Death Angels

26

MACDONALD TOOK CROYDON ROAD NORTHWEST THROUGH Mitcham, Morden and Merton, then headed west on Kingston Road through Streatham to Wandsworth and Clapham. Mile upon mile of red and gray brick row houses were interrupted by parks, schoolyards and stores clumped earnestly together. Thruways had become cross streets. Double-decker buses peered out over the other vehicles and lurched around corners. Cars as far as the eye could see, drivers sitting on their horns. More stores with flower and vegetable stands out front. It went on and on.

“ London is more than just Soho or Covent Garden, and all this is my territory.” Macdonald gestured to the world outside.

All that’s living, dead and everything in between, Winter thought. “It’s a big place,” he said.

“It’s more complicated than that. Did I mention that Croydon is the tenth largest town in England?”

“Yes, the first time you called.”

“I should be keeping my hands off Clapham. I’m invading the turf of my colleagues on the southwest side. But it’s my old district and the bigwigs thought I was best suited for this investigation.”

“What did your colleagues on the southwest side have to say about that?”

“The murder of a white foreigner? They pounded me on the back and then laughed behind it.”

“So you’re a popular guy.”

“More than ever.” Macdonald swerved to avoid a fruit cart that had just rolled out of an alleyway to the left. He glared at the black man who emerged behind it, clinging to the handle as if he were being pulled along.

“Did I tell you that this so-called thoroughfare is named Kingston Road?”

“Yes.”

“It’s no coincidence.”

They drove through Tulse Hill. Winter heard a whistle and saw a train pass on a viaduct above them, then clatter to a halt in front of the station building.

“Karen and Winston Hillier live in this neighborhood,” Macdonald said.

Winter nodded. “I want to meet them.”

“I’ll do what I can, but Winston just got back from the hospital after a nervous breakdown. It happened when I was at their house.”

Macdonald drove west on Christchurch Road and crossed the intersection. “The street on the right is Brixton Hill,” he said. “Follow it and there you are in the Caribbean.”

“Ah, Brixton.”

“Have you ever been there?”

“No, but I’ve heard about it.”

“ ‘ The Guns of Brixton.’ The Clash.”

“What?”

“The Clash.”

“Is that a band or something?”

Glancing over at Winter, Macdonald laughed and hit the brake to let a taxi pull away from the curb.

“The Only Band That Matters.”

“Not my kind of music.”

“I knew right off there was something wrong with you.”

Macdonald’s police radio chattered constantly with names of districts Winter had never heard of. He could hardly make out the words. The woman at the emergency hotline coordinated the calls as if she were reciting from a script.

“Brixton is a fascinating place,” Macdonald said. “Lots of my friends live there.”

The traffic was backed up on Poynders Road.

“I was thinking about the passenger lists on my way to London.”

“Hmm.”

“It’s a hell of a job.”

“That Jamaica case I told you about before? We went through three weeks of passenger lists, and that was bad enough.”

“We asked for them anyway.”

“Same here, but if-I’m saying if-you go to another country to kill someone, you’re hardly going to fly under your own name.”

“Unless the murderer is actually looking to get caught.”

“So all we have to do is eliminate the names on the lists one by one until we reach the murderer’s, and he’ll be sitting there waiting for us to knock on his door?”

“Something like that.”

“It’s an idea. Have you talked to a forensic psychologist about it?”

“Not yet. It’s just one possibility.”

“Let me tell you a story.”

The traffic began to move again, forming a semicircle around a car that had been pulled over to the shoulder and was being hoisted onto a tow truck.

“It was a Ford Fiesta too, did you see that car?” Macdonald nodded at the side of the road.

“Of course.”

“There was a murder in Peckham last Christmas, and all we had to go on were a few witnesses who saw a man drive away from the scene of the crime around the time it was committed.”

“Okay.”

“Some witnesses said that the car was silver, another that it was brightly colored. One guy swore that it was a Mark 1 Fiesta. He didn’t see it but he heard it drive away in the night and said, ‘I’ve owned Ford Fiestas all my life, and I know one when I hear it.’ ”

“Was he trustworthy?”

“As far as we could tell. So we decided to check all Mark 1 Fiestas. First we concentrated on southeast England. We identified ten thousand cars. No way. We didn’t have anywhere near the staff to track all of them down.”

“So you decided to go by color?”

“Good thinking. We settled on silver and narrowed it down to eighteen hundred cars. Still an impossible task, considering we only had ten people and they were following up other leads at the same time.”

“Hmm.”

“So we zeroed in on Peckham- East Lewisham, to be exact. That left us with about a hundred and fifty cars. We didn’t get very far, because some other information came to our attention that solved the case. As it turned out, the car was green. But, sure enough, it was a Fiesta.”

“In other words, you can trust what people hear more than what they see.”

“Yes, but my main point is that burying yourself in a bunch of lists isn’t necessarily the way to go. Still, we keep them on hand in case we need them.”

Winter nodded.

“Once we have a suspect, we can check the lists and say, Aha, he flew the day after his victim.”

Winter heard voices from the hallway but not a sound from the adjacent rooms. A car zoomed from Cautley Avenue onto Clapham Common South Side. The afternoon sun sliced through the window and lit up the opposite wall, adding a luster to the dry blood that made Winter close his eyes and see Per in front of him. He had walked through that door over there, and the remnants of his life were now splattered on the walls and floor. Winter was sweating. He loosened his tie. He had a sour taste in his mouth from the cigarillo and the top-fermented ale.

“Do you want to be alone?” Macdonald asked.

“Yes, if you don’t mind.”

Macdonald turned to leave.

“Close the door, please,” Winter said.

He shut his eyes again and saw the photographs. Macdonald had shown them to him at his office just a few minutes earlier. The similarities to what he had encountered in Gothenburg were frightening. Per was sitting in the same position, slumped against the chair with an eerie nonchalance, his back to the door as if he were reading a book. Opening his eyes, Winter walked over and stood behind the chair. Macdonald had left it exactly where it was when Per had sat in it.

Had Per been placed here for a reason? Had he been tied to the chair so that he could watch something enacted on the wall? Was he still alive at that point?

All of the victims had rope marks on their bodies, but it was as if the rope was there to keep them from falling off the chair, not to prevent them from escaping. No bruises or wounds to indicate a struggle, no signs that the thin strands had frayed.

Had Per been forced to watch another murder? A movie? Geoff had been killed at around the same time in Gothenburg. Could the murderer really have made his way from one city to the other that quickly? Maybe. Assuming it was the same person. Were there more murders that they didn’t know about? Was Per watching a video of one of them just before he died? Did it matter which way he was facing?

Winter looked at the floor. There were traces of blood that would have thickened even while the murder was taking place, sticking to shoes, footprints swirled across the linoleum as in a dance.

He closed his eyes again. Was music playing? Macdonald hadn’t found a CD in the room, or anything to play one on. Nobody had heard music coming from the room, no screams. All that was left was this deafening roar from the walls and floor that almost made Winter stagger backward. When he opened his eyes, the sun was gone. The walls were dull and unseeing, and if it hadn’t been for the shrieks, he would have thought that they no longer remembered what they had witnessed.

He went out into the hallway. Macdonald was waiting by the stairs.

“It’s going to happen again,” Winter said.

They stood outside the Dudley Hotel. Clapham Common pulsated with activity on the other side of the street, animating Battersea, Clapham, Balham and Brixton. Winter saw schoolchildren scattered around a pond and playground, their uniforms merging into large blue and red rectangles as the teachers lined them up.

People just home from work were walking their dogs. The wind was still gentle in his face, and the scents of spring, more powerful here than north of the river, quickened his senses. The sun painted flames on the clouds between the trees in the park.

“Much of Clapham is upper middle class,” Macdonald said. He had followed Winter’s gaze. “There’s money here, and you’re likely to find most of it around the Common. I worked the area for several years as a detective inspector, and I’m reaping the rewards now. Or paying for my sins.”

Two teenage girls passed by. Their backpacks, half as big as they were, wobbled a foot above their heads as they turned left and vanished behind the buildings.

“And we still don’t know what Per was doing in London,” Winter said.

“Unless his parents have come up with something new.”

“Not a thing.”

“Maybe he wanted to spend a few days checking out the music scene.”

“Music?”

“From what I understand, reggae is in again. Which makes Brixton the place to go. That might be what he had in mind.”

“We found some reggae in his room at his parents’ house but no evidence that he was a big fan.”

“It still could have been one of his reasons for coming here.”

“In that case somebody should have remembered seeing him when you made your inquiries after the murder.”

“People around here don’t admit to having seen anyone.”

“They’re scared?”

“Yes.”

“Even in such extraordinary circumstances?”

“Nobody’s behavior changes just because something like this happens. People are genuinely afraid of each other. Brixton and parts of Clapham are rife with drugs. A lot of the crime is tied to crack.”

“So no one admits to having seen a white kid who went around looking for music?”

“No, but it’s always possible that they actually don’t remember him. Whites, mostly teenagers, pour into Brixton every day on the train from Victoria Station. It’s the music that brings them.”

“And having once spent so much time here hasn’t done you any good?”

“Not yet anyway.”

Winter ran his fingers across his forehead. The sweat had dried, matting down his hair. All the new impressions had compounded his exhaustion from the flight, and the fear he had felt in Per’s hotel room lingered in him like a chill.

He was hungry, which felt inappropriate somehow. He hadn’t eaten anything besides some chicken salad and a jelly roll on the plane, and the ale had given him a headache. Or maybe it was just weariness.

“Have you had anything to eat, by the way?” Macdonald asked.

“Only on the plane. A little snack wouldn’t be such a bad idea.”

“I know just the place.”

Macdonald drove east on Clapham Common South Side and onto Clapham High Street. After a minute or two, he turned left, continued another block and a half and squeezed his Vauxhall into a parking space by a restaurant with awnings and three outdoor tables.

“It’s called El Rincon Latino. The owner is one of my old contacts-friends, I should say.”

They walked up half a flight of stairs and through the open glass door. The restaurant curved past the bar on the left.

The whole place was lit by glass walls facing Clapham Manor Street. Fresh flowers were everywhere, but the aroma was of herbs and chili. The only other customers were a handful of people at the bar.

They sat for a long time over grilled salmon, broiled shrimp with garlic, queso fresco, olives stuffed with anchovies and chili peppers, steamed cornbread, cuttlefish in black sauce, wild mushrooms and grilled eggplant with potato wedges. The food was served in small clay pots.

“We investigators have an easier time of it these days,” Macdonald said, putting his glass down.

“How so?”

“About a year and a half ago, they set up permanent teams, and I’m in charge of one of them. The way it used to be, if there was a murder in Clapham, they’d put together a team from around the city, but then some of London was suddenly undermanned. Investigators were sent back and forth to different stations to try to cover all the bases. It was a big mess.”

Winter heard voices clamoring at the bar.

“Now they’ve divided Greater London up into four quadrants, and I work the one called Four Area Southeast. It has a hundred and three inspectors assigned to eight different teams, each with three detective inspectors and nine assistants, not to mention civilian backup for index cards, computer runs and that kind of thing. I head up one of the teams, and we work together on every case that comes our way.”

“Then the trick is to have the right people.”

“I’ve made it my business to have the best. Inspectors from the south side, a couple from the Yard.”

“Murders only?”

“Yep. When you’re covering an area with upwards of three million people, that’s more than enough to keep you busy.”

“Makes sense.”

“There were seventeen murders in the southeast area last year and we solved every one of them. Probably because we were able to take our time. It was rougher going the year before-forty-two or forty-three murders, I have no idea why so many.”

“Did you solve all of them too?”

“All but one. We’re batting a thousand for the past twenty-one months, not counting the present case. The victim was notorious for breaking into houses in his neighborhood. Everyone who knew him, or had come home to find their bedrooms ransacked, was glad to see him dead.”

“No witnesses?”

“Nope.”

“And now you’ve got another case on your hands.”

“This one isn’t going to get away from us. We’ve dropped everything else. My detective superintendent also oversees another team, and he’s put them on the case too.”

“Twenty-six people altogether.”

“Twenty-seven if you count the detective superintendent, but I’m basically running the investigation.”

“Great, that should shake things up a little.”

“More than you might think. Just wait until the reporters show up tomorrow.”

“You’re an optimist.”

“What do you mean?”

“You said that you wouldn’t let this case get away from you.”

“We’re realists, but we also have faith in what we’re doing, right?”

“It’s a good combination.”

“I’d say it’s a necessary combination. And if you’re finished with that little snack of yours, I’ll drive you back to the station.”