The outside inquiry team had tried his number, but it went straight to voicemail. Preston Carmichael’s address was listed as in the village of Skirmett in the Chilterns, but when they tried his landline his wife told them he was spending the week at their flat in London.
‘Ability Place,’ said Stephanopoulos. ‘Down by the Millwall Docks.’
Less than a kilometre away from our location.
‘That’s convenient,’ I said.
‘That’s what I thought,’ said Stephanopoulos.
Back when London was the largest port in the world, Millharbour had once circled the Millwall Docks, where timber and grain were shipped in to feed the ferocious furnace that was London’s industry – back when we had industry. Now it is yet another development canyon lined with shapeless postmodern apartment blocks, and the grain all comes through Tilbury, further up the estuary.
Ability Place was your classic speculative luxury housing development, a twenty-two-storey concrete frame filled up with identical rows of luxury flats built to the lowest specification that you could get away with and still appeal to Chinese investors. It had twenty-four-hour concierge services, a gym, a spa, three storeys of underground car parking, and looked like a laboratory storage rack for giant mutant rabbits.
The concierge lived behind a desk at the end of an orange corridor lined with postal boxes. I assumed this was convenient for the postie and the absentee tenants alike – although the layout reminded me of the computer core in 2001: A Space Odyssey. I half expected a calm voice to suggest that it still had great enthusiasm for the mission.
Because we hadn’t had our dinner yet, me and Danni had our warrant cards out before the concierge had a chance to speak and hustled him up to the first floor to let us in.
The thing about vestigia is you get better at spotting them the more you spot them. And this includes particular types of vestigia as well. So it wasn’t surprising that even Danni felt the same stunned musical silence we’d sensed from the fulgurite tube and the melted crucifix at David Moore’s flat, before we’d even reached Preston Carmichael’s front door. I sent the concierge down the corridor and took the opportunity to run through Falcon entry procedure with Danni.
There’s such a thing as being overcautious, even in policing, but I still had a fresh memory of the hole in David Moore’s chest to keep me paranoid.
We stood either side of the door as I unlocked it and carefully pushed it open with my extendable baton. Most plain clothes officers don’t routinely carry their ASP with them, but then most plain clothes officers aren’t called upon to face down unicorns, sentient mould and the occasional carnivorous tree. I waited for a count of ten to see if anyone came rushing out or opened fire before crouching down and peering around the door jamb.
I did this partly because it makes you less of a target, but mostly because I was already in position to check whether the floor just inside the door was clear of magical booby traps.
Since it was a studio flat, the door opened straight into the bedroom half, which was screened from the reception area by a half-wall. Beyond that I could see that the curtains were drawn and the lights were out. The air inside the flat was cold and I could see the curtains rippling from the breeze outside. But the chill couldn’t disguise the sickly tang of decay, urine and faeces that every police officer gets to know as the harbinger of overtime.
‘Shit,’ said Danni.
I slipped on my booties, my nitrile gloves and, leaving Danni to guard the door, I stepped gingerly inside. It had a real parquet floor polished up to a bootie-sliding sheen and the walls were painted a characterless white with a hint of peach. The bed had been made up in the bachelor style, with the duvet thrown haphazardly over the mattress, and there were a couple of thick paperback books on the bedside table.
I saw the body as soon as I rounded the half-wall. It was stretched out on a red and green diamond-patterned rug in front of a leather sofa. It was covered in a yellow cotton fitted bed sheet that matched the duvet cover. There was a circular red-brown stain on the sheet about where I judged the chest to be.
You’re supposed to do two things when you discover a body – double-check they’re dead and protect the locus of the crime. I squatted down at what I hoped was the head end and resisted the temptation to uncover the chest – forensics would want to do that.
The face matched that of pictures we’d lifted from Preston Carmichael’s social media pages. His skin was pale and, when I checked his neck for a pulse, cold to the touch. Even through the gloves. I fished my last disposable face mask out of my jacket pocket and put it on so I could get closer to the corpse without breathing my DNA all over it.
The vestigium was identical to that I’d sensed from the fulgurite and crucifix, only this time widespread – affecting the whole bedroom. With that connection established, I checked the bathroom, just in case, and then retraced my steps to the corridor, closed the door behind me and called Stephanopoulos.
While we waited for the full weight of the Metropolitan Police to arrive, Danni stayed to secure the flat and I went and talked to the concierge. He hadn’t seen Preston Carmichael recently, but also wasn’t sure he’d recognise him if he had. CCTV was limited to covering the garage ramp, the main entrance and the fire doors. I told him that we were going to need the footage from at least the last seven days. He said he wasn’t sure he was allowed to do that, and I explained that he was legally obliged to hand it over.
To my surprise, the first officer on the scene was Detective Chief Inspector Alexander Seawoll. Vast, profane, northern and suspiciously clever, he played at being an old-fashioned governor, but in real life he was something far more modern and effective.
He stared down at me and narrowed his eyes.
‘What have you done with your trainee?’
I explained that she was guarding the scene while I secured the CCTV, and it pained him that he couldn’t find any fault in that.
‘You’re probably wondering why I decided to grace you with my presence,’ he said.
Which was true, since DCIs spend most of their life in their offices or, worse, in other people’s offices and conference rooms. ‘Playing,’ Seawoll once said, ‘pin the fucking buzzword on the sodding flow chart.’
‘You have a secret love nest in Canary Wharf,’ I said.
‘Chance would be a fine thing,’ said Seawoll. ‘I’m here on my tod because once again your lot have managed to spread my team over half of bloody London. Poor Pam is going to divorce our Miriam for neglect and it will all be your fault.’
I’ve met Pam, and as far as I could tell, her and Stephanopoulos were more doting than the last page of a Jane Austen novel. Still, I’ve learnt never to interrupt Seawoll when he’s ranting. Apart from anything else, my therapist says that this is obviously the way he expresses affection. I doubt that, since she’s never heard him swear at an illegally parked car.
‘Where’s the nearest coffee?’ he asked suddenly.
‘Tesco Express,’ I said. ‘Round the corner.’
So he sent me out for refs, but not before making sure I phoned Danni and asked her what she wanted.
‘Always look after your people,’ he said as I noted down the order. ‘The way you treat them sets an example for the way they treat others.’
By the time I got back, I found Seawoll intimidating a thin nervous white man with thinning sandy hair and an almost bespoke medium-grey pinstripe suit. He was from the property management company and, having softened him up with some strategic looming, Seawoll was now killing him with soft words and kindness. Officers past the rank of inspector normally never get to interview anyone except other police, so Seawoll likes to dust off his famous ‘Don’t make me angry, you wouldn’t like me if I was angry’ technique at every opportunity.