Deadline

Twenty-nine

It had just turned twenty past ten when Bolt arrived at the address Mo had given him – a bedsit on a residential road of rundown whitebrick Georgian townhouses on a hill a few hundred yards north of Tufnell Park Tube station. There were a dozen or so police vehicles as well as an ambulance double-parked on both sides of the street, blocking it off entirely, and small clusters of onlookers, some of them in dressing gowns, standing at the edges of the cordon talking quietly among themselves, clearly both appalled and fascinated by the crime that had taken place in their midst.

Bolt's taxi stopped a few yards short of the bright yellow lines of scene-of-crime tape.

'Christ, what's going on here?' asked the driver as he took the fare.

'Murder,' Bolt told him, and got out of the car.

He showed his ID to one of the uniforms ringing the cordon and was directed to a van where he put on the plastic coveralls all officers are obliged to wear when entering crime scenes. He was exhausted, the remnants of the two pints of Stella he'd had with Jack tasting sour and dry in his mouth.

Mo met him in front of number 42. He looked a little queasy. 'It's pretty bad in there, boss. You might want some of this.' He produced a tube of Vicks and Bolt dabbed some under his nostrils.

Bolt sighed. The last thing on earth he wanted to see right now was a body, and it wasn't essential to the inquiry that he did so since he could easily get the details of what happened from other people, but he wasn't the sort to shirk the unpleasant aspects of the job. 'Let's get it over with,' he said, following Mo through the open front door and into a dusty foyer with plastic sheeting over the bare stone floor. Long threads of cobweb hung from the corners of the ceiling and there was a stale, airless smell, mixed with something else. Something much more pungent.

'She's down here,' said Mo, walking past a threadbare-looking staircase and down a dark, very narrow hallway to an open door at the end, the smell of decay getting stronger with each step.

By the time they reached it, it was pretty much unbearable, and Bolt had to stop himself from gagging.

'Jesus,' he whispered.

'It looks like she's been dead for days,' said Mo, moving aside to allow him access.

The room was small and cramped, dominated by an unmade double bed which took up well over half the floor space. Flies were everywhere, their buzzing irritatingly loud as they vied for space with the four white-overalled SOCOs inside, who were testing the various surfaces for DNA, and taking samples from the body. Bolt could get no further than the doorway, which suited him fine.

A woman lay on her side in an approximate fetal position, her feet and ankles wedged under the bed. She was wearing a pink T-shirt with writing on it that Bolt couldn't make out, and a lacy black thong. Her body was bloated and discoloured where the first stages of decomposition were beginning to take effect, but the maggots that were eating her up on the inside had yet to burst out. From his basic knowledge of forensics, Bolt knew this meant that although death had definitely not been recent, it was also unlikely to be more than four days ago, particularly in comparatively warm weather such as they'd been having.

He stood still for several seconds, staring at her dead, ruined body. The abject humiliation of death depressed and horrified Bolt. It always brought home his own mortality, and the sure knowledge that one day he too would end up like this. Nothing more than rotting flesh, all thoughts and memories of a lifetime gone.

'Have we ID'd her yet?'

Mo nodded. 'That's why I called you. Her name's Marie Aniewicz. She's Mrs Devern's cleaner.'

'Jesus Christ,' he whispered, tensing. 'How old was she?'

'Twenty-five,' answered Mo. 'She'd worked at Mrs Devern's place for just under three years.'

He thought of Emma, only eleven years younger, and was unable to stop himself from picturing her here in the same position.

'It's no age, is it?'

'No, it's not.'

Bolt took a deep breath, temporarily forgetting the thick stench of rancid meat.

'What a waste.'

No one said anything for a while. The SOCOs continued to work methodically, as if this was just a routine task for them, which of course to a large extent it was.

'Do we know how she died yet?'

The SOCO nearest to Bolt, who was kneeling down beside the body taking photographs, heard the question and looked up.

'Looks like a single stab wound to the heart,' he said, his voice muffled by his face mask. 'No other obvious injuries on her.'

He gently lifted her right arm with his free hand and touched a thin tear in her T-shirt at roughly the level of her third and fourth ribs. A small dark patch on the T-shirt, not much bigger than two fifty-pence pieces, marked the spot. The fact that there was so little blood, either on the body or anywhere else in the room, suggested to Bolt that she'd died quickly.

'How was she found?' he asked.

'Like this,' answered the SOCO, 'but with the duvet covering her.'

'It's an unusual position to be in for someone who's just been stabbed. I'd have thought she'd be more sprawled out.'

'It looks like she was stabbed, then placed in this position almost immediately. You can see from the lividity that this is where she's been lying most of the time since death.' He pointed to her underside which was darker than the rest of the body where the blood had slowly collected there.

Bolt nodded, and looked around the room. There were no signs of a struggle. The two lamps on either side of the bed were still upright, as were the handful of framed photos and the pot plant on the chest of drawers against one wall. Bolt didn't look at the photos. He didn't want to see what Marie Aniewicz had been like in life.

'Looks like a professional job,' he said when he and Mo were back outside on the pavement, breathing in the comparatively fresh air, glad to be out of the stifling tomb that was the young cleaner's bedroom.

'No one heard a thing, and there's no sign of forced entry, either to the house itself or her bedsit. And it's been difficult to get hold of witnesses. The other ground-floor bedsit's empty, and the rest of the people in the house are apparently illegals, so they've made themselves scarce. The local cops got an anonymous call reporting a nasty smell coming from her room about six o'clock this evening.'

'Does Barry know? And Tina?'

'I got hold of Barry, and he told me to get you down here. He's at some charity function tonight. He wants a full update in the meeting tomorrow morning. I couldn't get hold of Tina. She left before I found out about this, and now she's not answering her phone.'

Bolt exhaled air through his nostrils. 'This puts a whole new perspective on things, doesn't it?'

'Well, there's no way it's unconnected. We haven't got an exact time of death yet, but according to the doctor who examined the body she's been dead somewhere between three and five days. About the time of the kidnapping.'

'There's only one motive for killing the cleaner, then: they found out the alarm code from her and got access to Andrea's house. Which is how they would have placed the trip switch on the front door and found out what Emma was planning on Tuesday. So it's not an inside job.'

'And Phelan's probably not involved.'

'Almost certainly not. Killing the cleaner was a risk. You'd only do that if you had to.'

'So, either they've got Phelan as well as Emma . . .'

'Or he's dead.' Bolt thought of Andrea, wondered how much more bad news she could take. 'They've already killed two people that we know about. There's no reason why they won't have made it three.' Or four, whispered an uninvited voice at the back of Bolt's mind. The fact that the kidnappers could plan to murder a cleaner just to get access to a house meant that it was highly unlikely they'd lose too much sleep over the prospect of killing Emma.

Bolt wiped a hand across his brow. The night was unseasonably warm for September, and he was conscious that he was sweating again.

'These guys really mean business, Mo.'

Mo nodded slowly, his dark eyes full of sympathy. 'I know. But as you've said, they took a risk killing the cleaner. Someone somewhere might have seen something. Sooner or later they're going to make a mistake. Remember that, boss. No one's luck lasts for ever.'