Dead Line

SEVENTEEN

‘Chacun à son goût,’ said Constable Debby Morgan. DI Cullen scowled at her, wondering whether to admit he hadn’t a clue what this meant. She liked using foreign phrases, but then she had a degree, like so many of today’s recruits, and he supposed they couldn’t help showing off a bit.

Not that he really minded with young Morgan, for he had a soft spot for her. He got a bit of stick from some of his colleagues on the subject, and it was true that Debby Morgan was an attractive girl, with big blue eyes, cute features, and an athletic figure. But DI Cullen had been married twenty years and had three daughters of his own, one almost as old as Debby. He was fond of his junior colleague, but in a completely avuncular way.

Now he said, ‘Goo is the word for this one.’ He pointed to the open file on his desk, with the photos of the corpse that had been found in a box in one of the City’s churches. ‘This bloke met a sticky end all right.’

‘Weird to think he did it to himself.’

‘I’ve seen weirder.’ Which was true – he’d worked vice for six months once in Soho, and had never got over what some people got up to. He looked at young Morgan, thinking she had a lot to learn about life. ‘So what are you thinking?’

She shrugged. ‘The obvious, I guess. Who put him in the box?’

DI Cullen nodded. ‘There’s that, of course, but does anything else strike you?’ She looked blank, so he supplied the answer. ‘Someone else put him in the box, but the death was self-inflicted. So why didn’t this other person help the victim? The pathologist said death wasn’t instantaneous at all – the poor bugger took several minutes to go. Where was our good Samaritan then?’

‘Maybe they didn’t know the victim,’ she offered hopefully.

‘If you found a dead stranger in a church, what would you do? Call the police? Run for help? Try the kiss of life? Or would you cram him in a box and walk away?’

‘I see what you mean.’

There was a knock and the door to Cullen’s office opened a foot. A young sergeant stuck his head in.

‘Excuse me guv, but I thought you’d want to know.’ The sergeant looked at Constable Morgan with frank admiration.

‘What is it?’ demanded Cullen shortly.

‘We had an anonymous call giving a name for the man in the box.’

‘And?’

The sergeant looked at his pad. ‘Alexander Ledingham.’

‘Who is?’

The sergeant shrugged and looked at Cullen helplessly, as if to say ‘beats me’. ‘Lives in Clerkenwell, according to the caller.’

‘What else?’

‘That’s it. They hung up.’

‘Write down everything you can remember about the caller,’ said Cullen, standing up abruptly, and the young sergeant nodded and withdrew. Cullen looked out the window, where the sky was turning a threatening shade of grey. ‘Grab your coat,’ he said to Morgan. ‘It looks like rain.’

They ended up going to Clerkenwell twice, the second time with a search warrant and a locksmith. The previous afternoon, with the help of the local police station, they had located the residence of one A. Ledingham, in a brick warehouse that had been converted into new flats. No one answered the buzzer, which made sense if Ledingham was indeed the man in the box. Two neighbours said they hadn’t seen him for a couple of days. He was a new tenant, who kept himself to himself. Neither recalled ever seeing any visitors to Ledingham’s flat.

This time DI Cullen and Constable Morgan went straight to the flat on the third floor. They waited impatiently while the locksmith went to work; five minutes later the flat’s front door sprang wide open.

A powerful odour greeted them as they stepped into the small hall. ‘Phew,’ said Debby Morgan, holding her nose and stepping into the blue haze that filled the flat. Straight ahead of them was a large, wooden-floored open area that seemed to be dining room and sitting room combined. It was sparsely furnished, a sofa and two wooden armchairs at one end, a cheap-looking dining table and four chairs at the other. On the walls, just visible through the haze, were framed posters, bright Op Art geometric constructions.

DI Cullen screwed up his eyes and stepped forward into the small kitchen, which seemed to be the source of the smell. He saw with alarm that the electric cooker was on, and opening the oven door he was greeted by a cloud of black smoke. Once he’d stopped coughing he looked again. There seemed to be something in a roasting tin.

‘Let me,’ said Debby, turning off the cooker at the wall. Holding her handkerchief in front of her face and grabbing a pair of oven gloves, she reached carefully into the oven and pulled out the tin, which contained the remains of some unidentifiable roast, now shrunken to a smouldering black heap. She dumped the entire pan without ceremony into the sink and turned on the cold tap. A loud hissing noise resulted and clouds of steam rose up and gradually began to disperse as Cullen switched on an extractor fan.

‘What do you think that tells us?’ asked Cullen.

‘That he’s not much of a cook?’

DI Cullen shook his head. ‘It means he was planning on coming back here. Whatever he was getting up to wasn’t meant to take very long.’

‘This is one of those ovens with a time delay,’ said Morgan, who was examining the controls. ‘So he could have set it to come on at a certain time.’

‘Whatever. He was expecting to come home and eat it.’ He was looking round. A book case on one wall held a row of paperback novels, and several larger books on computer graphics. That must be his work, thought Cullen, and he noticed a laptop open on a small desk in one corner.

‘Let’s look in the bedroom,’ he said, pointing to a door in the corner of the room. ‘We can do a detailed search here later.’

He opened the door gingerly, and the cautious look on his face turned to astonishment as he peered in.

‘What on earth?’ exclaimed Constable Morgan as she came in behind him.

The room was dominated by an enormous bed, neatly made, with brass posters at its feet and a canopy supported by intricately carved wooden posts above the head. Dangling from one of the brass uprights was a pair of silver handcuffs.

DI Cullen said, ‘He must have been a right weirdo.’

‘But a religious weirdo,’ Debby said, pointing to the wall facing the bed, where a painted triptych of wooden panels hung. Christ was on the cross, depicted in gory detail; blood dripped from his side and crucified hands and feet. The panels were cracked and faded – antique, thought DI Cullen; he’d seen things like it in a church in Italy, where his wife had insisted on going one summer, overruling his preference for Marbella.

That wasn’t the only strange thing: on the other walls were dozens of architectural drawings, held up by masking tape. They were all of churches, many of them detailed floor plans, heavily annotated in black ink in a small, precise hand, notes mostly, but also a series of lines that converged near the altar, marked by arrows and large Xs.

If the bed hadn’t been there, you would think this was the office of an ecclesiastical architect. But there was nothing sacred about the overall effect; sinister, rather.

Shaken, DI Cullen opened a cupboard door in the corner of the room, half-expecting to find a skeleton hanging from a rail. He was relieved to discover only clothes, neatly folded on shelves, with a few jackets and shirts on hangers.

Constable Morgan had put on a pair of latex gloves and was searching through the drawers of a pine dresser. She turned with a triumphant look on her face, holding up a little black book. ‘Don’t tell me,’ said Cullen, ‘you’ve found a guide to black magic rituals.’

‘Not so exotic. I think it’s his diary.’ She flipped through the pages, then suddenly stopped, holding it out for Cullen to see.

Each page covered one week and Morgan had stopped at the current week. There were only two entries. Sunday said 1 pm, Marc. Which sounded like a lunch date. But Tuesday made Cullen’s eyes open wide. St B. 8 p.m.

‘What was the name of the church where they found this bloke?’

‘St Barnabas.’

He pointed at the diary with an angry finger. ‘There it is.’ Morgan continued going through the diary. There was no other mention of ‘St B.’ But on several pages she found initials that could be churches – ‘St M’, ‘St A’ and ‘Ch Ch’ appeared.

Cullen gave an appreciative whisthe.

‘What are you thinking?’ asked Constable Morgan anxiously.

He looked into her big blue eyes and smiled. ‘You’ve done well, Debs. Drop that in an evidence bag and let’s take a look at Mr Ledingham’s computer to try and find out where he worked. Maybe someone there can explain all this…’ – he raised a baffled hand to take in the room.