‘What have you got?’ Dougie said, moving closer.
‘Treasure trove here, Boss,’ said Gibson, grinning.
‘No shit?’
‘Mainly weapons. But we have a chest full of gold. Ingots. Jewels. Rings. Even some doubloons, would you believe.’
Dougie grinned.
‘Don’t let CID near that. They’ll half-inch the fucking lot.’
‘No way, Boss, that’s my pension plan.’
Dougie laughed. A booming laugh that invited friendship.
In the dazzling light generated by the halogen bulb, Dougie looked around. The attic space had brick walls that were blackened from extensive fire damage. There were more than a dozen boxes on the floor, also charred. Some of them had burned through, spilling out their contents. Dougie could see swords and guns lying on the floorboards of the attic. The floor was sticky with some kind of white substance, as if this were an insect’s nest. Dougie bent to one knee and touched the sticky substance with a finger.
‘Wax,’ said the female CSI. She was name badged: SHARON PARKS, Crime Scene Investigator.
‘What sort of wax, Sharon?’ Dougie said.
‘Candle wax, at a guess,’ Sharon said.
Dougie pictured it: an attic full of candles. No windows, just scores of flames flickering with every gust of breeze through the joints of the floorboards. That explained the absence of a ceiling light.
‘The candles caused the blaze here?’ he speculated.
‘Smell,’ said Gibson.
Dougie took a deeper sniff. He could now detect a faint tang of petrol. The attic had been torched.
‘Is there fire damage elsewhere in the house?’ he asked.
‘Not so far as I know,’ Gibson said.
‘But there may be.’
‘I’ll get the guys to run some tests.’ Gibson started e-berrying immediately.
Gina arrived in the attic space, her head appearing through the hatch with the startled look of someone entering a new world. ‘Lair?’ she called out, and her voice echoed.
‘Storage space,’ Dougie suggested.
She clambered up, trod carefully over the charred beams, and peered down,
‘Weapons,’ she pointed out.
‘He was a collector, by the look of it.’
Dougie picked up a sabre from the floor, where it had nestled among scores of antique blades and Glock pistols.
‘We haven’t dusted for prints,’ Sharon pointed out.
‘You can read two layers of prints can’t you?’
She acknowledged, with a cheerful shrug, that she could and would.
Dougie swished the sword. He’d been a fencer in his youth and handled the blade well. It had a fabulous balance. Dougie guessed it was valuable, and had a provenance of interest. Someone famous would have duelled with this, or taken it to battle. That was the psychopath mindset again.
‘The gold?’
Gibson led him through the rear end of the attic. A mahogany chest that could have belonged to Bluebeard had been jemmied open. Inside, yellow gold bars and clusters of coins shone.
‘The coins are sixteenth century, by and large. And the ingots are vintage,’ said Gibson. ‘They predate the ending of the gold standard.’
‘Which means?’
‘Pre World War I.’
Dougie nodded. An attic lair full of ancient weapons and historic gold; Gogarty was full of surprises.
‘Get Tony up here, and get him to start logging the gold and the weapons,’ Dougie said. She’d already e-berried the Action before he reached ‘logging’.
Gina looked around at the treasure trove in which they stood. ‘How much is all this worth?’ she asked quietly.
‘Millions?’ hazarded Gibson.
‘Then why? With all his money? Why?’
No one had an answer to that one.
Chapter 25
Emilia was at Trestle 2, examining and measuring bones. This had been, she brooded, a catastrophically bad day, even by her standards.
First of all, at breakfast, she’d made a fool of herself with Marco. By flirting with him so ineptly he hadn’t even realised she was flirting. He hadn’t even realised she was talking to him, because of her failure to make eye contact,
Par for the course for her, but still galling.
Then she’d made an ever bigger fool of herself in the eyes of Professor Denton, by not realising there were four bodies, not three, on the trestle. That particular cock-up was all the fault of that bloody child-detective. The one with the ridiculous almost-stubble on his chin. So bloody young he looked like he ought to be in school uniform!
Emilia had subsequently learned, from internet sources, that the young cop was nineteen years old, and a prodigy. He’d graduated from Oxford with a Congratulatory First Class BA (Hons) at twelve years of age, and had achieved an on-line PhD by the age of fourteen. He spoke six languages, played the violin well; and was widely considered to be one of the cleverest people in the world.
Bastard!
It was so galling. The little pipsqueak had taken one casual look at the bones and instantly realised the truth that had totally eluded her, after her many hours of careful analysis. To make it worse, the young copper hadn’t even blamed Emilia for her blunder. Which just showed how unimportant she was. People didn’t even realise that it mattered when she screwed things up.
And so for the rest of the day, Emilia had lost herself in work. Her usual recourse at times of deep embarrassment. But – and this was some consolation – shortly after lunch a new body had been found. A full skeleton, buried shallowly beneath the rose bushes.
After the crime scene photographs had been taken, the body had been carefully placed on a trestle. And she was now using a magnifying lens to study the epiphyses on the distal end of the femur of this new discovery, Exhibit IS5.
Marco strolled across and joined her.
‘Be my guest,’ she said, flustered, as he started photographing the white howling skull of IS5. Immortalising its horror.
‘Grisly, isn’t it?’ he said cheerfully.
Emilia waved a hand, dismissing the thought as too obvious to be entertained. ‘I’ve seen worse,’ she bragged, with a naïve arrogance that even she found annoying.
It was true though. Several of her previous cases had involved recently dead cadavers. And the stench of putrefaction and the need to preserve and capture the assorted larvae within the corpses had been a strain. These, by contrast, were just old bones.
Despite her dismissive tone, however, it dawned on her that Marco was still standing next to her; and that his handsome and manly face bore an interested look. Emilia started to panic. She had a vivid flashback/recollection of what had happened earlier that day, soon after the failed-flirting moment. She’d become so nervous talking to Marco that she’d babbled incoherently, for ages. Then she’d clammed up. She was so tongue-tied, she thought he’d have to use the Heimlich manoeuvre on her just to get her to utter an actual word. Now she feared she was going to fuck it up all over again.
That was her curse, she knew. Good looking and charming men frightened her to death, and she was unable to be at ease with them. But unattractive brainy geeks bored the hell out of her. So she constantly felt trapped between rival worlds, neither of which she could ever inhabit.
‘When?’ His reply disconcerted her. ‘I mean, when have you seen worse?’
‘Harper Road. The gang massacre.’
‘Ah.’
‘We solved that one with a combination of DNA analysis and necromancy,’ she bragged.
Marco offered up an impressed expression.
Christ, he was good to look at.
She wished she had the gift of repartee. But she knew if she started down that road she’d end up resorting to withering sarcasm of a kind that, in her experience, deflated all masculine ardour.
‘You did that one?’ he asked.
‘Not on my own,’ she admitted. ‘I was, well, the rookie of the team really.’ She brushed he
r hair out of her eyes. Should have worn it up. On a work day. Stupid. Stupid! Forgot. She kicked herself, mentally. She tried to re-focus.
She realised she was chewing the inside of her cheek, and tried to stop herself. She knew it was a horrible habit. It made her look like a squirrel with nuts in its mouth.
Marco was smiling bashfully at her. She was painfully aware that he was gorgeous. He had that young careless beauty she’d always envied.
Awkward. Awkward! Didn’t know where to put her hands.
‘You should pin your hair up,’ he told her.
‘I don’t have –’
As if by magic, he produced a hair band. An old, frayed cotton band, nothing special. But there it was.
It made sense, of course. Marco had a ponytail himself; it was obvious he’d have his own cache of hair bands. And it was entirely sensible of him to help her put her hair up, to assist the efficiency of her cataloguing work.
What could be more sensible!
It was a hot day. There was sweat on her brow.
Marco stood behind her and expertly corralled her unruly locks with his strong hands, and slipped the scrunchy around it, creating a bushy tail. Then he lightly brushed the hair on the top of her head with his palm, as if stroking a wild mare’s mane. For that brief moment, Emilia’s loins clenched with anticipated union. She was weak with desire.
Then she turned around and approved his beauty again. And caressed her own hair where he had patted it.
‘You should be a girl,’ she drawled, offensively.
She wanted to die: why did she say that?
But Marco grinned. ‘Lunch maybe?’
‘I’ve got sandwiches.’
‘Me too. I’ll call for you at one,’ he kidded. Or was he kidding? Did he mean it?
Marco moved across the garden to take more photographs of the pit. The works manager and his team of navvies were taking out the support poles at one end, so they could broaden the extent of the search.
Emilia had heard the Ripper rumours, but all that made no sense to her. Four of the bodies were Victorian, admittedly, insofar as it was possible to date bones as recent as that even with spectrographic ossuary analysis. But this fifth skeleton she was inspecting was certainly more recent. A brooch found inside its ribs was, Emilia had been told, commonly sold in the 1920s but not before. That was according to the Exhibits Officer, Tony Williamson, who seemed to really know his stuff.
Emilia resumed her cataloguing. She took measurements of the major bones of IS5 on the osteograph board, which would allow her to make an estimate of the height of the body when alive. She inspected the pubic symphyses, and the closure of the cranial sutures, to determine the age of the body when it died. She measured the narrowness of the sciatic notch, to determine the sex of the body. She took note of the amount of bevelling of the glenoid in the scapula. She did the carbon dating of the bone itself, though that was a bit of a reach, and then a spectrogram. And she took multiple DNA swabs.
The corpse was, in Emilia’s view, female, probably in her sixties, with considerable osteoarthritis. The wife of whoever owned the house?
She glanced across at Marco, who was still taking photos, panting slightly with concentration. His forensic jumpsuit was pulled down, and tied at the waist. He was wearing a skimpy vest that bared his arms and shoulders and betrayed the outlines of his muscular abs. His arms, Emilia noticed with some intensity, were tanned and muscular and rich in strokeable hairs. His eyes were crinkled, backlit by the sun. She allowed herself another secret smile. There were perks to this job.
Emilia continued her work.
Nick Draper, the forensic odontologist, a short and tubby man with very little small talk, joined her on IS5 and started work on the teeth. He smelled strongly of coal tar soap; there were lots like him these days, with all the skin allergies around.
‘Massive tooth decay,’ he murmured into his mike, not even acknowledging Emilia’s presence with a nod or smile. ‘Arched wear marks on the incisors, indicating habitual pipe usage.’
‘A woman smoking a pipe?’ Emilia queried.
‘Common in the nineteenth century,’ Draper said.
‘This is 1920s, we think.’
‘It was not unheard of then either. Excuse me?’
Vexed at his rudeness, Emilia made a face.
She mulled over Draper’s findings. A woman who smoked! Hard to believe, really. Emilia herself had barely even seen a cigarette. Incense had now taken the place of tobacco in the rituals of growing up. Inhaling the aromas of Jupiter through a hookah was a rite of passage for every teenager.
She glanced again at Marco as covertly as she was able, which wasn’t very. He noticed and smiled. She looked away, sheepishly.
The sun was making her forehead peel, and she wished she’d put on suncream. The smell of old bones made her feel slightly nauseous. As she worked, she reflected on the rumours that Gogarty had murdered more than a hundred people in all. She knew that Forensic Science plc stood to earn -
Emilia coughed. An unexpected spasm that was almost like a sneeze.
A moment later she smelled something. A whiff of something noxious, a hint of a repellent aroma. Rotten eggs? Or was she about to come down with diarrhoea? Or maybe she was smelling her own vomit? Emilia felt queasy.
‘Are you okay?’ Marco asked, looking concerned, and moving closer to her. Very much closer to her in fact.
Very close indeed. So close she could smell him. The musky tang of his skin. The hint of jasmine cologne tinged with rosemary that he had dabbed on his neck and cheeks and hands.
She forced a smile. He smiled back, with a fond and direct and unblinking gaze. She realised - for by now the evidence had become irrefutable - that he liked her.
Her smile bloomed true, unforced, and rich in joy.
‘I’m fine,’ she said.
Chapter 26
Next door to the Donningtons were the Mehtas. All seven of them.
The house was clogged with the rich alluring aroma of cooking spices, ingrained in the walls and carpets and very soul of the house from years of curries and kormas and home made poppadoms. Tom found it refreshing.
Mr Mehta was from Mumbai, and had the fondest memories of his home city. Tom loved the place too; he’d been there with his Aunt Harriet when he was eleven. And then he’d visited it again in the course of his round the world study tour, in the year after his doctoral graduation, as a passionately curious fourteen-year-old.
The house of the Mehtas was a sub-continent upon an island in a street full of strangers: that was how Mr Mehta himself put it. Tom enjoyed his turn of phrase.
Mrs Mehta was a large and mostly silent and entirely beneficent presence, who sat in an old armchair that appeared to have grown out of her body, and who smiled at Tom from time to time indulgently, as if he were her scamp of a boy. While Mr Mehta was a grey-haired patriarch with a silver tongue who bragged ceaselessly and charmingly about his five children and twenty-two nephews and nieces; he would have listed them all too, if they had allowed it.
Mr Mehta admitted he had known ‘Andrew Bishop’ aka Gogarty, but only very slightly. They had met from time to time in the park while walking their dogs, and had passed the time of day as dog-walkers tend to do.
Tom and Fillide sifted their five witnesses patiently – that included the Mehtas’ three children over the age of eight, but not the two toddlers - then Tom nodded to Fillide. They were getting nothing new here. Time to go.
But as they were leaving, Mr Mehta rested a hand gently on Tom’s arm. And he said softly: ‘He called me Paki once.’
‘Bishop called you a Paki?’
Mr Mehta nodded.
‘As a joke. He said, I should set up a Paki shop, it would make me a fortune. Ha ha. Of course, I pretended not to take offence. For I know some people use the word without meaning to be offensive, even now older people do it out of habit, you can’t mind too much. But my point is: he knew very well that I am a Hindu and an Indian, and not a Pakis
tani at all. He’d asked me many times about my homeland, we had many long chats in the park, so I know that he knew. I am not anti-Pakistani in any way shape or form, but I like things to be proper. I am Indian.’
‘He was taunting you.’
‘So it felt,’ Mr Mehta said, sombrely.
‘His idea of fun.’
‘Indeed.’ Mr Mehta hesitated. Then he aired another dark memory. ‘He told me once, as we were chatting in the park, that my elder daughter Pakshi would end up going out with a rich footballer, because of her prowess with cooking. And he laughed, ha ha, as if I should be pleased. But I knew what he meant by cooking. He meant “spit-roasting”.’ A glint of rage in Mr Mehta’s eyes. ‘Another time, he told me my wife was a simple soul. He meant stupid, you see.’ Mr Mehta glanced at his wife; she shrugged, with a flash of temper. She hadn’t known that and didn’t like it. But she said nothing. ‘After that, I stopped talking to him. He was not a nice man.’
‘Clearly not.’
‘I am glad he is no longer my neighbour. I hope he dies in jail as a very old man, full of regrets, of a painful and profoundly disfiguring cancer.’
Tom was swamped by the anger in Mr Mehta’s words. He hadn’t expected it, any more than he had expected Sylvia’s terror at what-might-have-been. Not for the first time, he realised there was much he didn’t know about human beings.
‘We should go,’ said Fillide, oblivious to Tom’s psychodrama.
Mr Mehta smiled. Pleased to have helped in some little way to clarify the evil of Gogarty.
‘What happened to the dog?’ Tom asked, suddenly remembering what the Donningtons had told him. ‘Bishop’s dog?’
Fillide was impatient; this was hardly relevant.
‘The pug, you mean? A nice dog. Ugly as a breed but very sweet. It would always lick my hand. And it would pant like an old man, indeed, yes it did. Yes, I liked that dog. But then one day it wasn’t there, and I asked after it, and Bishop told me that he had killed it and eaten it,’ said Mr Mehta, ‘in a stew. Then he said, ha ha, that was just a joke, he didn’t mean it at all, the dog had been knocked down by a car. Now I think – well.’
Hell on Earth Page 27