47
I called Julia and listened to her tearfully describe how the police wouldn’t tell her what was going on. I told her they’d been to see me too, had asked me to step back from the case, and that I’d agreed. It would have been easier to tell her the truth – that I was still going after Sam, but now through Duncan Pell – but then she’d have that burden to carry, that lie to tell, and the police would eventually pick up the scent. I needed to stay ahead of them.
As I waited on Spike to call me back with an address for Pell, I thought of something Liz had said to me once. You don’t have that mechanism that tells you when enough is enough. You don’t know when to stop. I didn’t know how to respond to that at the time and I didn’t know how to respond to it now. But without Pell, without using him to try and find Sam, without getting Julia the answers she needed, I had nothing. No missing person to bring back into the light, no hole to fill. Nothing to define my life.
Duncan Pell lived about a quarter of a mile from Highgate Tube station, in a tiny house on the edge of Queen’s Wood. The road was nice but Pell’s house wasn’t. It looked like a late addition to the street; out of place among the big, red-brick fronts and gleaming bay windows that surrounded it. It was tucked away, half hidden behind a copse of trees, and the driveway slanted downwards, so you were forced to approach at a jog. It was just a box – completely square with no external features and nothing to distinguish it – and, as I approached it, passing the manicured lawns and spotless fascia boards of the other houses, I wondered what Pell’s neighbours made of him. I also wondered how he could afford to live in an area like this. Either London Underground were paying more than I’d imagined, or he’d been left the house by a relative.
The lawn hadn’t been mowed in weeks. Big, overgrown trees cast shadows across the house, and there were weeds everywhere: the grass was infested with them, but they were crawling through the driveway as well, fingering their way out of the cracks and up the side of the house. There was a red ceramic pot in the corner, with nothing growing in it, and a tap with a hose attached.
The front of the house had two windows, the curtains drawn both sides. I rang the doorbell and waited, watching for any sign of movement behind a small glass panel, high up on the door – but none came. I pressed my finger to the buzzer a second time, leaving it there, listening to the sound reverberate around inside the house but, ten seconds later, I got the same lack of response.
No approaching footsteps.
No sound inside at all.
I moved back up the driveway and headed down to the end of the road. From right on the corner, between a couple of monolithic fir trees, the gardens of the houses in Pell’s row were visible. Beyond was Queen’s Wood, its trees housed inside metal fencing, its endless canopy a patchwork of leaves. Pell’s back garden was pretty much a mirror image of the front, all grass and weeds and neglect, but it was built on two levels: a stone staircase connected them, the bottom one leading down to a rear gate. It was the easiest and quickest way to get onto the property, because there was no padlock – just a slide bolt – but it was far too exposed: all the neighbours’ windows looked down across it, and it backed right on to the edge of the woods and one of the approaches to Highgate Tube station. It was too risky.
I headed back up the road and returned to the front door, trying the bell for a third time. ‘Duncan?’ I said, keeping my voice low so the neighbours wouldn’t hear. But still I got no response. I turned and looked back at the street. The house was hidden so well behind all the natural growth, it was like a homing beacon for burglars. I took out my wallet, flipped it open and slid out a couple of thin hairpins.
Now I was the burglar.
I’d learned to pick locks in South Africa during my second spell there, from an ex-member of the National Intelligence Service. He was an arrogant, pig-headed racist who I’d interviewed on six separate occasions as part of a feature I was writing on the country, post-apartheid. His views were abhorrent, and his refusal to apologize for the things he’d done even worse, but he seemed to believe we shared some kind of kinship, however misguided, perhaps because I was the only person who’d ever spent any sort of time listening to him. I’d rarely picked locks as a journalist. As an investigator, outside of the rule of law, I did it often.
I hated it.
The difficulty. The precision. The frustration.
Working the kinks out of the hairpins, I took a look back out at the street and dropped down at the door. It was a cylinder lock – the same kind I’d learned with – so I had a small advantage. But the one true thing the South African had said in all the time I spent interviewing him was that lock-picking wasn’t like the films. The next ten minutes of failure proved him right – until, finally, the door popped gently away from its frame.
I paused, waiting for an alarm to start beeping and, when nothing came, entered the house and pushed the door shut behind me. Straight away it was clear Pell must have inherited the house. It was like stepping into a 1970s sitcom: an awful beige carpet, worn thin by traffic and scattered with stains, and wallpaper, thick and dirty, bleached yellow with smoke. In the kitchen, dishes were piled up in the sink; burger cartons and chip paper; food dried to a hard crust on the plates and worktops. The house was hot and stuffy from having been closed up, but there was a musty, decrepit smell as well, as if every inch of the house – even the foundations it had been built on – had reached the end of its life.
I headed upstairs. At the top were two bedrooms and a bathroom. The first bedroom was where he slept: a bed had been pushed in among built-in wardrobes and a mattress dumped on top. No sheets. No duvet. Just a sleeping bag. A side table was next to that with an ashtray on it. The room smelled strongly of smoke. To my left was a separate stand-alone wardrobe. I opened it up. There was hardly anything inside: two or three suits, three London Underground uniforms, a pair of jeans and a couple of shirts. At the bottom, lined up, were his boots: all steel-toecapped, all black with red stitching – the same as he’d had on the day I’d first met him at the station – and all polished until they shone.
I headed for the second bedroom. It was the hottest room in the house, sun beating down through the window, forming a square on the carpet. Dust was caught in the light, drifting from one side of the room to the other, and there was a strange smell. Sweet, like air freshener. In the far corner was a wardrobe. It looked old: dark wood, ornate design around its edges, chips dotted along its side and base. I opened it up. There were more clothes inside – more suits – and some cheap rip-off Magic Trees that smelt vaguely of aftershave, which I guessed he was using to combat the musty smell of the old wood.
At the bottom was a bag.
I dragged it out and dumped it on the floor, then unzipped it. On top was a coat, big and puffy and covered with dirt. It looked like he’d been gardening in it. I pulled it out. The sleeves were ripped and chewed at the ends, stained all the way up to the elbows in grease, and the back was filthy: black and torn, like it had been rubbed down with coal. I checked the pockets. One side was empty but the other had a folded piece of paper in it: a flyer. At the top was a black-and-white photocopied picture of a doorway, with a man standing outside it, smiling. He was holding a cup of something. Underneath, all the print had been smudged, as if the flyer had been inside the pocket for a long time. I looked at the coat again and a memory stirred in me. Had I seen it before somewhere? It had a strange smell. Not just dirt and grease and body odour, but something else. A dusty, oily kind of scent. Like the smell of the Tube. Pell had been wearing the standard uniform when I’d talked to him at Gloucester Road, but I started to wonder whether I’d seen the jacket in the booth behind him at some point. Glimpsed it and not even realized. I turned it on to its front and flipped it open. Inside, the insulation was coming through in a couple of places and then I spotted something else. Another stain.
Blood.
Not much, but enough: soaked into the collar of the coat.
I set the coat aside and returned to the bag. It had three other things inside: some cardboard packaging, a leather pouch, and a series of printouts rolled up into a tube and secured with an elastic band. I took out the card first and saw it wasn’t packaging at all – or, at least, not any more – but one side of a brown cardboard box, messily cut out with a blunt pair of scissors. There was nothing on one side but more dirt.
I flipped it over.
More grime. More dirt. And more blood. But the blood wasn’t what caught my attention this time. It was what was written across the middle of the board in black.
Homeless. Please help.
I glanced at the flyer – realizing it was for a shelter – and then at the coat next to it. Now I knew why I recognized it.
It had been Leon Spane’s.
Reaching down into the bag, I took out the leather pouch and then the roll of printed pages. The pouch was soft leather, closed at either end and bound in its centre with a tie. I pulled at the tie and the pouch fell open, like a bird spreading its wings.
Knives, one after the other.
Different lengths, different blades, different edges, different grips. But all of them had one thing in common: blood on them, congealed and dried, sticking to the leather and to each other. I placed them down on the floor next to the coat, next to the flyer, next to the cardboard sign – and I opened up the printouts.
They were maps.
I laid them side by side, but quickly realized it was the same map, reprinted over and over again, just at different magnifications. I brought the one with the closest view of the area towards me. It was Highgate. I could make out Pell’s house. I could see Queen’s Wood, and Highgate Cemetery to the south. And then a trail, running parallel to the Northern line and branching off right. Some kind of footpath. It cut between housing estates as it carved east, and halfway along, as nature became more dense, Pell had marked it with red pen.
And then I realized it wasn’t a footpath.
It was a disused railway line.