The Babylon rite

20

Mornington Terrace, Camden Town, London

DCI Mark Ibsen was standing in the scruffy beer garden of a large London pub near Regent’s Park. It was a frigid afternoon in mid-December; the beer garden was deserted. But he wasn’t here to drink, he was here to watch.

Larkham came into the garden with a couple of plastic coffee cups. He handed one over to his boss, then sipped from his own cappuccino.

Ibsen stayed silent, and staring. Larkham followed his superior officer’s gaze: which was directed over the wall of the beer garden, to the curtained sash windows of 74B, Delancey Street, a first-floor flat in a long, early Victorian terrace, which diagonally faced this pub across the road, and also the deep railway tracks that led down to Euston Station.

Larkham frowned, and swallowed his coffee. ‘What do you think, then, sir? We haven’t got a warrant yet.’

‘I know.’

‘Not that always stopped you in the past.’

Ibsen chuckled; but his mood was as sour and cold as the day. They were tracking down all the people they had seen in the photo with the tattooed man. Most of them had been located: more rich kids, all with the same boring story. I can’t remember that guy. He was probably a friend of Patrick Klemmer. No, I don’t know anything else.

Only a couple of people in the photo were yet to be traced and interviewed. And one of them was Imogen Fitzsimmons, twenty-five years old, an aspiring TV researcher, who lived here in Delancey Street. She was known as a party girl; she was a purposeful socializer. Yet she hadn’t been seen for two days. No one knew where she was; she hadn’t called in sick to work; she did not have a holiday scheduled and she had missed several professional and social engagements. Her close friends said she was maybe out of town with a secret boyfriend — could that be the tattooed man?

Ibsen stamped his feet against the cold, staring at the closed and curtained windows of 74B. ‘Larkham. Tell me again about the secret boyfriend. How secret? If he’s secret how come her pals all know about him?’

Larkham opened his notebook. ‘They don’t know for sure. Could be they’re just guessing. Her best friend is Lucinda Effingham, also in the photo. We interviewed her this afternoon. Effingham told me that in recent weeks,’ Larkham tilted the notebook to read better, ‘“Imogen had been acting strangely. Going off in the evening, not telling me where. We all reckoned she might be having an affair, she seemed happy, but she was furtive, and evasive. We speculated that she maybe met a married man at work.”’

Larkham closed the notebook. Ibsen tasted some of the rapidly cooling coffee, and put the cup down on the beer garden table. ‘Neighbours not seen or heard anything?’

‘Not in two days.’

‘Her phones…?’

‘Going unanswered. Landline and mobile. We will have a warrant by tomorrow. The landlord has keys and we can pick them up tomorrow morning.’

DCI Ibsen scowled. ‘No. This is wrong. This is giving me the collywobbles, Larkham. I think it’s the damn curtains.’

‘Sir?’

‘They are just too bloody shut. Look at them.’

‘Too… shut… sir?’

‘Yes, too bloody shut. When you go away for a weekend you don’t close curtains with such emphatic exactitude, do you? I think someone is in there, someone who wants to be in the dark.’

‘But-’

‘Come on — sod the warrant. This is a life-threatening situation. Call for some back-up.’

For the third time that day they asked the downstairs neighbours at 74 to open the external door, profusely apologizing as they did.

Larkham and Ibsen ran up the communal stairs to the flat on the first floor. 74B. They paused on the communal landing.

‘Armed response will be here in a few minutes-’

‘I don’t think she’s going to be armed, Larkham.’

Ibsen stepped back and vigorously kicked at the door; it nearly gave at the first attempt; Larkham kicked it a second time and the door swung open without protest, the lock cleanly snapped.

The flat was black as midnight, made very deliberately dark. And yes, Ibsen could sense a human presence: someone was either here or had been here, very recently. A slightly poisonous fragrance — of something ominous — hung in the stifled air.

Larkham punched the lights on and they gazed around.

The first thing they saw was the blood on the hallway floor, and on the opposite wall. Little seasonings of blood, like sprinkled cinnamon: blood spatter from a serious wound.

‘Jesus,’ said Larkham.

There was more blood in the living room: it was smeared on a white china mug, daubed in childish fingerprints on a magazine, and on a TV remote. Most bizarre was a mouth-shaped splodge of blood on a mirror at head height; as if someone wearing far too much scarlet lipstick had kissed the glass.

‘So,’ said Ibsen, ‘where is she? The blood is contained. She’s in the flat. She must be. She’s still here-’

They searched the bathroom and found trailing smears of blood on the shower curtain and dark crimson blood drops in the toilet bowl. The bathroom floor was oddly clean.

The kitchen revealed something worse: a sink covered with blood, as if a small mammal had been crudely slaughtered over the plughole.

Larkham pointed with a pen. ‘What is that?’

It was a sliver of flesh, lying on the bottom of the metal sink, surrounded by thick gobbets of blood. Was the flesh human? It was so mangled it was impossible to tell.

Ibsen didn’t know whether to feel sick or scared. ‘Larkham — the bedroom — she must be in there.’

The bedroom door was at the end of the landing. They pushed against it, but it seemed to be obstructed by a rucked carpet: a second, heavier shove got it open.

Ibsen didn’t know what he had expected to find in the bedroom; he didn’t care to imagine it. But he certainly didn’t expect to find nothing.

Yet there was no one in the bedroom. No body, no suicide victim, nothing. The bedsheets were liberally marked with blood, a white cotton T-shirt was also rusted with drying blood. The room was in chaos: a mirror was smashed, a TV was lying on the carpet, drawers had been flung open and clothing scattered, as if a fetishist had been seeking underwear, but there was no one here, and no one in the bedroom. Lots of blood but no body?

The flat was empty.

‘So what happened?’ Ibsen gazed at his own crazed reflection in the shattered mirror. ‘The guy came here and took her? Why did no one see this? Or hear anything?’

Larkham was opening the floor-to-ceiling wardrobes. The wardrobes were big; the whole flat was large and airy. This was a rich girl, yet another rich kid, with her own flat in a pricey part of town and lots of nice clothes, and she was very probably dead and yet her body had disappeared.

‘Sir.’

‘What?’

‘Jesus…’ Larkham’s voice was uncharacteristically choked. ‘She’s here, sir.’

Ibsen stiffened his resolve, and came across the room. If Larkham was shocked by the sight of the body, it had to be pretty bad.

It was far worse than pretty bad.

Imogen Fitzsimmons’s body was huddled in a corner of her own wardrobe, kneeling on the floor staring at the expensive coats.

In her stiff, blood-caked left hand the girl clutched an old-fashioned cut-throat razor, stained with blood.

The body was clothed: she was wearing tight skinny jeans and white socks. And a black T-shirt with a small Guinness logo. The blackness of the T-shirt made the body look almost normal — from the neck down. It had evidently absorbed a lot of blood but the redness didn’t show. And before she died, this young woman had obviously used the razor to progressively mutilate her face.

Ibsen closed his eyes as he felt the vertigo of nausea hit him. He calmed himself with two deep breaths, then looked again at poor Imogen Fitzsimmons’s face.

It was difficult to work out quite what she had done to herself in her final hours, so elaborate was the cutting. She seemed to have sliced off her own lips, which gave the horrible impression that she was grinning fiendishly: like a skull. She had also cut open her nostrils, or at least tried to. The damage was too complex to see which parts of her nose remained intact. The earlobes were missing: drools of blood trailed down each side of her neck.

Most disturbing was the way she had diligently sliced out the flesh of her cheeks, as if she had been trying to skeletonize herself. The skin and flesh had been so drastically cut away that the teeth and the bone were partly visible through the holes in the side of her face. She was half pretty young woman, half bleeding, horrific skull.

Larkham was pale and perspiring. ‘How could anyone do that? To themselves?’

It was too much. The two officers gazed at the corpse. Helpless, dwarfed, and mute.

Then, as they stared at the white face of Imogen Fitzsimmons, the girl’s head tilted, and she blinked, and a trickle of blood ran from her lipless mouth, as she desperately tried to mumble a word.

She was still alive.