or verbally abused, but mostly it involves paperwork.

A homicide with no obvious suspect is an automatic Category B inquiry, which means it gets a code name and a senior investigating officer who manages a mixed bag of detective sergeants, detective constables and wannabe PCs in plain clothes: in this case, OPERATION MURGATROYD, DCI Alexander Seawoll, and the long-suffering members of the Belgravia Major Investigation Team, including DS Guleed and DI Stephanopoulos. They gather the information, which is fed into the maw of the HOLMES computer system, which then showers its lucky acolytes with further ‘actions’ which usually involve gathering more information.

When the Special Assessment Unit is involved, some of these actions will be marked with an F for Falcon. And these end up with my name on them in the in-tray on the desk I share with Guleed. I used to squat at that desk with a third DC called David Carey, but since he went on long-term sick leave I’ve got his place and Danni has mine.

Although I wasn’t sure we should be dropping Danni into a case this serious.

‘She won’t thank you for underestimating her,’ Nightingale had said when I broached it at the morning Falcon assessment. Which was basically me and Nightingale grabbing a coffee for five minutes outside Belgravia nick before we went in for the MIT briefing.

‘She won’t thank me if something bites her leg off either,’ I said.

‘Do you think that’s likely?’ said Nightingale. ‘David Moore’s death could be an isolated incident – we don’t even know if there was a third party involved.’

‘You think he did it to himself?’

‘Possibly,’ said Nightingale. ‘It’s much easier for a practitioner to affect their own body than somebody else’s. But there’s also the possibility that he either carried an enchanted artefact in with him, or he encountered one already in the Silver Vaults.’

Or even that he was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time.

None of those choices seemed likely, but if I’ve learnt one thing on the job, it is that a coincidence can kill someone just as easily as malice. Was David Moore a practitioner? Did he have access to other enchanted items, and was the whole business with the ex-wife and the ring actually relevant to the case?

We needed more information, which was why Danni and me were heading for Poplar to check out David Moore’s gaff while Nightingale would sit in on Guleed’s interview with Althea Moore and see if he could cop a feel of her ring. We’d conduct an initial Falcon assessment and then call in search teams and forensics if necessary.

‘And I mean necessary,’ said Stephanopoulos. ‘Unless you want to pay for it.’

The government were in their sixth year of trying to cut crime by reducing the number of active police officers. So management were getting shirty about expenses.

David Moore had owned an ex-council flat in a brick-built workers’ housing estate in Poplar. Built in 1937, it was finished just in time to suffer a bit of light bombing during the Second World War. This close to Canary Wharf, and with the dull uninspiring bulk of One Canada Square looming over it, many council tenants had exercised their right to buy in the 1980s – followed by selling on to posh provincials exercising their right to gentrify in the 2000s. As a result, I wasn’t surprised to find an eclectic mix of low-end hatchbacks and impractical compact SUVs crammed into every available parking space.

We’d driven over in my orange Ford Focus ST, the one with the mileage and the dent in the bonnet where something had thrown a deer at me in Richmond Park.

The deer was startled, but fine – I never did find out what had thrown it.

Looking worse for wear as it did, the orange Asbo had the double advantage of being weirdly inconspicuous and unlikely to be TDA’d by local ruffians – not even the ones on six-figure salaries.

We parked by the bins and trotted up the stairs to the first-floor balcony, where David Moore had the last flat on the left. All the flats had brand-new composite wood doors with continuous locking and anti-ram bolts. The kind being installed by many councils to save local drug dealers from having to install steel reinforcements themselves. David Moore’s door had a large sheet of unvarnished plyboard covering an area from knee height to just below the spyhole. It looked like the sort of thing the council put up to cover racist or other abuse until they can replace the door.

The doorbell wasn’t working and the knocker, which should have been below the spyhole, was missing, so I gave the door a sharp rap with my knuckles. When that didn’t get an answer, we quickly escalated to the open palm slap combined with shouts of ‘Open the door, we’re the police!’ But fortunately, because it was covered by plywood, we didn’t have to resort to the vaguely demeaning shouting through the letterbox stage.

Stephanopoulos had wangled a section eight PACE warrant from a magistrate, so now we’d established that the flat was uninhabited I used a spell called clausurafrange to slice the bolts on both sides of the door. Danni was gratifyingly impressed.

‘You never said we could do shit like that,’ she said, and after a moment’s thought, ‘What on earth do you record as your method of entry?’

‘I put “authorised Falcon entry method”,’ I said.

‘And they let you get away with that?’

‘So far.’

I pushed the door open and squatted down to check there wasn’t a demon trap or other, more mundane, booby trap on the threshold. This is not something you usually have to worry about entering a suspect house, but I’ve learnt to be careful. Once my healthy paranoia was satisfied, we stepped inside.

The flat was painted in various shades of blue, ranging from indigo in the kitchen to a vaguely turquoise tinge in the hallways. The floor was fake parquet effect lino but, as Danni said, it was expensive fake parquet flooring. The bathroom, straight ahead from the front door, was tiny – barely big enough for a shower cubicle, toilet and basin. There were two bedrooms, but interestingly David Moore had used the larger of the two as an office.

Inside the smaller bedroom the queen-sized bed had been stripped to reveal a memory foam mattress and a pair of hypoallergenic pillows. A large rectangular section of the wall above the headboard had obviously been repainted recently – the fresh paint not quite matching the sky blue of the rest of the wall. When I crouched down to look underneath I got a strong whiff of bleach, which of course made me instantly suspicious. Even my mum, who practically drinks bleach, doesn’t use it that much in a bedroom.

‘Forensic countermeasure?’ said Danni when I pointed it out.

I thought of Althea and her busy spring cleaning and wondered if there was a connection.

‘Don’t know,’ I said.

We both slipped on our plastic booties just to be on the safe side. In my experience, the bleach usually only comes out when members of the public want to shift those troublesome incriminating bodily fluids.

Especially if they’ve been watching a lot of Silent Witness.

The desk in the office had a space for a missing laptop and the shelves were mostly filled with rows of box files with hand-lettered labels. Fewer books than I expected, and none seemed to be fiction. Hefty tomes on development economics, environmental activism and the like, with titles such as Lean Startups for Social Change and How to Save the World. There was a brand-new desktop Spanish dictionary sitting on top of its Amazon packaging next to an A4 ring-bound notepad. I could see the little remnants left on the rings where several sheets had been ripped out.

‘This man had a boring life,’ called Danni from the living room.

I joined her and immediately saw what she meant – it was hard to tell that anyone had spent time in the living room. A couple of Billy bookshelves were half empty, the TV was five years old and stood in splendid isolation without so much as a Blu-Ray player or cable box. The sofa looked brand new and there were no photographs anywhere.

‘It’s weird, isn’t it?’ said Danni. ‘These charity types usually have lots of pictures of themselves doing good deeds – you know, holding starving refugees and the like.’

The gateleg table didn’t have so much as a coffee ring on it.

‘Also, who did he work with?’ asked Danni. ‘There must have been charities or something helping him do good.’

‘Sahra’s looking into that,’ I said. ‘Our priority is checking for Falcon before we call in a search team.’

‘Are you waiting for me to make suggestions?’ asked Danni.

I said I was, and she pointed out the patch of fresh paint in the bedroom and said we should check that.

‘And then we should lever off the board on the front door and see what’s underneath.’

‘Good idea,’ I said, but not before we’d run through the potential practitioner checklist – if only because it had taken me a sodding day to compile it.

So starting with the bookshelves – any genuine Newtonian magic books like what I might find in the Folly library? None. Any occult or secondary works by known Newtonian authorities such as Richard Spruce, Samuel Erasmus Wolfe and Charles Kingsley, but not counting The Water Babies. None. Any general occult or other religious books that show a serious interest in spiritual topics but don’t generally show up in the Mind, Body, Spirit section in Waterstones. Possibly – a couple of books that looked like Catholic theology. I made a note of the titles in the box provided.

Then you check for paraphernalia, always bearing in mind that the line between cosplay, magic practice and niche sex play can get pretty blurry. The only ritual item we found was a large wooden and silver crucifix mounted in the hallway. We hadn’t noticed it on entry because it was hidden behind the open door, and it was definitely unusual. The wooden cross was made of varnished mahogany, while the Christ figure was silver and abstracted to the point where the face was a drooping featureless blob and it was impossible to tell where his flesh ended and his loincloth began.

‘It’s melted,’ said Danni, and I saw it was true.

When I got close I caught a hint of the same concussive light I’d got from the fulgurite tube. Now that I knew what I was looking for, the trace was getting easier to spot. I had Danni confirm before we moved on to the bedroom.

The first thing we did was pull back the bed, to check underneath as well as get better access. This revealed splatters of blue paint at the base of the wall. It had been painted over in haste and without any protection for the floor. I did the first assessment, letting my gloved hand rest on the middle of the patch, and felt nothing except maybe a persistent salt tang which I reckoned as an old vestigium from when the London docks were still in operation. I made a note of the sensation while Danni confirmed – although she thought the vestigium was more fishy than salty.

I left Danni on guard while I popped down to the Asbo to grab my hooley bar to carefully lever off the plywood sheeting. It was only held in place by the sort of masonry nails you might use to hang framed pictures on a wall, and they mostly spanged out when I put my weight on the bar.

Gouged so deeply into the door that it had penetrated past the surface laminate and into the compressed hardwood beneath were three marks. The centre design, despite being made of only three lines, was unmistakably a Christian cross. To its right another three lines made a smaller, inverted cross, while on the left three gouges of different length branched out in jagged lines from a single point – like lightning.

When I touched it, it was indeed like being hit in the back of the head by an angry maths teacher. Once Danni had confirmed the vestigium I called Stephanopoulos and arranged for a search team and a forensic sweep, starting with the painted patch in the bedroom.

‘My money’s on blood,’ said Danni. ‘What’s next?’

‘Some initial house-to-house,’ I said.

Danni was not happy going door to door.

‘I signed up for Falcon to avoid this shit,’ she said.

I knocked on the next door along.

‘Some things are unavoidable,’ I said, and was proved right when a white man with no neck, tattoos and a Rottweiler opened it and demanded to know what the fuck we wanted.

The Rottweiler was huge and snarling and straining at its lead. I could see the man was having to exert some pressure to hold it back. His expression indicated that he was perfectly willing to let go if we gave him an excuse.

Nightingale’s got this spell that can make a dog go to sleep, but unfortunately he hasn’t taught it to me yet. Fortunately, to my amazement, Danni crouched down and stuck her face out at the forty-odd kilograms of solid muscle.

‘Who’s a beautiful girl?’ she said.

The unlovely, flat-faced lump of genetic killing machine immediately lurched forwards, tail wagging so that Danni could stroke its head, all the while telling it what a beautiful, lovely, happy baby it was.

Danni looked up at the owner, who was looking as amazed as I felt.

‘What’s her name?’ she asked.

‘Beatrice,’ he said.

‘Who’s a lovely girl, Beatrice?’ said Danni, flinging her arms around the dog’s neck. ‘Yes you are, yes you are.’

After all that, the only logical next step was being invited in for a cup of tea.

The interior of the flat contained more chintz than I was expecting, given its owner, so I wasn’t surprised to find out that he’d only recently moved in with his nan. His name was Craig Sandwell and, judging from how scrupulously clean he kept the flat, I was guessing that he’d spent most of his life being institutionalised. Prison or the armed forces? I was reluctant to ask because he was being so co-operative, and in any case someone in the inside inquiry office could look him up later.

His nan was asleep in the main bedroom. Craig had moved in after she’d had a stroke, and acquired Beatrice the throat-ripper to keep her company while he was at work. He worked nights as a security guard at the Crossrail works at Canary Wharf and worried about burglars.

‘Some of the kids round here are well out of order,’ he said.

When we steered him around to it, he told us David Moore had been quiet and standoffish.

‘Typical posh leaseholder,’ said Craig. ‘He’d nod if he met you on the walkway but he wouldn’t get in the lift with you.’

When we asked whether he’d shown any recent changes in behaviour, Craig said he hadn’t noticed any but his nan had.

‘She said he’d started singing in the middle of the night,’ said Craig. ‘Said it sounded like hymns to her.’

Craig wasn’t about to let us wake up his grandmother to confirm, so we moved on to the next flat for even more hearsay.

We were kept on the doorstep by a cheerful, angular, middle-aged white woman with ex-blond hair, unseasonable shorts and a green sweatshirt with ‘Fuck Off I’m Busy’ written across the chest. The colour and lettering had faded enough for me to think that this was a relic of an enjoyably misspent youth.

The sweatshirt lady didn’t have much to do with her neighbours, apart from next door, where she would check on the old lady and take Beatrice for a quick spin. She wasn’t even sure if she could pick David Moore out of a line-up, although she was willing to try. She hadn’t seen or heard anything unusual recently but her daughter, Megan, had said she had. She was at school at that moment but we could come back later if we liked.

‘She said she saw an alien,’ said Megan’s mum. ‘Last weekend. If that’s any help?’

‘Did she say what it looked like?’ I asked.

‘She might of,’ said Megan’s mum, ‘but to be honest I wasn’t paying attention.’

We were saved from further house-to-house by the arrival of forensics and some hand-picked bodies from Belgravia who’d been designated the H2H team. Hand-picked, that is, by Stephanopoulos on the basis of who’d irritated her the most recently.

I did say I’d personally come back and interview Megan the alien-spotter when she was back from school.

‘Are there aliens?’ asked Danni as we climbed back into the orange Asbo.

‘Out there?’ I said. ‘Very likely. Down here? Not so far.’

We were going to head back to Belgravia for tea and paperwork but Stephanopoulos called us before we could pull out.

‘We’ve been going through David Moore’s phone logs,’ she said, ‘and we’ve found something you might want to get on to.’

David Moore had made no less than twenty-three calls to the mobile phone of one Preston Carmichael between six in the morning and seven in the evening on the same day he’d visited his ex-wife.

Two days after Megan had allegedly seen an alien.

The outside inquiry team had tried his number, but it went straight to voicemail. Preston Carmichael’s address was listed as in the village of Skirmett in the Chilterns, but when they tried his landline his wife told them he was spending the week at their flat in London.

‘Ability Place,’ said Stephanopoulos. ‘Down by the Millwall Docks.’

Less than a kilometre away from our location.

‘That’s convenient,’ I said.

‘That’s what I thought,’ said Stephanopoulos.

Back when London was the largest port in the world, Millharbour had once circled the Millwall Docks, where timber and grain were shipped in to feed the ferocious furnace that was London’s industry – back when we had industry. Now it is yet another development canyon lined with shapeless postmodern apartment blocks, and the grain all comes through Tilbury, further up the estuary.

Ability Place was your classic speculative luxury housing development, a twenty-two-storey concrete frame filled up with identical rows of luxury flats built to the lowest specification that you could get away with and still appeal to Chinese investors. It had twenty-four-hour concierge services, a gym, a spa, three storeys of underground car parking, and looked like a laboratory storage rack for giant mutant rabbits.

The concierge lived behind a desk at the end of an orange corridor lined with postal boxes. I assumed this was convenient for the postie and the absentee tenants alike – although the layout reminded me of the computer core in 2001: A Space Odyssey. I half expected a calm voice to suggest that it still had great enthusiasm for the mission.

Because we hadn’t had our dinner yet, me and Danni had our warrant cards out before the concierge had a chance to speak and hustled him up to the first floor to let us in.

The thing about vestigia is you get better at spotting them the more you spot them. And this includes particular types of vestigia as well. So it wasn’t surprising that even Danni felt the same stunned musical silence we’d sensed from the fulgurite tube and the melted crucifix at David Moore’s flat, before we’d even reached Preston Carmichael’s front door. I sent the concierge down the corridor and took the opportunity to run through Falcon entry procedure with Danni.

There’s such a thing as being overcautious, even in policing, but I still had a fresh memory of the hole in David Moore’s chest to keep me paranoid.

We stood either side of the door as I unlocked it and carefully pushed it open with my extendable baton. Most plain clothes officers don’t routinely carry their ASP with them, but then most plain clothes officers aren’t called upon to face down unicorns, sentient mould and the occasional carnivorous tree. I waited for a count of ten to see if anyone came rushing out or opened fire before crouching down and peering around the door jamb.

I did this partly because it makes you less of a target, but mostly because I was already in position to check whether the floor just inside the door was clear of magical booby traps.

Since it was a studio flat, the door opened straight into the bedroom half, which was screened from the reception area by a half-wall. Beyond that I could see that the curtains were drawn and the lights were out. The air inside the flat was cold and I could see the curtains rippling from the breeze outside. But the chill couldn’t disguise the sickly tang of decay, urine and faeces that every police officer gets to know as the harbinger of overtime.

‘Shit,’ said Danni.

I slipped on my booties, my nitrile gloves and, leaving Danni to guard the door, I stepped gingerly inside. It had a real parquet floor polished up to a bootie-sliding sheen and the walls were painted a characterless white with a hint of peach. The bed had been made up in the bachelor style, with the duvet thrown haphazardly over the mattress, and there were a couple of thick paperback books on the bedside table.

I saw the body as soon as I rounded the half-wall. It was stretched out on a red and green diamond-patterned rug in front of a leather sofa. It was covered in a yellow cotton fitted bed sheet that matched the duvet cover. There was a circular red-brown stain on the sheet about where I judged the chest to be.

You’re supposed to do two things when you discover a body – double-check they’re dead and protect the locus of the crime. I squatted down at what I hoped was the head end and resisted the temptation to uncover the chest – forensics would want to do that.

The face matched that of pictures we’d lifted from Preston Carmichael’s social media pages. His skin was pale and, when I checked his neck for a pulse, cold to the touch. Even through the gloves. I fished my last disposable face mask out of my jacket pocket and put it on so I could get closer to the corpse without breathing my DNA all over it.

The vestigium was identical to that I’d sensed from the fulgurite and crucifix, only this time widespread – affecting the whole bedroom. With that connection established, I checked the bathroom, just in case, and then retraced my steps to the corridor, closed the door behind me and called Stephanopoulos.

While we waited for the full weight of the Metropolitan Police to arrive, Danni stayed to secure the flat and I went and talked to the concierge. He hadn’t seen Preston Carmichael recently, but also wasn’t sure he’d recognise him if he had. CCTV was limited to covering the garage ramp, the main entrance and the fire doors. I told him that we were going to need the footage from at least the last seven days. He said he wasn’t sure he was allowed to do that, and I explained that he was legally obliged to hand it over.

To my surprise, the first officer on the scene was Detective Chief Inspector Alexander Seawoll. Vast, profane, northern and suspiciously clever, he played at being an old-fashioned governor, but in real life he was something far more modern and effective.

He stared down at me and narrowed his eyes.

‘What have you done with your trainee?’

I explained that she was guarding the scene while I secured the CCTV, and it pained him that he couldn’t find any fault in that.

‘You’re probably wondering why I decided to grace you with my presence,’ he said.

Which was true, since DCIs spend most of their life in their offices or, worse, in other people’s offices and conference rooms. ‘Playing,’ Seawoll once said, ‘pin the fucking buzzword on the sodding flow chart.’

‘You have a secret love nest in Canary Wharf,’ I said.

‘Chance would be a fine thing,’ said Seawoll. ‘I’m here on my tod because once again your lot have managed to spread my team over half of bloody London. Poor Pam is going to divorce our Miriam for neglect and it will all be your fault.’

I’ve met Pam, and as far as I could tell, her and Stephanopoulos were more doting than the last page of a Jane Austen novel. Still, I’ve learnt never to interrupt Seawoll when he’s ranting. Apart from anything else, my therapist says that this is obviously the way he expresses affection. I doubt that, since she’s never heard him swear at an illegally parked car.

‘Where’s the nearest coffee?’ he asked suddenly.

‘Tesco Express,’ I said. ‘Round the corner.’

So he sent me out for refs, but not before making sure I phoned Danni and asked her what she wanted.

‘Always look after your people,’ he said as I noted down the order. ‘The way you treat them sets an example for the way they treat others.’

By the time I got back, I found Seawoll intimidating a thin nervous white man with thinning sandy hair and an almost bespoke medium-grey pinstripe suit. He was from the property management company and, having softened him up with some strategic looming, Seawoll was now killing him with soft words and kindness. Officers past the rank of inspector normally never get to interview anyone except other police, so Seawoll likes to dust off his famous ‘Don’t make me angry, you wouldn’t like me if I was angry’ technique at every opportunity.

Including to use it on, rumour has it, senior officers up to and including the rank of deputy assistant commissioner.

‘So we’re going to need the names and contact details of all your tenants,’ said Seawoll, and the man in the pinstripe suit promised Seawoll the sun and the moon, a USB pen and anything else he might need.

Which turned out to be coffee – which I provided once Pinstripe had scuttled off.

‘The list for the whole building?’ I asked.

‘You never know what we might find once we’ve run all their names,’ said Seawoll. ‘Could be a couple of fortuitous clear-ups hidden in a place like this.’

This is the sort of thing that upsets money launderers and Liberty alike – although for different reasons, obviously. We were still divvying up the snacks when Guleed arrived and forced us to start again. She’d brought an advance guard of officers who, having just finished one house-to-house sweep, were not overjoyed about being launched into another. While Guleed got them organised, Seawoll asked me about Beverley.

‘Any day now,’ I said.

‘Do you think it’s going to make a difference to you?’ asked Seawoll. ‘Professionally speaking?’

I said I didn’t know.

‘Come on, Peter, you’re about to become a fucking father,’ said Seawoll. ‘You need to start thinking about the implications. One of which will be an obligation not to die suddenly in the line of duty.’

‘Thanks, sir,’ I said. ‘I’ll take that on board.’

‘More to the point, am I going to be invited to the christening?’

‘Might not be a christening,’ I said. ‘They’re still arguing.’

‘It’s not going to be one of those hippy New Age things, is it?’ said Seawoll.

‘If it is, do you still want to come?’

‘Will there be anything to drink?’

‘At the ceremony? Maybe.’ I said. ‘Afterwards – definitely.’

‘Then count me in.’

Guleed returned with Danni in tow, and we had one of those al fresco policy meetings that occur whenever police find themselves hanging around at an active crime scene waiting for forensics or prisoner transport to arrive and there’s no pub or café to slope off to. On the TV they either cut to the next scene, or the meetings are conducted while the SIO strides in or out of the locus, but in reality we mostly stand around because there’s nowhere to sit.

Seriously, the first clever sod that invents a combination extendable baton and shooting stick is going to be minted.

‘We’re not going to get the scene processed before this evening,’ said Seawoll once we’d briefed him as to David Moore’s flat. ‘And we’re not going to get a PM before tomorrow. Where’s Thomas?’

‘Heading out to liaise with TVP for the notification of Carmichael’s family,’ said Guleed.

And no doubt taking the opportunity to have a sniff around his house to see if there were any signs that Preston Carmichael was a practitioner.

Seawoll asked me whether I needed further access to the flat, and I told him I’d done the IVA but I would want to know if there was an obvious cause of death.

‘Like what?’ asked Seawoll.

‘Like a great big hole in his chest,’ I said.

Seawoll checked his watch.

‘Why don’t you and Danni action the statement with the little neighbour girl,’ he said. ‘Sahra can suit up and check the body when the forensics go in. If nothing immediate comes up from you or Nightingale, we’ll have a briefing at 6.30.’

And with that we separated like a bunch of teenagers in a slasher movie.