22
GHOSTS OF VIOLENCE
As soon as Longbright was on her way, Renfield called Leslie Faraday to inform him of the day’s events. He was ashamed about having to sneak behind the Detective Sergeant’s back, and wondered how many days he would manage to avoid giving the Home Office any useful information.
Faraday: You were supposed to call me last night, Renfield.
Renfield: I couldn’t get away. Everyone was still in the office.
Faraday: Couldn’t you have slipped out for five minutes? What have you got for me? Have there been any irregularities so far?
Renfield: We’ve got an identity on the first body. The one in the freezer.
Faraday: I’m not interested in the victim, I just need to know that you’ve caught someone. Have you?
Renfield: No.
Faraday: But you at least know who you’re looking for, yes?
Renfield: Not exactly.
Faraday: What do you mean, not exactly? Policing should be considered an exact science. Either you’re close to making an arrest, or you haven’t the faintest idea what you’re doing. Which is it?
Renfield: We’re…
Renfield struggled with his conscience. He knew how much trouble he could make for the PCU, but was suddenly loath to do so. They had offered him unexpected support at a time when his career could have been destroyed.
Renfield: … very close to making an arrest.
Faraday: Oh. Well, then. Good. But you must let me know if anything goes wrong. I have to make reports too, you know.
Faraday was clearly disappointed that this was all he could offer, but was forced to accept the meagre information. Renfield signed off wondering how long he could hide the truth.
As the sergeant sat on the corner of Delaney’s bed in the gathering gloom, he thought about his hopeless situation. If he lied to Faraday, he would be exposed when the PCU failed to deliver. If he told the truth, news of his secret disclosures would soon reach the unit. If he asked Longbright on a date and she discovered that he was ratting on his colleagues behind her back, she would never talk to him again. Forget it, Fat Boy, he told himself. She’s too good for you anyway.
He had always wanted to do the right thing, but how many times had it placed him in a spot like this? It was the wayward guys who made friends, the womanizers, the hard drinkers, the ones who bent the law around themselves. The officers at his old station had nicknamed him Captain Bringdown because of his determination to play by the rules. The PCU had merely made a harmless literary joke out of his name before accepting him for who he was. Yes, he wanted to do the right thing, but perhaps this time the right thing was something different.
Meanwhile, DS Longbright found herself opposite the great letters sculpted in white concrete that spelled out the team named ‘Arsenal.’ The new football grounds filled the skyline of the street like a great spaceship. Opposite, the remaining rows of shabby Victorian terraces stretched away uphill, from Drayton Park toward the horrors of North London’s crack-addled Blackstock Road.
Longbright checked the ID card, but spotted the builders’ outlet before needing to search for street numbers. She could hardly have missed it; picked out in the Gunners’ shades of red and white, K&B Decorating stood in homage to the team grounds that had existed in the area since 1913. A muscular boy with strong Grecian features was carrying in a delivery of planks and dropping them noisily inside the store. The ground floor was a confusion of sawdust and shouting.
‘It’s funny,’ the Greek boy told her. ‘Terry ain’t been in for more than a week, ’as ’e? Nobody knows where he is.’
‘Can you give me an exact day when you last saw him?’ ‘Monday before last, something like that. It’ll be on his work sheet.’
‘Didn’t any of you think to talk to the police?’ she asked, already knowing the answer.
‘The police?’ He almost laughed in her face. ‘Listen, love, the blokes here go a bit mad every now and again, then come back and pick up where they left off and nobody mentions it. Not worth going to the police about.’
‘They get paid by the number of days they do?’
‘Yeah, so if they don’t come in, it’s up to them, innit.’
‘Anyone been around to Delaney’s flat to check on him?’
‘Terry don’t like people going round there. His missus kicked him out of the house and I think he’s a bit ashamed of the place he’s renting. I told him he wouldn’t get back on his feet if he kept taking time off.’
‘So he’s done it before. Has he been here long?’
‘About four years. He had a couple of days off the last week he was here. Is he in trouble or what?’
‘You could say that. I need to know everything you know about him. If you can’t remember right now, that’s fine, call me first thing tomorrow morning.’ Longbright gave him one of the cards Bryant had printed up for everyone at Mornington Crescent, an odd little art deco number in black and silver that looked more like a calling card for an antiques store. She had crossed out the old address and hand-written the new one.
‘He’s not been hurt, has he?’
‘Why, you think he’s done something to deserve it?’
‘Terry? You’re joking.’ The young man called over his shoulder. ‘Oi, Jess, tell this lady what Terry’s like.’
‘One of the nicest blokes I’ve ever met,’ replied Jess. ‘If he was a bird I’d marry him.’ They all laughed.
‘Keeps his nose clean, does he?’ asked Longbright. ‘Stays out of trouble?’
‘Honest as the day is long. Always helping other people. That’s Terry’s trouble, if anything. Does charity work in his spare time. One of the best.’ It seemed that everyone in the shop agreed with that sentiment.
‘What did he do here?’
‘Painting, decorating, some building work, welding, a bit of demolition.’
‘Do you have a list of his most recent jobs?’
‘They’ll be in the book,’ said Jess. ‘Come with me.’
Dan Banbury was in many ways the PCU’s least likely member, in that there seemed to be nothing wrong with him. He was the married one who lived with a loving wife and a well-adjusted ten-year-old son in the suburbs of South London. He was the unit’s voice of common sense, and had been selected for precisely this reason. However, he possessed a skill that singled him out as unusual: He had an almost preternatural ability to understand what had happened in a vacated room. He followed standard procedures, establishing a three-dimensional grid pattern at a crime scene to mark off prints and collect fibres for analysis, but above this he had an understanding of the way in which frightened humans confronted one another. He saw the shape of their fears and passions, the psychology of their actions, the way in which they translated their emotions into physical movement. The ghosts of violence were visible to him.
The extraordinary thing was that, until being asked to join the PCU, he had been entirely unconscious of this sensitivity. Bryant had found such a skill present in only a handful of forensic experts, and had campaigned for Banbury’s inclusion in the unit. He needed people who saw more deeply than those around them.
When Banbury entered Delaney’s flat, he quickly recognised four people: Terry Delaney, his girlfriend, his daughter and a stranger. Terry was the most noticeable. Signs of his occupancy were everywhere, from the newspaper he had folded back to read over breakfast, to the whiskers rinsed from his razor and imperfectly cleaned from the sink, to the toothpaste that had dried on his brush. The bed had been occupied by one, but there were magazines, titles that would be read by a woman in her mid-twenties, thrown onto the bedside table beside a half-emptied tub of makeup remover and a brush containing long hairs. She was a dyed blonde, untidy, and her habits had annoyed Terry. He kept his territory tidy and separate. The little girl had slept on the couch in the neutral zone of the lounge. A single duvet was stored beneath it, together with her pyjamas, pink slippers, a jewelled hair clip.
But it was the stranger who interested Banbury most. Judging by the faint oily striation on the front door lock he had first tried to use a simple burglar’s tool to gain entrance, but had been defeated by the London bolt set in place on the inside of the door. He had gone down the hall and climbed out of the window, reaching around to the apartment’s bathroom casement. The carpet tiles at the end of the hall were rarely walked on, but the pile was slightly flattened at their edge, as if someone had reached out on tiptoe.
The conversion of the house into flats had placed the bathroom sill in a shaded corner behind a tree, and had left the second floor vulnerable. The window was awkward to access, but easy to open if you recognised the type of catch. This had been no ordinary burglar. He had not been looking to steal a CD player or a television. Anything heavy or awkwardly shaped would have proven difficult to manhandle across the building’s exterior. This thief was after something that he could pocket. He had ransacked the place without bothering to put anything back, but had not been able to avoid precision. He wanted Delaney to know that someone smart was onto him.
But then the householder had unexpectedly returned. He had unlocked the door from the hall, stepped inside, let the door swing shut behind him and stopped, confronted by his dismantled apartment.
And in the next room, the stranger had stopped, too. His search had suddenly ceased at this point. It had not been a good idea to wear workman’s boots because they had steel inlays, and were so heavy that they were easily discernible from any other marks on the carpet. Some criminals kept a specific pair of shoes to burgle in. Banbury would have liked to be able to access FIT, the Footwear Intelligence Technology system that catalogued over 14,000 images of shoe print types. He crouched on the floor and looked for pattern, wear, size and damage features, but could not see enough detail with his naked eye.
The prints led to behind the door, where the intruder must have waited—they were heavier here—before attacking Delaney. Now the bootprints danced in a tight circle, to be joined by twin drag marks, Delaney’s shoes, the toes rather than the heels, as he was pulled away to the couch and laid down on his stomach. A single droplet of blood had fallen, and there was a small patch of dried fluid on the carpet that looked like spittle. Banbury sniffed delicately, wondering if he might catch a faint chemical odour in the room, but found none. Yet Delaney had simply fallen to the floor. Not a drug, then; something else with the power to render a man unconscious in a second—or perhaps kill him outright. A thin knife or long needle, through the underside of the jaw or behind the ear, straight up into the base of the brain. The signs were so easy to read that Banbury felt as if he had witnessed the entire scene unfolding before him.
But if Delaney had surprised a burglar, and had been killed while the robbery was in progress, how had he wound up in a shop freezer?
‘Everyone says Terry Delaney is one of the good guys,’ Long-bright told John May, setting a mug of tea on his desk. ‘He never touched drugs, had no known connections with anyone dodgy, was working hard to pay his wife money, saw his daughter every other weekend.’
‘Why was he divorced?’ asked May.
‘Nothing unusual there. He and his wife were working all hours and their schedules never matched up. She’s a nurse at UCL. Actually, we know her. Niamh Connor takes shifts in A and E. She treated Meera for her cut arm. These are the last jobs Delaney took on.’ She dropped an additional page of addresses on the desk.
May studied the sheet and tapped the last line. ‘Allensbury Place—that’s near the railway line bordering the King’s Cross site. It’s within walking distance of where he was found, and where he was living.’
‘He mainly worked on local projects. Didn’t do the West End because his boss was having some kind of row with him over unpaid parking tickets. He drove a white van, but we didn’t find it outside his flat.’
‘We need to know who Delaney was working with in the days leading up to the burglary. Get Bimsley over there. And have Meera talk to his ex-wife.’
‘Dan’s convinced that Delaney didn’t know his attacker. He says the footprints in the apartment suggest he surprised a burglar, simple as that.’
‘So there’s a fight and the burglar kills him, bundles him into his van in a panic, can’t think what to do with the body, takes it home and cuts it up, then remembers the empty shop up the road and dumps him in the freezer. Or he takes him straight to the shop, out into the back room, lays him out on the plastic sheets and does his cutting there. It would be ironic if the first straightforward case we’ve handled in years turns out to be the one that gets us the unit back.’
‘What are you going to do, John? Do you want some help?’
‘No, just keep an eye on the others for me. Arthur and I will try to have this place running more efficiently by the morning, providing he gets back soon from wherever he’s wandered off to. At least we have electricity and the neighbourhood has Wi-Fi, so I can use my laptop.’
‘Where did Mr Bryant go?’
‘He wrapped that disgusting old scarf around his head and told me he was meeting an old friend in a graveyard. If we keep operating by the book, we might be able to clear this whole thing up in time to satisfy the Home Office. I do hope Arthur isn’t going to try and muddy the waters with some unlikely scenario involving, oh, I don’t know, resurrectionists or pagan worshippers.’
‘I’ve heard him mention forest gods quite a few times.’
May sipped his tea, thinking. ‘He sees ghosts, you know.’
Longbright’s brow furrowed. ‘What do you mean?’
‘Not in the conventional way. It’s just—I think the past is always there. The ghosts walk beside him. All the things that have happened here in times gone by remain burned into his vision like afterimages. It’s Arthur’s weakness. And, of course, his greatest strength.’