33
DECAPITATION
Joseph was a devoutly religious man who had chosen to work in a cathedral of commerce. As the cleaner released his vacuum hose and guided the nozzle between the desks, he once more felt a sense of awe. The desk units were arranged like pews on either side of a central aisle, at the head of which was the boxed-off chancel where the Director of Operations received his clients.
It was not yet light outside, but here in the great nave of the open-plan office everything was sharp and bright from six a.m. onwards. Two walls of bare brick, two of glass, twenty desks, a conference area and the sacristy of the refreshment station, all intended to be maintained in immaculate condition throughout the day. Except that the workers here accumulated so much rubbish in their work spaces that Joseph could discern their individual personalities, forcing their way through like grass growing in concrete cracks. Each night they left something of themselves behind, as if anxious to leave evidence that they existed. When someone resigned from the company and was replaced, the space was cleared and inevitably filled again. To Joseph, even the photographs of families were interchangeable. He never met the people who sat on the chairs and hunched over these desks. For him, they existed only through their belongings, a draped cardigan, a gym bag, a sunlit photograph of smiling children.
However, this morning was different, because there was someone here. Joseph could see the shiny black shoes sticking out from the edge of the desk partition. As he walked forward, towing the vacuum cleaner behind him, he knew something was seriously wrong. The office cubicle was in chaos. The garbage pail had been overturned and a swivel chair lay on its side. Papers lay in sacrilegious disarray across the carpet tiles. Then he saw the dark, sticky patches gleaming in the light from the overhead panels.
Joseph took a step forward, and the victim was revealed to him.
The name on his cubicle wall was Maddox Cavendish, and he was one of the project’s main architects, but Joseph had heard that he was Marianne Waters’s hatchet man, and that presumably meant he fired people, and that meant there were a lot of people who really hated him.
Which probably explained why Maddox Cavendish had no head.
‘Oh, God. Oh, Lord. Oh, Jesus.’ Raymond Land sat shaking his head in his hands as Arthur Bryant looked on with interest.
‘Isn’t it funny how the most atheistic people start summoning gods when they’re in a state of panic?’ he mused. ‘You could probably trace the birth of many religious cults to such moments of self-induced anxiety.’
‘Oh, shut up, Bryant. You’re no help at all. What are we going to do? The chief architect of the ADAPT Group’s expansion plans, rendered headless in an office with a secure entry system. Murdered within a few hundred yards of two other men, one a builder, the other an assistant manager of a sodding coffee shop! And you’re telling me our only suspect is the clueless young leader of a local protest group. It’s not going to stick. I can’t go back to Faraday and tell him this. I can’t contain it now. The story will be out and all over the networks by lunchtime. We can’t have people fearful of going to work. Can you imagine the chaos? They’ll be suing their employers. The publicity’s going to backfire on everyone. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve lied to Leslie Faraday this week. I keep telling him we’re getting close to an arrest but he doesn’t seem to believe me. He’s not getting information from anywhere else, is he?’
‘I can’t imagine why you did that, old fruit. You should have told the truth and said that there’s a mad killer roaming our streets and we have absolutely no clue about who he might be or what his motives are.’
‘That’s what you would have done, isn’t it? Because you don’t care what you say to your superiors; you never have. I remember the Brixton Prison breakout, when you called Faraday a time-wasting dung-beetle.’
‘If I remember correctly, which is fairly unlikely, I accused him of behaving like Cardinal Richelieu or a rabid weasel, depending on whether he preferred to take his comparisons from history or the animal kingdom.’
‘All very amusing, Bryant, but Faraday was a junior official then and he’s your boss now, and that’s exactly why we’re in this fix. If you’re mean to them on the way up, they’ll knife you once they reach the top. We’re all going to be thrown out on the streets any minute now.’
‘Drink your tea, Raymondo, you’ll feel better. It’s got whisky in it.’
‘It’s half past eleven in the morning. I can’t drink alcohol this early.’
‘I only added a drop to buck you up. We’re doing everything we can. Apparently the room was covered from every angle by cameras and very well lit, but the killer took the precaution of smashing up the CCTV’s hard drive. There was a separate system in operation outside which he couldn’t get at. April and Meera are going through the footage right now.’
‘What about everyone else?’
‘Renfield is with Kershaw at the morgue, John has gone with Janice and Dan Banbury to the ADAPT offices, Bimsley and DuCaine are getting interviews and I’m ploughing my lonely furrow here. In fact, you’re the only one not doing anything useful.’
‘Then tell me what I can do,’ Land pleaded.
‘Go over Faraday’s head. Talk to Oskar Kasavian and tell him the truth. If you don’t, I will.’
‘I don’t see what good it will do—’
‘I want him to understand one thing,’ said Bryant. ‘He must realise that whether he likes it or not, we’re his only hope. Tell him that we’ll clear up the case. We need everyone on our side for this. And I think we can do it.’
‘Do you really believe that?’ Land asked.
‘Yes, I do,’ said Bryant. ‘But if I told you why, you’d probably have a heart attack.’
‘We know that he was here until nearly ten p.m. because he called home from work to check his messages,’ said John May. ‘Where have you gone, Dan?’
Banbury appeared from behind the desk units. ‘I’m trying to get the carpet tiles up,’ he explained. ‘There’s an awful lot of blood underneath them.’ The area surrounding Cavendish’s desk had been taped off and photographed, and the floor closed to all members of staff, who periodically peered in through the glass with impassive faces. Occasionally one of them would discreetly record some footage onto a mobile phone.
‘If the courtyard hadn’t been closed outside, we might have had witnesses walking past. How the hell did the killer get in?’
‘No forced entry. It must have been someone Cavendish knew.’
Longbright bagged the dead man’s appointment book. ‘I’ll do the remaining co-workers,’ she suggested. ‘His suppliers and clients will take longer to sift through.’
‘What happened, Dan?’ asked May. ‘You must have some idea.’
‘This is only in the early stages, John. But I can tell you our man is starting to panic. The victim was killed here. The cuts are the same as before, but nastier, more ragged and careless. Once the bone was severed he tore through the remaining section of skin. There are bits of it all over the place. Looks like he’s taken the head away. Hang on, here’s something…’ He raised a white rubber glove above the desk to show May. Between Banbury’s thumb and forefinger was a tangle of brownish black hair. ‘It’s from a dead animal. The collar of a jacket?’
‘No,’ said May grimly. ‘Too coarse. Looks to me like it’s from a deer or a stag. Mr Toth has every reason to panic. I think we’ve got him this time. Okay, Janice, let’s bring him in.’