Broken Homes

5

It was raining again and it took me about as long to drive across the river and down to the London Borough of Bromley as it had taken me to drive to Brighton the month before. A big chunk of the time was spent negotiating the Elephant and Castle traffic system and crawling down the Old Kent Road.

Once you’re south of Grove Park the Victorian bones of the city dwindle and you find yourself in the low-rise mock-Tudor land of London’s last big suburban expansion. Places like Bromley are not what people like me and my dad think of as London but the outer boroughs are like in-laws — like it or not, you’re stuck with them.

Patrick Mulkern’s address was a weird mutant hybrid that looked like the developer had got bored of building mock-Tudor semis and had rammed two together to create a mini-terrace of four houses. Like most of the homes on the street, its generous front garden had been paved over to provide more parking space and an increased flood risk.

An off-white Ford Mondeo was parked outside, glistening in the rain, I checked the index — it matched the ones from the CCTV. Not only was it a Mark 2 but it had the wimpy 1.6 Zetec engine as well. Whatever the wages of crime were Mulkern certainly wasn’t spending it on his wheels.

I sat outside with the engine off for five minutes and watched the house. It was a gloomy day but there were no lights visible through the windows and nobody twitched the net curtains to check me out. I stepped out of the car and walked as fast as I could into the porch shelter. At some point the house had acquired a thick coating of a vicious flint pebble dash that almost had the skin off my palm when I rested my hand on it.

I rang the doorbell and waited.

Through the frosted panes either side of the door I could see a spray of rectangular white and brown smudges on the hallway floor — neglected post. Two, maybe three days’ worth judging by the amount. I rang and kept my finger on the bell way beyond polite but still nothing.

I considered going back to my car and waiting. I had my Georgics by Virgil to plough through and a restocked stake-out bag that I was fairly certain didn’t contain any of Molly’s scary culinary surprises, but as I turned away my fingertips brushed the lock and I felt something.

Nightingale once described vestigia to me as being like the afterimage left on your eyes in the wake of a bright light. What I got off the lock was like the aftermath of a photoflash. And embedded in it, something hard and sharp and dangerous like the strop of a razor on a whetstone.

Nightingale, by virtue of his vast experience, claims to be able to identify the caster of an individual spell by their signare — that’s signature in proper English. I’d thought he was having me on, but just recently I’d started to think I could sense his. And the signare off the door zapped me back to a Soho roof top and a fucker with a posh accent, no face and a keen non-academic interest in criminal sociopathy.

I checked the living-room windows — nobody was there. Ghostly, through the net curtains, the looming furniture was old-fashioned but neatly kept and the TV looked twenty years old.

What with the book not being actually reported stolen, I wasn’t going to get a search warrant. If I broke in I’d have to rely on good old Section 17(1)(e) of the Police And Criminal Evidence Act (1984) which clearly states that an officer may enter a premises in order to save ‘life and limb’ which doesn’t even really require you to hear anything suspicious. This is because not even the most hardened member of Liberty wants the police to be dithering around outside their door while they’re being strangled inside.

And if I broke in and the Faceless Man was still in there?

I’m not as practised as Nightingale, but I was almost totally sure that the vestigia on the lock had been laid down more than twenty-four hours earlier and that the Faceless Man was long gone.

Almost totally sure.

I’d only survived our last encounter because he’d underestimated me and the cavalry had turned up in the nick of time. I didn’t think he would underestimate me again and the cavalry was currently the other side of the river.

Not that a Sprinter van full of TSG would make much difference. Nightingale had been certain that only he could take the Faceless Man in a fair fight. ‘Not that I have any intention of offering him such a thing,’ Nightingale had said.

But I couldn’t wheel out Nightingale every time I wanted to enter a suspect house, otherwise what was the point of me? And I couldn’t hang around outside until one of the neighbours got suspicious enough to dial 999.

So I decided to make a forced entry. But just to be on the safe side I’d phone Lesley to let her know where I was and what I was doing.

This is what we in the job call ‘making a risk assessment’.

Her phone went straight to voicemail so I left a message. Then I turned off my phone, checked no one was watching, and blew the Chubb out of the door with a fireball. Nightingale’s got a spell that pops out a lock much neater, but I have to go with what I’ve got.

I waited for a moment in the doorway — listening.

Ahead of me stairs went up, to the right open doors led to the living room, another door at the rear of the house and beyond the bead curtain at the far end, I assumed, the kitchen.

‘Police,’ I shouted. ‘Is anyone in the house?’

I waited again. When you go in mob-handed you go in fast to overwhelm any resistance before it can get started. When you go in alone, you go slowly with one eye on your line of retreat.

Another vestigium — a burnt meat, rusty barbecue smell overlaid with another whetstone scrape of the blade and a flash of heat.

Much as I wanted to, I couldn’t hang about in the doorway all day. I darted across the hall and checked that the living room was clear. Then, going as quietly as I could, I slipped back out and into the back room.

What had obviously once been a dining room had been transformed into a de-facto workroom. There was an antique drop-leaf table that had been colonised by a key-cutting machine and boxes of blanks and French windows that looked out over a patio and sodden strip of lawn. An old-fashioned mahogany sideboard with a framed imitation Stubbs hung above it — horses in a brittle eighteenth-century landscape.

The room had the scent of metal dust but I couldn’t tell if that was vestigia or the aftermath of key-cutting. The silent hallway behind me was making me nervous so I moved on quickly to the kitchen.

Clean, old-fashioned, a couple of mugs and a single blue china plate on the yellow plastic drying rack.

The burnt-meat smell was less evident here and when I checked the cupboards and the upright fridge they were well stocked but nothing had spoiled.

I was getting a feel for the house. A single man rattling around in a family-sized home — his parents’? Or was there an estranged wife and kids? My mum, had this been her house, would have filled it with relatives or rented out the rooms or probably both.

I went back out into the hall and stood at the bottom of the stairs.

The rusty barbecue smell was stronger and I realised that it wasn’t a vestigium at all — it was a real smell.

‘Mr Mulkern,’ I called because at some distant point in the future a defence barrister might ask me if I had. ‘This is the police. Do you need assistance?’

God, I hoped he was out visiting his sick mother or down the shops or getting a curry.

At the top of the stairs I could see the top of a half-open door that, barring a radical departure from typical design, would lead to the bathroom.

I put my foot on the stairs and flicked out my extendable baton to its full length. It’s not that I don’t trust my abilities, particularly with impello, but nothing says long arm of the law like a spring-loaded baton.

I went up the stairs slowly and as I did the smell got worse, the coppery overtones mingling with something like burnt liver. I had a horrible feeling I knew what the smell was.

I was halfway up the flight when I saw him, lying on his back inside the bathroom. His feet were pointed at me, black leather shoes, good quality but worn at the heels. They were turned outwards at the ankle in a way that’s very hard to maintain unless you’re a professional dancer.

As I climbed the final stairs I saw that he was staring straight up. What bare skin showed on his face, neck and hands was a horrible pinkish brown like well cooked pork. His mouth was wide open and stained a sooty black and his eyes were a nasty boiled white. Even this close up, though, the stench remained just bearable — he must have been dead for a while. Days, maybe. I didn’t try to check his pulse.

A well trained copper is required to do two things when he finds a body, call it in and secure the scene.

I did both of those while standing outside in the rain.

Murder is a big deal in the Met. Which means that murder investigations are really fucking expensive, so you don’t want to be launching into one and then find that the victim was merely pissed out of their box and having a lie down. That actually happened once, although truth be told the guy was in a coma from alcohol poisoning — but it wasn’t a murder, that’s my point. To prevent the Murder Investigation Teams’ senior officers being dragged away from their all-important paperwork, London is patrolled by HAT cars, Homicide Assessment Teams, ready to swoop down to make sure that any dead people are worth the time and money.

They must have been close because the team pulled up less than five minutes later — in, of all things, a brick red Skoda that must have been painful to sit in the back of.

The DI in charge of the car was a rotund Sikh with a Brummie accent and a neat beard that was going prematurely grey. He went upstairs but came down less than five minutes later.

‘They don’t get much deader than that,’ he said and sent the DCs away to tape off the scene and prep for house to house. Then he spent a long time on his phone, reporting back I guessed, before beckoning me over.

‘Are you really with SCD 9?’ he asked.

‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘But we’re supposed to be called the SAU now — Special Assessment Unit.’

‘Since when?’ asked the DI.

‘Since November,’ I said.

‘But you’re still the occult division, though?’

‘That’s us,’ I said although ‘occult division’ was a new one on me.

The DI relayed this down his phone, listened, gave me a funny look and then hung up.

‘You’re to stay here,’ he said. ‘My governor wants a word with you.’

So I waited in the porch and wrote up my notes. I have two sets, the ones that go in my Moleskine and the slightly edited ones that go into my official Met issue book. This is very bad procedure, but sanctioned because there are some things the Met doesn’t want to know about officially. In case it might upset them.

DCI Maureen Duffy, as I learned she was called, pulled up in a Mercedes E-class soft top convertible which seemed a bit male menopause for the slender white woman in the black gabardine trench coat who got out. She had a pale narrow face, a long nose and what I thought was a Glasgow accent but learned later was from Fife. She spotted me in the doorway but before I could speak she held up her hand to silence me.

‘In a minute,’ she said and went inside.

While I waited to become a priority I called Lesley for the second time and got her voicemail again. I didn’t bother calling Nightingale on the mobile I’d got him for Christmas because he only turns it on when he wants to call someone — the new technology being strictly there for his convenience, not anybody else’s.

Forensics had now arrived and the house to house team were already knocking on doors by the time I was summoned back upstairs.

DCI Duffy met me at the top of the stairs, high enough up to view the body but far enough down not to get in the way of a couple of forensic types in blue paper suits who were working the scene.

‘Do you know what killed him?’ she asked.

‘No, ma’am,’ I said.

‘But in your opinion the cause of death is something “unusual”?’

I looked at Patrick Mulkern’s boiled lobster face, considered saying something flippant, but decided against it.

‘Yes, ma’am,’ I said. ‘Definitely unusual.’

Duffy nodded. I’d obviously passed the all-important keeping your gob shut test.

‘I’ve heard you have a specialist pathologist for these cases,’ she said.

‘Yes, ma’am,’ I said.

‘You’d better let him know we have work for him then,’ she said. ‘And I’d like your boss to be there as well.’

‘He’s a bit busy.’

‘Don’t take this the wrong way, Peter, but I’m not interesting in talking to the monkey — just the organ grinder.’

But I did take it the wrong way, although I was careful not to show it.

‘Can I have a look through his stuff downstairs?’ I asked.

Duffy gave me a hard look. ‘Why?’

‘Just to see if there’s anything. . odd,’ I said and Duffy frowned. ‘My governor will want it done before he gets here.’

‘Is that so?’

‘Yes, ma’am,’ I said.

‘Fine,’ she said. ‘But you keep your hands to yourself and anything you find comes to me first.’

‘Yes, ma’am,’ I said meekly and headed downstairs to call Dr Walid who unlike some others I could mention picked up his phone on the first ring. He was suitably pleased to have a new body to examine and promised to be down as soon as he could. I left another message on Lesley’s voicemail, stuck my hands in my pockets and got down to work.

My dad reckons he can tell one trumpeter from another after listening to three notes and I’m not talking about just differentiating your Dizzy Gillespie from your Louis Armstrong. He can tell early Freddie Hubbard from late Clifford Brown. And that ain’t easy, I can tell you. My dad can do this not just because he’s spent years listening to these guys solo, but because he makes it his business to know the difference.

Most people don’t see half of what’s in front of them. Your visual cortex does a shit load of imaging processing before the signal even gets to your brain, whose priorities are still checking the ancestral savannah for dangerous predators, edible berries and climbable trees. That’s why a sudden cat in the night can make you jump and some people, when distracted, can walk right out in front of a bus. Your brain just isn’t interested in those large moving chunks of metal or the static heaps of brightly coloured stuff that piles up in drifts around us. Never mind all that, says your brain, it’s those silent fur-covered merchants of death you’ve got to watch out for.

If you really want to see what’s staring you in the face, if you want to be any kind of half-decent police officer, then you’ve got to make it your business to look at things properly. That’s the only way you’re going to spot it — the clue that’s going to generate the next lead. Especially when you have no idea what the clue is going to be.

I figured that whatever it was this time, it was probably going to be located in the makeshift workshop stroke dining room. Still, I checked the front room and the kitchen first because there’s nothing worse than finding out later that you walked right past a major lead. Or, and I’d only been on the job a week when it happened, a suspect.

Lesley got him — in case you’re wondering.

Whatever else the lately dead Peter Mulkern had been, he wasn’t a slob. Both the kitchen and living room were tidy and had been cleaned to an adequate, if non-professional, standard. This meant that when I donned my gloves and pulled the sofa away from the wall I found an assortment of pens, bits of paper, fluff, a boiled sweet and thirty-six pence in change.

It was one of the bits of paper, but I didn’t realise the significance of it until later.

The back room was the only part of the house that had any books, two stand-alone 1970s MFI bookshelves stuffed with what looked like technical manuals and trade magazines with names like the Independent Locksmith Journal and The Locksmith. Since joining the Folly I’ve had to study a lot of suspect bookshelves and the trick is not to glance. You methodically work your way along each shelf starting with the top one and working your way down. This netted two issues of Loaded magazine from 2010, an Argos Christmas catalogue, a paperback copy of Tintin’s Destination Moon, a folder full of invoices that dated back to the 1990s and a National Trust booklet on the wonders of West Hill House in Highgate. I left the booklet half off the shelf so it was easy to find again and popped back into the living room to check one of the scraps of paper again.

It was still there, an old-fashioned ADMIT ONE paper ticket of the kind that gets torn off the end of a roll by, say, volunteer guides at one of the smaller National Trust properties. A property like West Hill House in Highgate. I made notes but left the ticket where I found it. The Met gets pretty fundamentalist about chain of evidence in murder cases — not only does it help prevent any anomalies that might be exploited by a defence barrister, but it also removes any temptation to ‘improve’ the case by the investigating officers. Or at least makes it much harder than it used to be.

I took the time to check the sideboards in the work room and, with permission from DCI Duffy, checked the upstairs rooms — just in case Peter Mulkern had been an enthusiastic visitor of National Trust homes and had a pile of guidebooks stashed by his bed. Nothing. Although I did note a copy of Cloud Atlas on the bedside table.

Once I was satisfied I wasn’t going to make a fool of myself, I persuaded one of Duffy’s mob to run an IIP search looking for crimes at National Trust properties in London. The response was pretty instantaneous — a break in at West Hill House Highgate — unusual because the custodians didn’t know what was stolen. I was just noting down the crime number when Nightingale tooled up in the Jag. I went out to meet him and as we walked back to the house I filled him in as to how I got here.

He paused to examine the burnt hole in the front door.

‘Is this your handiwork Peter?’ he asked.

‘Yes sir,’ I said.

‘Well at least you didn’t set the door on fire this time,’ he said. But his smile faded as he stepped into the hall. He sniffed and I saw a flicker of memory on his face — quickly repressed.

‘I know that smell,’ he said and went up the stairs.

Negotiating the interface between the Folly and the rest of the police is always tricky, especially when it’s the murder squad. You don’t get to be a senior investigating officer unless you have a degree in scepticism, an MA in distrust and your CV lists suspicious bastard under your hobbies. Nightingale says that in the good old days, which for him is before the war, the Folly got immediate and unquestioning co-operation. No doubt with plenty of forelock tugging and doffing of trilby hats. Even post war he said there just weren’t that many cases and the senior detectives back then were still much more relaxed about paperwork, procedures or, for that matter, evidence. But in modern times, where an SIO is expected to match up specific villains to specific crimes and faces an exterior case evaluation if they don’t, you have to use a certain amount of tact and charm. A detective chief inspector is, by definition, more charming than a constable. Which is why Nightingale went up the stairs to talk to Duffy. He wasn’t gone that long — I think it’s the posh accent that does it.

I asked him if it was definitely one of ours.

‘I’ve never seen anything quite like it,’ said Nightingale. ‘Judging from the smell I’d say he was cooked.’

‘Could you do that? I mean, do you know how?’

Nightingale glanced back up the stairs. ‘I could set you on fire,’ he said. ‘But in that case his clothes would have burnt as well.’

‘Was it magic?’

‘We won’t know until Dr Walid has had a chance to examine him,’ said Nightingale. ‘I didn’t sense any vestigia on the body.’

‘How else could it have happened?’ I asked.

Nightingale gave me a grim smile. ‘Peter,’ he said. ‘You of all people should know that it’s dangerous to reason ahead of your evidence. You say you sensed a vestigium at the door?’

I described what I’d felt — the cutthroat razor terror of it.

‘And you’re sure you recognised it?’

‘You’re the expert,’ I said. ‘You tell me. Is that likely?’

‘It’s possible,’ said Nightingale. ‘I wouldn’t have been able to tell at your stage of apprenticeship. But I was only twelve at the time and easily distracted.’

‘Easily distracted by what?’

‘Peter!’

‘Sorry,’ I said and told him about the break in at West Hill House in Highgate.

‘A somewhat slender thread,’ said Nightingale.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘But what if I was to tell you that West Hill House was the home of Erik Stromberg the famous architect and German expatriate.’

Nightingale’s eyes narrowed. ‘You think the book might have belonged to Stromberg?’

‘He got out before Hitler came to power,’ I said. ‘What if he brought some secrets with him? What if he was a member of the Weimar Academy?’

‘London was full of expatriates in the run up to the war,’ said Nightingale. ‘German or otherwise. You’d be surprised how few of them turned out to be practitioners.’

‘That book had to come from somewhere,’ I said.

‘True,’ said Nightingale. ‘But Whitehall had a bee in its bonnet about German infiltration and hence much of our manpower was devoted to spotting them and rounding them up.’

‘They were interned?’

‘They were given a choice,’ said Nightingale with a shrug. ‘They could join the war effort or be shipped over to Canada for the duration. A surprising number of them stayed. Most of the Jews and the Gypsies, of course.’

‘But you might have missed some?’

‘It’s possible — if they kept quiet.’

‘Perhaps that’s where Mr Nolfi’s mother learnt her party tricks,’ I said. ‘She might have been an expatriate. I didn’t think of asking in the hospital.’ Tracking down the exploding granddad’s antecedents was yet another thing that was still sitting in the low priority things-to-be-done pile. It might have to be moved up.

‘Indeed,’ said Nightingale. ‘I’d like you to have a look at the house.’

‘Today?’

‘If possible,’ said Nightingale which meant, yes absolutely today. ‘I’ll liaise with the Detective Chief Inspector and Dr Walid, when he arrives. Once you’ve done that you and Lesley can join us for the post-mortem — which I suspect will be instructive.’

‘Oh joy,’ I said.