Lies Sleeping

7 Brand Loyalty

Supernatural creature of the night or not, this was a DSI, death or serious injury, while in contact with a member of the police force and therefore triggered a mandatory referral to the Independent Police Complaints Commission under Section 2 of the Police Reform Act 2002.

That meant it was the Department of Professional Services that arrived to secure the scene and take statements while we waited for the notoriously slow IPCC investigators to get their arses in gear. I knew a couple of the people from the DPS from my many, many visits there and they all shook their heads upon seeing me.

We all knew that this was going to be a full-on independent inquiry conducted exclusively by IPCC investigators, so we didn’t try and co-ordinate our stories or anything foolish like that. It was obvious to me that Lucy had done the right thing, both legally and morally, and any attempt to put the fix in would create more problems than it solved.

Or at least that’s what I told myself, while I waited to be interviewed.

The police don’t like being policed any more than your average member of the public does. But I’ve had more experience of being investigated than most officers my age and have learnt to sit still, be polite and give short, precise answers to any questions. Do not get clever, do not volunteer information and do not offer a helpful critique of your questioner’s interviewing technique – no matter how justified it might be.

One bonus is that you get to keep a copy of the interview tape so you can hone your own interviewing technique, anticipate further lines of inquiry, or auto-tune your responses while you wait for your contact to get back to you.

I did ask if there was any word on Richard Williams’s cause of death. He’d just been lying there, eyes closed, mouth open, left arm limp across his chest, the other lying by his side. There was no sign of violence that me and Guleed could see and definitely nobody else in the room.

‘We’re still waiting on the PM,’ the IPCC investigator told me, and sent me home.

The IPCC were going to want a pathologist of their own choosing to do the PM. Never mind about what they were going to make of the Pale Nanny’s teeth, what were they going to make of Doctors Vaughan and Walid?

So I went back to the Folly, which has the advantage of being both home and work at the same time. Guleed went home because she has, she says, a deep and mystical understanding of the work-life balance. A concept I once tried to explain to Nightingale with the aid of the big whiteboard in the visitors’ lounge. I think he grasped it in the end, and said he was all in favour as long as I understood that this in no way applied to apprentices.

‘And I’ve had quite enough time doing nothing,’ he said.

The main shift in the Annexe was just leaving as I settled into the Tech Cave to see if I couldn’t tie up some loose ends. In deference to the spirit of the balance, however, I had a can of Special Brew while I was doing it.

The Annexe had already produced an IIP check of Gabriel Tate and John Chapman and had determined that both of them had left the country a year earlier. Chapman had left no forwarding address, although Border Force had a record of him boarding a flight to JFK. Gabriel Tate had been much easier to track, not least because he had a webpage advertising his brand new company in Brisbane, Australia. I fired off a formal request for assistance to Australia, who would be fast asleep. It was the middle of the day in the States so I called a contact of mine at the FBI to see if she could help.

I was going through the action list to see if there was anything I could do sitting down when I got a call from Dr Walid, who invited me to an autopsy. I said that I couldn’t think of a better way to spend my evening and called Nightingale to see if he wanted to come.

‘I think I’d rather stay here,’ he said.

‘Here’ being the Whitechapel Bell Foundry, where Nightingale was keeping an eye on the bell just in case. I knew he was hoping that Martin Chorley would turn up in person to try and get his bell back. He’s gone one round with Chorley already and, whatever he says, he’s dead keen to go round two. And, as an operational plan, it had a certain merit. Providing collateral was kept down to – what, a two-to -three block radius?

I doubted Martin Chorley would be that stupid – I also could hear a rhythmic metallic clanking sound down the line.

‘Are you forging?’ I asked.

‘I thought,’ said Nightingale, ‘that since there was all this good metal lying around, I might lay down some enchantments – just in case.’

So it was off down the Horseferry Road to the Iain West Memorial All You Can Stomach Forensic Suite, which is state of the art and a good place to impress outside pathologists who have been requested by the IPCC. Out of tact I waited until the IPCC lot had buggered off, and as a result this was my favourite kind of autopsy. The kind where the conclusions have already been drawn and the bodies have all been sewn up and covered tastefully with a sheet.

Dr Vaughan and Dr Walid were waiting for me in the space between the bodies with faint smiles that were only sinister because of the context. At least I hope it was the context. We started with the cause of death determination for Richard Williams.

‘We don’t have one,’ said Dr Vaughan. ‘For what it’s worth, we can call it heart failure. But that’s not particularly useful, now, is it? Just about everything is heart failure when you get down to it.’

Cause of death can be hard to determine even when the victim has a knife sticking out of their forehead, let alone with no visible wounds or gross pathology. Half a litre of Richard Williams’s blood was now distributed among labs from Euston to Cambridge, but unless you know what toxin you’re looking for, you can’t screen for it. Besides, I could tell from the ever more sinister smiles on Dr Vaughan’s and Dr Walid’s faces that they had a theory – and not one that involved a neurotoxin.

‘Voila,’ said Dr Walid.

He twitched the sheet off Richard Williams’s leg to reveal a large abstract tattoo – almost one of those faux Maori sleeves, but not. The lines were too angular and yet very familiar. I thought one patch looked fresher until I realised that its darkness was not fresh ink but burnt flesh.

‘Burnt down to a depth of two centimetres,’ said Dr Walid. ‘We were just about to excise it so we could have a closer look.’

‘You can watch if you like,’ said Dr Vaughan.

I barely heard her because I’d just recognised the shape of the tattoo. A long upright stroke with two right-hand strokes going diagonally up.

‘G for Gandalf,’ I said.

Specifically G in Tolkien’s imaginary Dwarvish runes or actually, as I learnt from a bit of googling, his imaginary early Elvish. I explained this to the doctors, which at least had the effect of wiping that sinister smile off their faces.

‘And I suppose you’re fluent in Elvish?’ said Dr Vaughan, by way of retaliation.

‘No,’ I said. ‘But G is what Gandalf stamps on his fireworks. Gandalf is the wizard, by the way.’

‘I know who Gandalf is, thank you,’ said Dr Vaughan.

‘I think we can assume that this is Martin Chorley’s work,’ said Dr Walid.

He was right. Martin Chorley really did have a sick sense of humour. He’d once labelled a demon trap in Elvish script.

‘And the rest of the tattoos?’ asked Dr Vaughan.

‘It’s all Dwarvish iconography,’ I said. ‘From the films, though, not the books.’

‘We’re still waiting on the lab work,’ said Dr Walid. ‘But Jennifer here thinks there may have been metallic particles under the skin.’

‘A small demon trap, I was thinking,’ said Dr Vaughan. ‘Or something working along the same principles. I’d like to see if your boss knows something about it.’

I said I’d set up a meeting.

‘If there was a remote trigger of some kind,’ I said, ‘it must have quite a short range. Why else would Chorley sacrifice his killer nanny as a distraction if he didn’t have to get close himself?’

Which meant someone was going to have to go back over the hospital CCTV looking for Chorley. More work for some unlucky sod in the Annexe, or perhaps lucky sod, if they had no social life and needed the overtime.

‘We’re calling her Charlotte Green,’ said Dr Vaughan primly.

‘What?’

‘Well, it’s a bit unfeeling to keep referring to these young women as “killer nannies” and the like,’ she said. ‘Whatever they did in life they’re in my care now and I don’t think it’s too much to expect a bit of respect.’

‘Why Green?’

‘Because I didn’t want to use Gamma as a category name,’ she said. ‘And Charlotte because she’s our third Jane Doe.’

The first being the young woman with the unusual teeth who’d died at the Trocadero Centre.

‘Alice Green,’ said Dr Vaughan.

The second being the weird half-man, half-tiger person who’d tried to kill me on a roof in Soho and got himself shot in the head for his trouble.

‘Barry Brown.’

‘You’ve started a new classification system, haven’t you?’ I said.

‘Well, we couldn’t go on with what we had, could we?’ said Dr Vaughan.

Dr Jennifer Vaughan had taken one look at the various cataloguing methodologies for the fae and come to the same conclusions I had – that they were bollocks. She’d been threatening to devise her own system ever since. Now, for solid historical reasons, I’m not comfortable with dividing people up into groups. But the medical profession cannot sleep easy until it has a category for everything.

‘It’s all about instilling confidence,’ Dr Walid had explained once.

Apparently patients much preferred doctors who sounded like they knew what they were talking about – even when they didn’t. Perhaps especially when they didn’t.

‘If it helps, think of it as provisional,’ said Dr Vaughan.

So Brown for the chimera – the cat-girls and tiger-boys, and God knows what else Martin Chorley’s sick little brain might have come up with.

‘Brown for Beta, right?’

‘Just so,’ said Dr Vaughan.

‘And Green for Gamma.’

‘Oh, he is bright, isn’t he?’ said Dr Vaughan to no one in particular. ‘Subjects that are not the product of modification, or at least modification of their phenotype.’

‘So she was born the way she is?’ I said. ‘How can you tell?’

‘Why don’t we have a look?’

She tweaked the sheet back to expose poor Charlotte Green down to her navel. The horribly familiar Y incision had been sewn up, although I noticed the cut had wiggled slightly to avoid bisecting any bullet wounds.

‘We won’t have the genetic results back for a week or so, but I’m willing to bet good money that we won’t find any evidence of chimerism,’ she said.

So no genetic manipulation at the cellular level.

I asked her how she could be so sure, which got me an approving nod from Dr Walid.

‘From this,’ said Dr Vaughan.

I watched, wincing, as she reached into Charlotte’s mouth and pulled her tongue out to its full extent. It was at least twenty centimetres long.

‘Now, as you can imagine,’ said Dr Vaughan. ‘You can’t just a fit a tongue like that into someone’s face – there’s no room for it. If you detach her lower jawbone and have a good look down her throat you’ll see it’s substantially different from the human norm.’

Which didn’t necessarily mean anything, since the human norm was a spectrum that went from smaller than you’d expect to larger than you can imagine.

‘Vastly different,’ said Dr Walid, who’s had this argument with me before. ‘But very similar to Molly’s. As is the dentition.’

‘Molly let you look in her throat?’

‘Not me,’ said Dr Walid, who had never got close to Molly with so much as a tongue depressor.

‘She’s perfectly reasonable if you explain yourself properly,’ said Dr Vaughan. ‘She let me have a quick look with a bronchoscope. Admittedly, it took a little while for her to get used to it, and I did have to get a second bronchoscope after she bit through the first one.’

‘Did you get a tissue sample as well?’ I asked.

‘Of course,’ said Dr Walid. ‘That’s what we’ll use as a comparison for genome sequencing. But at an anatomical level, the positioning of the hyoid bone and the larynx are identical between Molly and Charlotte.’

‘Longer tongue, more control, and extra room to keep it in,’ said Dr Vaughan.

And if Charlotte the killer nanny was the same as Molly, then the chances were that she was the same as the so-called High Fae I’d encountered in Herefordshire. We couldn’t call them gammas. It made them sound like bad guys in a cheap first-person shooter – and what if they found out?

‘In that case,’ I said, ‘can we change the surname to Greenwood?’

‘Whatever for?’ asked Dr Vaughan.

‘Because one day we might want to share this data with them,’ I said. ‘And it will be slightly less embarrassing.’