by Andy Maslen
“We got that lot from the girl’s bedroom. Looked like a bloody advert for the Samaritans in there. She was into cutting, anorexia, all that shit. No laptop, before you ask. I did look. But,” she looked at Gabriel, “we know where she went, after leaving home, I mean.”
Susannah looked up and cocked her head on one side. “Well?”
“A cult. The Children of Heaven. It’s a lead, boss. A good one, too.”
“Good work, Chel. Action Man here behaved himself, did he? No amateur detective shit?” Another look flashed between Gabriel and Chelsea. Which, of course, Susannah picked up. You don’t get to be a DCI by missing the bleeding obvious. Especially when it’s passing between your DS and a civilian consultant who’ve just spent the morning together. “OK, spill. Gabriel, you want to fess up or do I have to interrogate you properly?”
“No, Boss. I opened my mouth. Tried to get the dad on-side. But that was it, just a little story about how I was only there because you were throwing all your resources at it.”
“It did work, Boss,” Chelsea said. “He gave us permission to look in Eloise’s room. It was fine, really. Gabriel was good as gold. Well, good as silver, anyway.”
Susannah smiled.
“Look, you did a good job. Don’t worry Gabriel, I won’t bust your balls over it. Just remember who’s in charge. Until you and the boys in black balaclavas go in and kill everyone, it’s a police case. Now, Chels, you check out these, what did you call them, Children of Heaven? Where they’re based. Who’s the fuckwit egomaniac in charge. Modus operandi—yes, Action Man, we do still know a little Latin in the Met, thanks for raising your eyebrows—all the usual.” She pointed at Gabriel. “You’re with me. I’ve got you a nice little office to watch the CCTV footage in—no windows, no air con, and a subtle bouquet of bad breath, BO, and farts. This way, please.”
She manoeuvred herself round her desk and led Gabriel through CID and down a flight of stairs before, as promised, installing him in a windowless cubbyhole furnished solely with a hard plastic chair, a cheap metal and plywood table, and an ageing PC with a flat-screen monitor.
She pointed at the screen, which, when she nudged the grubby black and silver mouse, sparked into life with a grainy but reasonably clear colour still of the north end of Regent Street.
“You use the video controls on screen to play, pause, fast forward, and reverse. You can zoom in by clicking there,” she pointed at a button on the screen, “or pressing Control and F1 on the keyboard. Zoom back out by clicking it again or pressing Control and F2. When you’re finished with each camera and want to go onto the next one, click that arrow there,” another scarlet fingernail tapped against an onscreen button, “and that one there to go back to the previous camera. Any problems, call Roni Shah in IT; she’s brilliant. Number’s on the side of the PC. Questions?”
“None. Actually, one. What do I do when I find something, or when I’m done?”
Susannah flipped one of her police business cards onto the desk’s greasy surface. Call me. I’ll come and let you out.”
With that, she was gone, her heels ringing on the hard floor tiles outside in the corridor. Gabriel puffed out his cheeks, rocked his head from side to side, making the joints in his neck click, and pressed Play.
For the next ten minutes, he watched intently at double speed, eyes flicking across the screen as the figures scurried this way and that, and vehicles sped into view, paused at traffic lights then jumped forward again and out of sight.
Then he sat straighter. That was the silver Mondeo, he was sure of it. The rear windows were blacked out and the time-stamp on the top right corner of the screen matched the time he was having his coffee. He noted the time and the camera number on his phone then clicked on to the next camera.
This one was placed about halfway between Biaggi’s and Oxford Circus. Again, there was a five-minute period when nobody even vaguely resembling the young woman he’d seen passed in front of the camera. But there she was, walking on those stiff, skinny legs towards Oxford Circus, her bulky Puffa jacket a dead giveaway. At one point, she looked straight into the lens of the camera. Her face was a mask of anxiety: skin and muscles around the eyes taut, the eyes themselves wide and staring, the mouth downturned.
“Got you!” Gabriel muttered, noting the time-stamp and camera number again.
Eloise continued down Regent Street until she passed out of the frame. Gabriel clicked onto the third camera. This one was positioned high above Oxford Circus itself. Moments into the footage, Eloise appeared, walking towards a crowded bus stop. She took her place in the loose gathering that constituted a queue and stood, her shoulders hunched, looking left and right at the people around her. They were all intent on their phones and wouldn’t have noticed the terrorist in their midst if she’d been wearing a bandolier of dynamite.
A double-decker bus approached the stop. People streamed off from the middle doors and the gaggle of shoppers, tourists and office workers mounted the platform at the front, before being lost from view. Eloise Payne climbed aboard and disappeared inside the bus that was to be her tomb. Gabriel took another note. Now he was sure. This was the same girl. Her fingerprints were on the ball bearing, and she was on the bus.
Suddenly, he realised what was about to happen on the screen in front of him. His finger hovered over the mouse to stop the video. But he couldn’t do it. He felt compelled to sit there and wait.
Seconds ticked by and he found he was counting aloud, under his breath, as he pictured her final moments.
“One. Two.”
She must have swiped her Oyster Card by now.
“Three. Four. Five. Six.”
She’s climbing the stairs.
“Seven. Eight.”
She’s found a seat.
“Nine. Oh, Jesus!”
The bus blew outwards from the top deck then the picture snapped to grey and back speckles as the force of the blast took out the CCTV camera.
Steadying his breathing, he picked up Susannah's card and called her.
“I’ve got your bomber, Boss.”
23
A Deal Takes Shape
SEATED IN JARDIN’S COMFORTABLE SITTING room, sipping chilled Sancerre from a tulip-shaped glass, Toron once again couldn’t help but admire the sheer hypocrisy of his business partner. The man dressed like a hermit, wore his hair like an Old Testament prophet, and subjected his disciples to all manner of privations. Yet he himself lived a life of indulgence, from his paintings to his wine. What I see when I look at you, compadre, is a smug, egotistical, lecherous con artist. One who I’m sure would double-cross me in a flash if he felt he could get a better deal elsewhere. Better not, though, or you’ll find yourself experiencing one final religious conversion in three inches of water.
Then he noticed Jardin was looking at him with a puzzled expression on his face, brows crinkled, lips pursed.
“What are you thinking about?” Jardin asked, taking a gulp of the wine and wiping the drops from his moustache with his fingers.
“Me? Oh, just how much money we are both going to make from our joint venture out here in your jungle paradise.”
“On which subject, perhaps it is time we talked about a split of the profits. I was thinking—”
“Here’s what I think,” Toron said, leaning forward suddenly and putting his glass down hard enough to make Jardin flinch. “I think I am providing raw materials, management, technical specialists, quality assurance, supply chain, distribution, sales and marketing, plus legal, security, and greasing palms in law enforcement and the DA’s office. You are providing facilities, human resources, and power. That being the case, eighty-twenty in favour of Muerte Eterna once all costs have been defrayed.”
He sat back, crossed his right ankle over his left knee, and spread his arms along the back of the sofa. Waited.
He got to ten before Jardin spoke. What was interesting, to a student of human weakness, as Toron considered himself to be, was the range of emotions that so clearly fl
ashed across Jardin’s face.
Initially, as the ridiculously low percentage proposed to him registered in Jardin’s brain, all the colour drained from his face. His skin took on a waxy sheen and his lips tightened into a thin black line as if drawn on with a pen, or cut with a knife. He stroked that damn beard again as he fought to wrest himself back under control. But still he clearly didn’t trust himself to speak and played for time by staring up at the ceiling as if looking for divine guidance, which, as an atheist, he was unlikely to receive. Finally, he looked back at Toron, who maintained an indulgent smile as he held his hand, palm out, to one side. Well, “Père” Christophe, what now?
Jardin swallowed. “Eighty-twenty?” He laughed, but it was an artificial-sound, mirthless, stagey, too, like he’d learned it from YouTube. “My friend, please do not denigrate our contribution with your management talk of human resources. You know that what we offer here goes way beyond mere ‘facilities’.” He drew air quotes around this word. “I am offering you a secure manufacturing plant with its own airfield, a guaranteed supply of obedient, free labour, a total lack of scrutiny, and,” he smirked again, “I know your loyalty to your wife is total, but for recreation, strictly as a diversion from the pressures of running your considerable business empire, well, let’s just say my female children are more than willing to please. Fifty-fifty.”
At the mention of his wife, Toron felt a surge of anger race through his body. He clenched his fists and his right hand jerked involuntarily towards his pistol.
“You NEVER mention Dolores, you hear me? Madre de Dios, you sanctimonious sonofabitch, if you even breathe her name again I will cut your balls off and make you eat them.”
Any other man would have pissed himself with fear at being spoken to like this by Toron. Jardin merely laughed, this time the genuine, twinkly-eyed variety. He patted the air in front of him. “Calm yourself, my friend, calm yourself. I apologise. A poor attempt at humour, that is all.”
“Seventy-thirty,” Toron said.
“Sixty-forty.”
“Sixty-five-thirty-five. And if anything comes out of your mouth except ‘deal,’ I’m leaving, and your existing contract to fly coke up to Houston is cancelled.”
Toron found himself waiting once more.
That infernal smirk appeared on Jardin’s face again. God, how he wished he didn’t need this man and his posturing.
Jardin took a sip of wine and placed his glass down on the table that stood between them with a soft clink.
“Deal.”
24
DOBAG
BACK IN SUSANNAH'S OFFICE, GABRIEL sat facing her across the desk. Her hunched shoulders and crimped mouth told him a lot about what sort of a day she was having.
“So tell me,” she said. “How sure are you? That it’s her.”
Gabriel thought for a second, aware that the woman sitting behind the cluttered desk was going to have to go in front of the media shortly. If he was wrong, she’d probably castrate him publicly in the middle of Piccadilly Circus.
“I’m certain. The car was the same. She was dressed the same. I tracked her from Regent Street all the way down to Oxford Circus. I watched her get on the bus. And I watched the fucking thing explode, forgive my language.”
“I don’t give a fuck about your language, Gabriel. But I have a full-scale press conference in thirty minutes and if I stand there and say, ‘Oh, yes, ladies and gentlemen, the bomber was a nice little middle-class girl from the suburbs called Eloise Payne,’ and it wasn’t, you will have made me look like a fucking idiot. At which point you are off this case and I don’t care what your Mr ‘Official Secrets Act’ Webster says. Are we clear?”
“As mud.”
“Right.” She stood up and tugged at the hem of her dark green suit jacket. “How do I look?”
Gabriel looked her up and down.
“Smart, stressed, and sexy. But I’d do up that button or it’s going to be your cleavage on the six o’clock news instead of the bomber.”
She looked down and fastened her blouse closer to her neck. Then back at Gabriel, a twinkle in her eye.
“Were you looking at my tits instead of listening to me?”
“Me? Of course not! Consummate professional. Plus, you’re my temporary Guvnor. It wouldn’t be appropriate.”
“Oh, no. Of course it wouldn’t. And I’m sure you’ve never done anything you didn’t think was appropriate in your long and distinguished career, have you? Now, come with me. We’ve got an appointment in DOBAG.”
He stood and followed her out of her office.
“Doe-bag?” he said, once again stumbling to keep up as she swerved effortlessly round swivel chairs, desks and knots of detectives discussing the case.
“Department of Blood and Guts. The Path Lab. You’re going to meet our resident slicer-and-dicer, Doctor Henry Haydn, who might give me the final bit of reassurance I need.”
The inside of the pathology lab was spotless. Every surface gleamed under the brighter-than-daylight LED lighting, whether it was bone-white porcelain, stainless steel or shining plastic. Gabriel breathed in cautiously through his nose, a frown crinkling his forehead. It smelled of disinfectant, mainly, though he could detect a familiar meaty scent underneath the pine. Classical music was playing from a phone docked into a sleek silver speaker on a bench by the door. Violins and a harpsichord. Maybe a Spanish guitar. The wall on the far side of the room, opposite the door, was divided into twelve rectangular drawer fronts, each about four feet wide by two feet deep.
The central space was filled by three stainless steel tables. Each table had a central depression for a body, sloping from the head-end to the foot, where drain holes led through to deep, oval, stainless steel receptacles beneath. The two outer tables were empty, but the central table was not. Draped in a pale green sheet of thin fabric was an object roughly the size and shape of a deflated football. Standing behind the table, his blue vinyl-gloved hands clasped in front of him, was the pathologist. Dr Haydn was a slightly built man with a shock of white hair standing up all over his tall, domed skull. His spectacles were from another era, black plastic at the top and gold wires around the sides and bottom of the lenses, giving him the appearance of an FBI agent from the 1960s. Unruly white eyebrows leapt and curled from behind the frames. He’d chosen to reinforce the anachronistic image with a tweed jacket, accessorised with a black and white polka-dotted pocket square, and a wine-red, paisley bowtie that appeared, from its lopsided wings, to have been hand-tied.
“DCI Chambers!” he said, then smiled as Susannah and Gabriel walked over to him. “And you have a guest.” He turned to Gabriel, snapped off his right glove and shook hands. “Welcome, welcome. No doubt DCI Chambers here has apprised you of her and her colleagues’ less-than-respectful name for my laboratory?”
Gabriel glanced across at Susannah, who was grinning at him.
“She may have mentioned it. I thought it sounded cool.”
“Cool! You hear that DCI Chambers? I am cool. So, allow me to reveal to you a work I would title ‘Head of a Young Woman,’ were I curating one of those cabinets of curiosities that pass for art nowadays.”
He pinched a corner of the shrouding fabric between thumb and forefinger and whisked it away with a theatrical flourish.
In their own way, all three living people in the room had become used to death, and all the grisly forms in which it might be inflicted on the human frame. There were no indrawn breaths, no mutterings of oaths, no turnings away. The pathologist had spent his career examining dead bodies. The detective had spent hers tracking down those who left them behind. The ex-soldier had spent a fair portion of his creating them.
“Not much of a looker, is she?” Susannah said.
“Ah, the gallows humour once more,” Dr Haydn said. “No, she has rather lost her youthful bloom, hasn’t she? I dare say we all would, were we to dive fifty feet, face-first, onto a marble floor.”
The head that had once belonged to Eloise Payne had been do
ubly abused, first by the blast and then by the impact with the floor. The skull was crushed and the face was partially folded in on itself. Her blonde hair was cut short and matted with blood.
“I cleaned her up as best I could, but I’m thinking it’s nothing the parents should be shown. We received the DNA results an hour ago, ran them through the usual databases and got a match with Miss Payne. So that’s fingerprint and DNA evidence for you, DCI Chambers. You have your bus bomber.”
“Thanks, Henry. At least that’s one incontrovertible fact I can give the jackals for the evening news. And we now know where she disappeared to when she left home.”
“Really? And where was that, pray tell?”
“A religious cult. The Children of Heaven. Ever heard of them?”
“No, I haven’t. But it does supply an answer to a puzzle that’s been niggling at me since I ran a tox screen on the young lady’s blood.”
“Which is?” Susannah said, checking her watch.
“She had extremely high levels of anti-psychotic drugs in her system, including haloperidol and fluphenazine, which are usually used to treat schizophrenia. Plus, a muscle relaxant called succinylcholine, and a sedative: diazepam. That’s Valium. Basically, she was bombed before she bombed, so to speak. These and other drugs have been associated with brainwashing in the past, which would fit with her having been indoctrinated into a cult of some sort.”
“What sort of side effects would you expect to see in someone who’d taken that lot, Doctor Haydn?” Gabriel asked.
Haydn smiled, pushing his glasses back up his nose with the tip of an index finger. “A very perceptive question. Your consultant has his wits about him, DCI Chambers. Well, there are many, from impaired liver function to anxiety, although those would be hard to detect externally. But in this dosage, I would be very surprised not to see some evidence of tardive dyskinesia.”