Including to use it on, rumour has it, senior officers up to and including the rank of deputy assistant commissioner.
‘So we’re going to need the names and contact details of all your tenants,’ said Seawoll, and the man in the pinstripe suit promised Seawoll the sun and the moon, a USB pen and anything else he might need.
Which turned out to be coffee – which I provided once Pinstripe had scuttled off.
‘The list for the whole building?’ I asked.
‘You never know what we might find once we’ve run all their names,’ said Seawoll. ‘Could be a couple of fortuitous clear-ups hidden in a place like this.’
This is the sort of thing that upsets money launderers and Liberty alike – although for different reasons, obviously. We were still divvying up the snacks when Guleed arrived and forced us to start again. She’d brought an advance guard of officers who, having just finished one house-to-house sweep, were not overjoyed about being launched into another. While Guleed got them organised, Seawoll asked me about Beverley.
‘Any day now,’ I said.
‘Do you think it’s going to make a difference to you?’ asked Seawoll. ‘Professionally speaking?’
I said I didn’t know.
‘Come on, Peter, you’re about to become a fucking father,’ said Seawoll. ‘You need to start thinking about the implications. One of which will be an obligation not to die suddenly in the line of duty.’
‘Thanks, sir,’ I said. ‘I’ll take that on board.’
‘More to the point, am I going to be invited to the christening?’
‘Might not be a christening,’ I said. ‘They’re still arguing.’
‘It’s not going to be one of those hippy New Age things, is it?’ said Seawoll.
‘If it is, do you still want to come?’
‘Will there be anything to drink?’
‘At the ceremony? Maybe.’ I said. ‘Afterwards – definitely.’
‘Then count me in.’
Guleed returned with Danni in tow, and we had one of those al fresco policy meetings that occur whenever police find themselves hanging around at an active crime scene waiting for forensics or prisoner transport to arrive and there’s no pub or café to slope off to. On the TV they either cut to the next scene, or the meetings are conducted while the SIO strides in or out of the locus, but in reality we mostly stand around because there’s nowhere to sit.
Seriously, the first clever sod that invents a combination extendable baton and shooting stick is going to be minted.
‘We’re not going to get the scene processed before this evening,’ said Seawoll once we’d briefed him as to David Moore’s flat. ‘And we’re not going to get a PM before tomorrow. Where’s Thomas?’
‘Heading out to liaise with TVP for the notification of Carmichael’s family,’ said Guleed.
And no doubt taking the opportunity to have a sniff around his house to see if there were any signs that Preston Carmichael was a practitioner.
Seawoll asked me whether I needed further access to the flat, and I told him I’d done the IVA but I would want to know if there was an obvious cause of death.
‘Like what?’ asked Seawoll.
‘Like a great big hole in his chest,’ I said.
Seawoll checked his watch.
‘Why don’t you and Danni action the statement with the little neighbour girl,’ he said. ‘Sahra can suit up and check the body when the forensics go in. If nothing immediate comes up from you or Nightingale, we’ll have a briefing at 6.30.’
And with that we separated like a bunch of teenagers in a slasher movie.
4 Misdirection
The smell of death is insidious. Spend any time close to a corpse, especially when they’re not fresh, and it gets into your clothes. Which is why I keep a spare jacket and shirt in a dry-cleaning bag in the back of the Asbo. I’ve got quite good at changing in the car, and I only nearly elbowed Danni in the face once getting into the spare shirt.
By the time I was finished the schools were out, and we headed back to Poplar to talk to Megan about her alien. I let Danni do the charm offensive and it worked almost as well as it had with next door’s dog. Soon we were in the living room sitting around the homework table with Megan, aged nine and three quarters, cups of tea, and Megan’s mum hovering in the role of appropriate adult.
‘I normally make her do her homework as soon as she gets in,’ said Megan’s mum, who worked nights as a cleaner for the DLR. ‘That way I know it’s done before I go out.’
She was quick to reassure us that Megan’s big sister would be home from work soon enough to keep an eye on her.
‘It was an alien,’ said Megan – she sounded quite definite and looked quite pleased to be getting out of doing her homework.
‘How did you know it was an alien?’ I asked.
‘It felt like an alien,’ said Megan, and slurped her tea.
Felt, I thought, not looked.
I looked at Danni. She had caught this, too, because she followed up by asking Megan if she could describe how the alien felt.
‘Glowy,’ said Megan. ‘As if she was giving off radiation, and there was a noise.’
‘What kind of noise?’ asked Danni.
‘Like this,’ said Megan, and opened her mouth and sang ‘La’ in a perfect high G. She kept going until she ran out of breath.
‘So like someone singing?’ said Danni.
‘Yeah,’ said Megan. ‘But only if you was an alien.’
Danni asked a few more questions to nail down the time frame and then we left Megan to get on with her homework.
‘She really seems to think it was an alien,’ said Danni once we were out on the walkway.
It had started raining while we were doing the interview and the clouds were low enough to obscure the tops of the dull glass boxes of Canary Wharf.
‘That’s the zeitgeist, isn’t it?’ I said. ‘Back in medieval times she would have described it as an angel or a devil or a fairy. Nowadays everything is aliens.’
One of the forensic techs was taking a breather outside David Moore’s flat. She had her hood down and her mask off. Short brown hair was plastered to her forehead with sweat. I gave a friendly wave and got a nod in return.
‘So if it wasn’t an alien?’ asked Danni, who was running through her notes.
‘Maybe a fae of some kind,’ I said. ‘Some of them can have pretty strong vestigia.’
My cousin and fellow apprentice, Abigail, wanted to call a vestigium attached to a living creature an ‘aura’, but I was resistant. I wasn’t about to start talking about people’s auras in public, and definitely not in any official document with my name on it.
‘Could it be an actual angel?’ asked Danni. ‘Or a devil?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said.
The original Society of the Wise, which was your actual official name for the Folly, had been proudly part of the Enlightenment. God, if he existed, was the ultimate master craftsman who had set the world in motion, with fixed immutable laws, and then left it to get on with things. They saw angels and devils as abstract concepts and held that anything wandering around with a halo, wings or a pitchfork was either an uppity fae, a con man or a mountebank. This attitude had persisted even into the most strident periods of muscular Victorian Christianity, and devout wizards espoused that angels, as manifestations of god, were as above the fae as man was above the beasts that crawl in the dust. Such matters were best left to them, as was ordained by the Church to deal with them.