Broken Homes pg-4

by Ben Aaronovitch

  Crawley had managed to avoid the blight of out-of-town shopping centres by the simple expedient of dumping one in the middle of the town. Beyond this were the council offices, the college and the police station, all clustered together as neatly as something from a game of SimCity.

  We found PC Slatt in the canteen which was as reassuringly unimaginative as its London counterparts. She was a short, red-headed woman who filled out her stab vest like a three-bedroom semi and had clever grey eyes. She said she’d already been briefed by her inspector. I don’t know what she’d been told, but she stared at Nightingale as if she expected him to grow an extra head.

  Nightingale dispatched me to the counter, and when I got back with the tea and biscuits PC Slatt was describing her actions at the crash site. Spend any time around traffic accidents and you have no trouble recognising blood when you see it.

  ‘It glistens when you shine the torch on it, don’t it?’ she said. ‘I thought there might have been another casualty in the car.’

  It’s quite common for people who’ve been involved in car crashes to escape from their vehicles and wander away in a random direction even with severe injuries. ‘Only I couldn’t find a blood trail and the driver denied there was anyone else in the vehicle.’

  ‘When you first looked in the back of the vehicle did you notice anything odd?’ asked Nightingale.

  ‘Odd?’ she asked.

  ‘Did you feel anything unusual when you looked inside?’ asked Nightingale.

  ‘Unusual?’ asked Slatt.

  ‘Weird,’ I said. ‘Spooky.’ Magic, particularly strong magic, can leave a sort of echo behind it. It works best with stone, less well on concrete and metal and even worse with organic materials — but strangely well with some varieties of plastic. It’s easy to spot the echo if you know what you’re looking for, or if the source is very strong. It’s where ghosts come from, by the way. And it’s a bugger to explain to witnesses.

  Slatt leaned back in her chair — away from us. Nightingale gave me a hard look.

  ‘It was raining,’ said Slatt finally.

  ‘How did he strike you?’ asked Nightingale. ‘The driver?’

  ‘At first, like every car crash victim I’ve ever met,’ she said. ‘Dazed, unfocused, you know how it is — they either babble or go catatonic. He was a babbler.’

  ‘Did he babble about anything in particular?’ asked Nightingale.

  ‘I think he said something about the dogs barking but he was mumbling as well as babbling.’

  Slatt finished her meal, Nightingale finished his tea and I finished my notes.

  I drove as PC Slatt directed me past the train station, over the tracks and through, as far as I could tell, the Victorian bit of Crawley. Certainly Robert Weil’s house was a stumpy detached brick Victorian villa with squared-off bay windows, a steep roof and terracotta finials. The surrounding houses were all Edwardian or even later so I guessed that the villa had once stood proudly in its own grounds. You could see the remnant in the big back garden that was currently the focus of a cadaver dog team — on loan from International Rescue, I learnt later.

  PC Slatt knew the PC on door duty, who signed us in without comment. The house was big enough that its owners hadn’t felt the need to knock down all the intervening walls and had, recently I thought, restored the decorative moulding. The dining room had been abandoned and overrun by their children, aged seven and nine according to my notes, and was treacherous with toys, broken xylophones and DVDs that had come adrift from their cases. The kids were staying with friends but the wife remained. Her name was Lynda, with a Y, with faded blonde hair and a thin mouth. She sat on the sitting-room sofa and glared at us while we searched her house — the locals were looking for bodies, we were looking for books. Nightingale took the study. I did the bedrooms.

  I did the kids’ rooms first, just on the off chance that something interesting was hidden amongst the Lego Star Wars stickers, the Highway Rat and some slightly sticky colouring-in books. The eldest already had a laptop of his own in his room although, judging from its age, it looked like a hand-me-down. Some kids have all the luck.

  The parents’ bedroom had a fusty unaired smell and not much in the way of interest to me. Real practitioners never leave their important books lying around, but you pick up pointers. The key is unlikely juxtapositions. Lots of people read books about the occult, but if you find them alongside books by or about Isaac Newton, especially the long boring ones, then hackles are raised, flags hoisted and, more importantly, notes made in my notebook.

  All I found in the bedroom was a dog-eared copy of the Discovery of Witches under the bed along with the Life of Pi and The God of Small Things.

  ‘He hasn’t done anything,’ said a voice behind me.

  I stood up and turned to find Lynda Weil standing in the doorway.

  ‘I don’t know what you think he did,’ she said. ‘But he didn’t do it. Why can’t you tell me what he’s supposed to have done?’

  It’s good policing, when you’re engaged in other tasks, to avoid interacting with witnesses or suspects and especially with those individuals that might straddle both categories. Besides — I didn’t know what her husband had done, either.

  ‘I’m sorry, ma’am,’ I said. ‘We’ll be finished as soon as we can.’

  We were finished even sooner because a minute later Nightingale called me downstairs and told me that the Major Crimes Team had found a body.

  They’d done it with a wicked bit of policing too. I was seriously impressed. The MCT had CCTV footage of Robert Weil heading out through the Pease Pottage roundabout and off down the ominous sounding Forest Road — so called because it ran along the central axis of St Leonard’s Forest, a patchwork of woods that covered the ridge of high ground that ran from Pease Pottage to Horsham.

  Prime body dumping country, according to PC Slatt, easily accessible via footpaths and forest tracks and not covered by speed cameras. Wherever he’d gone, Robert Weil hadn’t returned to Pease Pottage for over five hours so he could easily have been anywhere in the forest. But they’d caught a break because Lynda Weil had phoned her husband at nine forty-five, presumably to ask him where the hell he was, and that allowed the Sussex Police to triangulate the position of his phone to a cell just short of the village of Colgate. After that, it was just a matter of checking the appropriate stretch of the road until they spotted something — in this case tyre tracks from a Volvo V70.

  The grey overcast was darkening to countryside black when we arrived at the murder site. There wasn’t a proper turn off, so I had to park the Jag further up the road and walk back.

  PC Slatt explained that the landlord had only recently blocked off the entrance to an access route through the forest here.

  ‘Weil probably remembered the turn off from a walk in the area,’ she said. ‘He hadn’t planned on it not existing any more.’

  Important safety tip for serial killers — always scout out your dumping locations before use. We had to clamber over an artificial hillock made of sticky yellow mud and discarded tree limbs, because the marginally visible path was still being checked forensically.

  ‘He had to drag the body,’ said PC Slatt. ‘It left a trail.’

  ‘He doesn’t sound very prepared,’ I said. The rain was making silver streaks in the beam of my torch as I shone it back to guide Nightingale over.

  ‘Perhaps it was his first kill,’ he said.

  ‘God, I hope so,’ said PC Slatt.

  The path beyond was muddy but I walked with the confidence of a man who made sure he packed a pair of DM boots in his overnight bag. Town or country, it doesn’t matter, you don’t want to be wearing your best shoes at a crime scene. Unless you’re Nightingale, who seemed to have an unlimited supply of quality handmade footwear that were cleaned and polished by someone else. I suspected it was probably Molly — but it might have been gnomes for all I knew, or some other unspecified household spirit.

  On either side of the path were stands
of slender trees with pale trunks that Nightingale identified as silver birch. The gloomy stand of dark pointy trees ahead were apparently Douglas firs interspersed with the occasional larch. Nightingale was aghast at my lack of arboreal knowledge.

  ‘I don’t understand how you can know five types of brick bond,’ he said, ‘but you can’t identify the most common of trees.’

  Actually, I knew about twenty-three types of brick bond if you counted Tudor and the other early modern styles, but I kept that to myself.

  Somebody sensible had strung reflective tape from tree to tree to mark our path downhill to where I could hear the rumble of a portable generator and see blue-white camera flashes, yellow high-viz jackets and the ghostly figures of people in disposable paper suits.

  Back in the dim and distant past, your victim was bagged, tagged and whipped away to the mortuary as soon as the initial photographs were taken. These days the forensic pathologists stick a tent over the body and settle in for the long haul. Luckily, back in civilisation it doesn’t take that much longer. But out in the country there’s all sorts of exciting insects and spores feasting on the corpse. These, so we’re told, reveal ever so much information about time of death and the state the body was in when it hit the ground. Getting it all catalogued can take a day and a half and they’d only just started when we arrived. You could tell that the forensic pathologist wasn’t happy to have yet another random set of police officers interfering with her nice scientific investigation. Even if we were good boys and wore our noddy suits, with the hoods up and masks on.

  Neither was DCI Manderly, who’d got there before us. Still he must have reckoned the sooner we were started the sooner we’d be gone, because he immediately beckoned us over and introduced us to the pathologist.

  I’ve been racking up some corpse time since I joined the Folly. And after the hurled baby and the Hari Krishna with the exploded head, I’d thought myself toughened up. But, as I’ve heard experienced officers say, you never get tough enough. This body was female, nude and caked in mud. The pathologist explained that she’d been buried in a shallow grave.

  ‘Only twelve centimetres deep,’ she said. ‘The foxes would have had her up in no time.’

  There was no sign of staging. So Robert Weil, if it had been him, had just dumped her in the hole and covered her over. In the harsh artificial light she looked as grey and colourless as the holocaust pictures I remember from school. I couldn’t see much beyond the fact that she was white, female, not a teenager and not old enough to have loose skin.

  ‘Despite the sloppy burial,’ said the pathologist, ‘there’s evidence of forensic countermeasures, the fingers have all been removed at the second knuckle, and of course there’s the face. .’

  Or lack thereof. From the chin up there was nothing but a pulped red mass flecked with white bone. Nightingale crouched down and briefly got his own face close enough to kiss where her lips had been. I looked away.

  ‘Nothing,’ Nightingale said to me as he straightened up. ‘And it wasn’t dissimulo either.’

  I took a deep breath. So, not the spell that had destroyed Lesley’s face.

  ‘What do you think caused that?’ Nightingale asked the pathologist.

  The pathologist pointed to where the top of the scalp was traced with tiny red furrows. ‘I’ve never seen it in the flesh, so to speak, but I suspect a shotgun blast to the face at close range.’

  The words ‘Perhaps somebody thought she was a zombie’ tried to clamber out of my throat with such force that I had to slap my hand over my mask to stop them escaping.

  Nightingale and the pathologist both gave me curious looks before turning back to the corpse. I ran out of the tent with my hand still over my mouth and didn’t stop until I cleared the inner forensic perimeter where I could lean against the tree and take my mask off. I ignored the pitying looks I got from some of the older police outside — I’d rather they thought I was being sick than that I was trying to stop myself from giggling.

  PC Slatt wandered over and handed me a bottle of water.

  ‘You wanted a body,’ she said as I rinsed my mouth out. ‘Is this your case?’

  ‘No, I don’t think this is us,’ I said. ‘Thank god.’

  Neither did Nightingale, so we drove back to London as soon as we’d stripped off our suits and thanked DCI Manderly for his co-operation — Nightingale drove.

  ‘There were no vestigia and it certainly looked like a shotgun wound to me,’ he said. ‘But I’m minded to ask Dr Walid if he might like to come down and have a look for himself. Just to be on the safe side.’

  The steady rain had slacked offas we drove north and I could see the lights of London reflected off the clouds just beyond the North Downs.

  ‘Just an ordinary serial killer then,’ I said.

  ‘You’re jumping to conclusions,’ said Nightingale. ‘There’s only the one victim.’

  ‘That we know of,’ I said. ‘Anyway, still a bit of a waste of time for us.’

  ‘We had to be sure,’ said Nightingale. ‘And it does you good to get out into the countryside.’

  ‘Oh yeah,’ I said. ‘Nothing like a day trip to a crime scene. This can’t be the first time you’ve investigated a serial killer.’

  ‘If that’s what he is,’ said Nightingale.

  ‘If he is then he can’t have been your first,’ I said.

  ‘Unfortunately true,’ said Nightingale. ‘Although I’ve never been the one in charge.’

  ‘Were any of the famous ones supernatural?’ I asked, thinking it would explain a great deal.

  ‘Had they been supernatural,’ said Nightingale, ‘we’d have ensured that they were not famous.’

  ‘What about Jack the Ripper?’ I asked.

  ‘No,’ said Nightingale. ‘And believe me there would have been relief if he had turned out to be a demon or some such. I knew a wizard who’d assisted the police investigation and he said that they’d all have slept far sounder knowing it wasn’t a man doing such terrible things.’

  ‘Peter Sutcliffe?’

  ‘I interviewed him myself,’ said Nightingale. ‘Nothing. And he certainly wasn’t a practitioner or under the influence of a malicious spirit.’ He held up a hand to stop me asking my next question. ‘Nor was Dennis Nilsen, as far as I could tell, or Fred West or Michael Lupo or any of the parade of dreadful individuals I’ve had to vet in the last fifty years. Perfectly human monsters every one of them.’

  2

  The Sons of Weyland

  If he was our perfectly human monster, then Robert Weil was keeping schtum about it. I kept track of the interview transcripts via HOLMES and in the first round of interviews it’s about what you’d expect. He denies having a body in the back of his car, claims that he went out for a drive and a walk, doesn’t know how the blood got there, certainly has no knowledge of dead women with their faces shot off. As it becomes clear that the forensic evidence is overwhelming, what with blood on his clothes and mud under his fingernails, he stops answering questions. Once he was formally charged and remanded in custody he ceased talking to anyone — even his brief who then recommended that he be psychologically evaluated. Even just skimming the actions list I could feel the MCT’s frustration as they settled into a long hard slog, grinding down every lead into fine powder and then sifting it for clues. The victim stayed stubbornly unidentified and the autopsy revealed nothing more than to confirm that she was white, female, mid-thirties and hadn’t eaten for at least forty-eight hours before her death. Cause of death was most likely a shotgun blast to the face at a range close enough to leave powder burns. Dr Walid, gastroenterology’s answer to Cat Stevens and, as far as we knew, the only practising crypto-pathologist in the world, popped in on his way home with his own autopsy report.

  So we had afternoon tea and pathology, sitting in the stuffed leather armchairs downstairs in the atrium. The Folly had last been refurbished in the 1930s when the British establishment firmly believed that central heating was the work, if not of th
e devil per se, then definitely evil foreigners bent on weakening the hardy British spirit. Bizarrely, despite its size and the glass dome, the atrium was often warmer than the small dining room or either of the libraries.

  ‘As you can see,’ said Dr Walid laying out pictures of thin slices of brain on the table, ‘there are no signs of hyperthaumaturgical degradation.’ The slices had been stained a variety of lurid colours to improve the contrast, but Dr Walid complained that they remained stubbornly normal — I took his word for it.

  ‘Nor was there any sign of chimeric modification to any of the tissue samples,’ he said and sipped his coffee. ‘But I have sent off a couple of them to be sequenced.’

  Nightingale nodded politely, but I knew for a fact that he only had the vaguest idea of what DNA was, since he was old enough to have been Crick and Watson’s father.

  ‘I think we may as well consider this case closed,’ he said. ‘At any rate, from our perspective.’

  ‘I’d like to keep monitoring it,’ I said. ‘At least until we have an ID for the victim.’

  Nightingale drummed the table with his fingertips. ‘Are you sure you have the time for that?’ he asked.

  ‘Sussex and Surrey MCT will produce a weekly summary while the case is ongoing,’ I said. ‘It’ll take me ten minutes.’

  ‘I don’t think he takes me as seriously as he should,’ Nightingale told Dr Walid. ‘He still slopes off to conduct illicit experiments whenever he thinks I’m not looking.’ He looked at me. ‘What is your latest interest?’

  ‘I’ve been looking at how long various materials retain vestigia,’ I said.

  ‘How do you measure the intensity of the vestigia?’ asked Dr Walid.

  ‘He uses the dog,’ said Nightingale.

  ‘I put Toby in a box along with the material and then I measure the loudness and frequency of his barking,’ I said. ‘It’s no different from using a sniffer dog.’