by Dal Maclean
Will’s own uniformed reflection in the glass startled him—his skin ghostly against his dark hair; his hazel eyes, big black holes in his face.
He moved closer until the reflection vanished into the view outside. It had started to rain.
Down in the street, he could see the same huddle of press photographers near a black SUV, hoods up, fumbling weather protection onto their equipment, and the line of parked saloons. A couple of the paps noticed him framed in the window, and their cameras rose with hopeful instinct, then drooped again when they realized he was just a copper.
He looked down at his phone then glanced up again, caught by the echo of a sudden, definite movement.
A shaven-headed, stocky man had left the press group and was striding along the pavement until he reached a black limousine, parked several cars along. Medium height, Will cataloged automatically, early thirties IC6 . . . Middle Eastern or North African. He didn’t seem bothered by the rain.
It was only as he opened the driver’s door of the car though, that Will noticed an open window at the back, and a passenger peering out and up.
Another man, and he was looking at Will.
The shock of recognition was startling. Sleek, brushed back silver hair. Chiseled features. A mature face. As close to a consigliere as Joey Clarkson employed.
Charles fucking Priestly.
The right-hand man of a gangland boss monitoring a police party? Monitoring James’s engagement party?
Outrage fought apprehension.
Charles’s presence felt like a warning. A challenge.
The steady rain turned in the space of a second to a downpour, bouncing and dancing off the roof of the limousine. Will’s phone began to buzz in his hand, but his attention was locked on Charles’s expressionless face, as the car window slowly rose to conceal it, inch by inch. As if Will had only imagined he’d been there. But he could still feel those detached eyes on him, and he glared back blindly.
And in a flash of unwanted déjà vu, he was back outside a brutal murder scene ten months before, staring it out with the Godfather himself, Joey Clarkson, invisible behind the same blackened windows.
The phone’s persistent buzzing finally broke his concentration.
He raised it to his ear, but his attention remained fixed on the limousine as it slowly began to pull away onto the street.
Salt’s unmistakeable Northern Irish accent: “Sorry Guv. We’re on.”
2
“Where’s your car? An’ you wore that to the party?”
DS Des Salt looked and sounded utterly scandalized as Will stepped from the back of another black Mercedes.
“Actually,” Will said as he straightened up. “I was the belle of the ball.”
But Salt wasn’t listening. His eyes had bugged, fixed on the man who’d emerged from the other back door of the car.
To add to an epically shitty day, Sir Robin Dunn, the Deputy Commissioner, had decided to mimic his boss’s earlier egalitarian gesture and offer Will a lift to the crime scene, since he’d been leaving the party early too. So, with miserable inevitability, Will had been trapped again in a vehicle with the top brass.
Next to Sir Ian’s tall, handsome charisma, Sir Robin had the kind of faded, mousy features people easily forgot until he became their superior officer. But perhaps because he had so little star power, he was also less intimidating. He was smaller, quieter, more self-contained. Will would have found it easier to relax around him because of that, if he’d trusted him for a second.
Reliable rumor had it that Sir Robin was heir-apparent to the top job when the Commissioner left, though he was actually older than Sir Ian. Will wasn’t sure he believed it. But Sir Robin was very obviously a politician and a strategist. How else could such an unremarkable man have reached the position he had?
Sir Robin regarded him across the roof of the car and smoothed what was left of his mid-brown hair.
“Carry on DI Foster. I think I’ll just have a few words with the team out here, since I’m on the spot. I won’t get in the way.”
“Yes Sir,” Will said. “And thanks for the lift if I don’t see you again.”
Sir Robin smiled. He didn’t seem to smile often. “It’s an MPS car. Of course it should be used to help an officer in pursuit of his duty.” Sir Robin nodded decisively, as if in approval at his own statement, and strode off toward a uniformed borough constable, who watched his approach with wide-eyed disbelief.
Will pulled on his peaked cap and scanned the immediate area, accidentally meeting the admiring eyes of a group of drunk women gathered on the other side of the blue and white crime-scene tape. His gaze kept moving but one of the women—a sizable blond—began to wolf whistle and shout obscenities. Soon others joined in. Will ignored them.
Greek Street was a long stretch of tall brown and red brick terraced buildings in Soho, with pubs, eateries and shops taking up their ground floors. The tape spanned the width of the street about halfway down, and behind it, Will’s admirers blended with a small crowd of Monday evening revellers drawn by the unexpected entertainment. They stood in knots, sipping drinks and chatting, impervious to the April evening temperatures. But at least it had stopped raining.
Unworthy satisfaction—near elation—swelled with sudden power in Will’s chest, the relief that had bubbled inside him since he’d rejoined the force. He was back at the center of things. This was his life again.
He should be wishing he was still at the party, or on his way home to Leyton to do some of the things the big blond was graphically signaling to him. But then, he’d have been doing them alone.
“Looks like you’ve pulled, Guv,” Salt remarked, Antrim accent untouched by years in London. He was a tall, thin redhead, clad in a forensic suit. His pale, heavily freckled skin looked even whiter than normal in the evening chill, and his nose was pink. “Want me to send uniform to hose ‘em down? Or let ‘em through?”
Will could tell Salt was trying not to laugh as the catcalls rose to a crescendo behind them.
“They’d tear you limb from limb, Sergeant. And I might just let them.”
Will drew in a lungful of night air and began to take in the markers of the crime scene Salt had already secured.
The ambulance, standing silent and useless, its urgent light, dark and still. Too late.
A first-response car, flashing languid, silent, spastic blue.
A masked Scene of Crime Officer in a pale blue forensic suit, taking boot prints from two paramedics as they sat on the floor of their ambulance between its open back doors. Sir Robin, Will noted, was moving toward them for his next morale-building chat.
Will studied the focus of all of the activity—a narrow street door, set in a dark red rendered wall, between a shop, also housed in the red building, and a jazz club on the other side. The door was wedged wide-open and the walls inside were painted clashing cerise pink. Gray vinyl flooring led to a narrow staircase at the back. And just inside—the customary euphemistic sign fixed to a hot pink wall: Models.
“Guv.” Salt handed Will a white Tyvek forensic suit, which Will began to drag on over his uniform, to an ecstatic chorus of filth from beyond the crime scene tape. When he finally managed that, he balanced precariously to pull on plastic overshoes. His hat and gloves ended up with one of the borough PCs. Out of the corner of his eye, he could see Sir Robin glad-handing his way back to his car.
“Did you . . . ?”
Salt handed him the iPad which held his decision log, with a rakish waggle of his brows. Will waggled his back. To the uninitiated, Will supposed it might look like flirting. But it was far more solid than that. Old knowledge. Old loyalty. Old loss.
“Right,” Will said. “Let’s crack on.”
They pulled up their facemasks and the hoods of their forensic suits, then strode through the bilious pink hallway and up the narrow staircase. The perfume inside was familiar: a top note of bleach, a base note of piss and weed.
“Female. IC2.” Des said as they went.
Southern European. “There’s a passport in what’s believed to be her bag, and her ID’s been corroborated by a witness. Looks like a pro gun shot.”
“Never heard of a murder in a walk-up before,” Will mused.
Walk-ups were an infamous Soho institution, born in the 1960s: gray-area mini-not-quite-brothels accessed from a door on the street. There were usually two rooms at the top of a set of stairs, monitored by an assistant called “the maid,” who got by on compulsory tips from the punters. The setup was intended to keep the girls safe, and as far as Will knew, it did. But not this time.
A chair stood on the small landing at the top of the stairs—for the maid presumably—and there was a price list on the wall above it. It was titled, Ten Minute Service, totally matter-of-fact. Straight sex £25 Sex and Oral £35 Sex and Full Strip £35 Sex and Positions £35 Hand Relief £20 Sex and Vibrator £40 Water Sports £40 Tip for Maid £2. Beside it were prices for longer periods of time, up to £135 for an hour. To Will’s knowledge, price lists were the same through all the walk-ups in Soho, like a franchise, or a cartel.
Each side of the landing held an open door, but there was no doubt which of the rooms had been the scene of the crime. The full force of police arc lights spewed out of the doorway on the left, draining the intensity of the pink walls outside it.
Inside the room seethed with bustling white and blue-clad figures, but there was almost no sound, just that harsh alien glare and the stench of vomit and blood. Metal. Acid. Bile.
Will had been inside a walk-up once before, on a raid when he was in uniform, and he remembered that it had sought to create an illusion of intimacy and sensuality, with cushions and strings of fairylights and purple velvet. This room didn’t bother to flatter anyone, and the arc lights illuminating every mote of dust, showed up its brutal utilitarianism.
A double divan bed with two pillows and a faded, flowered duvet cover. A table and two chairs. The floor was covered with badly stained dark-blue carpet tiles and the walls were grimy, scuffed white, with no decoration other than an aggressively cheap, but absolutely accurate, plastic wall clock. An open door in a wall to the left showed a tiny ensuite. No effort had been made to pretend the room was anything other than a place to do seedy business.
The victim lay on the floor between the end of the divan and the door, a pathologist on his knees beside her talking into a voice recorder. A video camera operator filmed his work.
The body appeared to be fully clothed, and that in itself, felt strange. All the working girls Will had rousted out during a short-lived council-sponsored “Clean Up Soho” campaign, had worn only lingerie to greet their clients, ready for action.
Will leaned closer.
The dead woman’s hair was blond, long and badly dyed; the roots, a sad, human black. She wore jeans, well-used white trainers and a long, padded navy anorak, the hood edged with matted, wiry, fake fur. She lay on her side, her face concealed by a cloud of brassy hair. But the dark hole under her right ear was unmistakable, and beneath her head, a generous pool of blood and brains had seeped into the sparse dark blue nylon tufts of the carpet.
Even without seeing any more of her, Will thought she looked poor.
A camera flashed.
Salt said: “The passport says Daria Ivanescu, aged thirty-five. Romanian. Witnesses have IDed her as the woman usin’ this room. She was a prostitute.”
“You don’t say.” Will scanned the room again, but it held so few objects, it was hard to get a mental picture of a struggle. He looked down at the corpse.
Hello. Daria.
A dead arm flopped outward as the body was lifted and turned smoothly onto its back. Concealing hair slid away to reveal a face, even featured, fine-boned and very attractive even slack with shock. The woman’s big, heavily made-up eyes were half-open. Dark brown.
“Evening Dr. Beresford,” Will said.
The pathologist glanced up. He was plump and middle-aged, and his hood concealed a fringe of dark hair around a bald skull, like a tonsure that had spread. His eyes, above his white mask, were very dark and very sharp.
“Professional execution?” Will asked, on the off-chance Beresford was in a good mood.
Beresford gave a quelling frown. Some pathologists played the game, but he was too experienced to volunteer anything unless he was very sure. Pompous as fuck, but one of the best in his field.
“Placement is very accurate,” Beresford conceded. Which was as close to a comradely hug as any copper was likely to get from him.
Beresford happened to occupy a special place in the list of Will’s worst memories as the pathologist who’d carried out the first postmortem he’d ever watched from beginning to end.
2013. Guys Hospital. He’d just made it into CID. It was the last removal of illusion that the human body, however beautiful, was anything sacred. That time he’d kept his breakfast down and stayed upright by sheer force of will. Beresford hadn’t noticed.
“No signs of rigor mortis,” Beresford went on in detached, cultured tones that skated close to boredom. “No visible traces of lividity. She’s been dead for less than two hours. From her position I’d venture she was shot while kneeling down; the perpetrator was behind her, possibly holding her by her hair. All this could change of course, after a full examination,”
Salt said softly, “I’ll never get why they cooperate. Why not fight to the end?”
“In this case there are signs she did,” Beresford said. “There’s some blood on the interior of the apartment door . . . though there’s none on the knife handle on either side and no prints at all, so . . . probably wiped as the killer exited. A small knife’s been bagged up somewhere with blood on the blade. The handle looks to have been wiped too.” Beresford raised the woman’s arm by the sleeve of her padded coat, taking her hand in his short, thick, blue-gloved fingers. “There’s a fresh cut here. And these two nails have broken off. False nails.” The rest of her manicure looked fresh, the nails long and shaped, painted an unchipped pinky-lilac. “The broken pieces are bagged too.”
“She threw up,” Salt said. A kneeling SOCO was lifting samples from a yellow-green stain of vomit to their right, a yard or so inside the door. It had to be Daria’s. A hit man wouldn’t have hurled his guts up.
The scene playing in Will’s head was brutal. He clenched his jaw and watched Beresford go back to work as if they weren’t there, probing behind a broken fingernail with a fine metal tool, and Will had a sudden unwelcome mental image of the woman sitting in some nail bar, choosing the color of varnish she’d wear in her grave.
He drew a sharp breath. “Where’s the maid? She’d have seen who came in.”
“Other flat,” Salt said. “With the hooker . . . the sex worker who found the body.”
The room across the hall was a meanly furnished mirror-image of the other, lit by a single, puny overhead light-fitting, oppressively gloomy, especially after the glare of the arc lights. But at least it smelled of nothing worse than damp, stale tobacco and semen. A uniformed female police officer stood guard near the door.
Three women sat side by side on the bed, all smoking compulsively as if there was a prize for the first to finish their cigarette. But when they saw Will and Salt they froze, with expressions that ranged from fear to defiance, all three holding their cigarettes an identical inch from their open mouths, like some kind of living art installation.
“This is purely a murder investigation ladies,” Will said, as he pulled down his mask and then his hood. Their expressions tightened. “I’m not interested in what you do for a living, or your immigration status, or if you’re taking anything illegal or which bloke’s organizing your evenings. I just want to know what you know about Daria.”
There was a short almost frantic silence, then the girl on the left blurted: “I found her . . . but I do not know her.”
The other women tensed, as if they were witnessing someone dancing out onto a high wire. Probably talking to the police would feel like that, if you were on the g
ame.
“She paid me . . . to use ze room,” the woman continued. She was bottle-blond, brown-eyed, young, pretty, and she sounded French. In her outdoor jacket and tight jeans, she could have been a wholesome, if very distressed, au pair. “Just . . . uh . . . pendant une demi-heure. Je connais Scarlett. She is her . . . um, flatmate? Is how Daria knows my number.”
“What’s your name?” Will asked. Salt was noting it all down.
The girl pouted. “Fifi.”
Of course it was. “Your full name?”
Fifi frowned, then sighed. “Monique Rembaud. I work in zat room tonight. But Daria . . . she call . . . ce matin. Say she had a . . . client privé. Someone . . . je ne sais pas . . . famous?” She shook her head suddenly, impatient with herself. “Secret. Zat is it. She says ze client does not wish to be seen, so she want a place no one will prêter attention? She pay me . . . thirty pounds. She pay Evelyn, aussi. To go.”
Will asked. “Evelyn?” Though he had a horrible feeling he knew.
The woman in the middle shifted uncomfortably. She was plump and older than the other two by a couple of decades. Possibly Filipino.
“You’re the maid?” She nodded. So much for the obvious eyewitness. “So did either of you see Daria arrive? Or her client?”
“Evelyn and me . . . we see Daria,” Monique said. Evelyn nodded again. “I open ze door for her and get ze money at about seven. Zen I go to eat. Avec Evelyn. We tell Roxy so she knows zer is no maid. I do not see anyone else arrive.”
“How did Daria seem? Her mood?”
Monique glanced at Evelyn, who looked down at her shoes. “She. . . . ” Monique shook her head impatiently. “Elle semblait très tendu. Excité?”
Will groped through his schoolboy French.
Wound up. Excited.
“You think she’d taken something?”
Monique gave a Gallic shrug. Who doesn’t? it said.
“When did you come back to the room?”
“Je ne sais pas. I zink . . . thirty minutes? Maybe . . . a little more. Ze door is closed, but it is not locked. And I knock but she does not come so . . . I go in.” She covered her trembling mouth with one hand and bowed her head.