Beyond the Tron door we turned right into a brightly lit and blindingly white corridor which infinitied off into the distance. It was lined with vault doors and display cases filled with silver. At the far end I could see blue and white tape and forensic types swishing around with cameras and collection kits. As we walked down the corridor I saw that John Tann’s name was on every header, but the name of each shop was displayed on the inside of the door so you could see them when the shop was open.
And inside each shop was the most silver. It was crammed onto shelves and free-standing display cabinets. Ranks of cutlery, salvers and gravy boats. Lines of dogs and cats and bears and eagles and intricate galleons under full sail. All of it glittering in the bright white tungsten light.
And in each shop, standing or sitting amongst the splendour, was the proprietor or salesperson watching us slither past in our noddy suits.
‘We offered them a chance to wait outside the perimeter,’ said Guleed. ‘But they refused to go.’
Most of the shops had been owned by the same families for over fifty years, and so it was with Samuel Arnold & Co, two thirds of the way down the main corridor.
Samuel Arnold & Co was a double-width shop, which meant it had two John Tann doors, which was just as well because one of them was blocked by the body which lay sprawled across the threshold, legs sticking out into the corridor. The SOCOs backed off as we approached, I like to think out of deference to my expertise but more likely because they didn’t want to be associated with the kind of weird bollocks that doesn’t look good when making a court appearance. Me and Danni went in through the second door and picked our way down the narrow aisle between packed display cases until we could get a good look.
I’d noticed as I passed them that some of the shops seemed very specialised. One was all silver cutlery, salvers and plates; another specialised in silver figurines or candelabras. Samuel Arnold & Co was mostly jewellery, the display cases showing lines of rings, chains and pendants, while delicate spun silver necklaces hung around the necks of headless busts.
By the standard of murders most gruesome, this was not particularly bad. I’ve seen headless, faceless and dismembered bodies. Not to mention the one that was cooked from the inside out. And it’s not that you get used to it, but you do feel a little wash of relief if the injury is small and neat and the corpse hasn’t yet started to smell.
He was a white man, looked to be in his fifties, with thinning brown hair cut short, regular features, pale grey eyes staring at the ceiling, thin-lipped mouth now slack with death. He was wearing jeans, trainers and a plain purple sweatshirt under an olive Patagonia jacket. A hole, about a hand’s width across, had been burnt in the sweatshirt just below and to the right of the label; it was perfectly circular and the edges of the fabric were charred black. Through the hole a huge wound was visible but its exact nature was obscured by congealed blood and unidentifiable bits. I’d have said it was a shotgun wound, except I couldn’t see any pellet holes surrounding the main injury and it seemed too deep.
‘Does that look strange to you?’ I asked Danni, pointing at the wound.
‘Yes,’ said Danni in a slightly squeaky voice. And then, in a normal register, ‘Yes, yes, it does.’
I called out to the hovering forensic techs and asked whether I could pull back the sweatshirt and have a look.
‘No!’ came the unanimous reply. ‘And get a move on.’
‘We’re going to do an Initial Vestigium Assessment,’ I told Danni.
Magic, including the everyday magic that permeates the world, leaves behind it a trace – an echo, if you like. You’ve probably felt it all your life – that sense of familiarity when you walk into a strange room, that shiver you felt for no reason on a particular stretch of pavement, the sense that someone just whispered your name. These can all be vestigia, or they can be random misfiring of neurons, a memory or even a daydream. Separating the two takes training and practice, and is the first step in becoming a Falcon-capable officer.
‘Don’t worry if you don’t feel anything,’ I said. ‘If you’re unsure don’t hesitate to ask me. Remember, that’s part of the training process.’
We were already squatting down by the body, so that seemed a sensible place to start. I leant over and got my face as close to the corpse as I could. I smelt sweat, fabric softener and, underneath, the first sweet, creeping hints of decay.
But nothing else but the random tick-tock of my brain.
I pushed myself back onto my heels and looked over at Danni.
‘What can you sense?’ I asked.
Danni closed her eyes and slowed her breathing. It was hard to tell behind the glasses, mask and hood, but I think she frowned before looking at me.
‘There’s nothing there,’ she said. ‘Is there?’
I was impressed.
‘No,’ I said. ‘No vestigia down here at all.’
‘You said there’s nearly always something,’ said Danni.
‘There’s some things that can suck magic out of the environment,’ I said, and heard Guleed groan from her position in the doorway.
‘Not that again,’ she said as we stood up.
‘Not what again?’ said Danni.
‘I’ll brief you when we’ve finished evidence collection,’ I said. ‘You need to get hold of a crime scene map, locate all the CCTV cameras, electronic cash registers, phones and laptops, and mark where they were when the incident happened. If we track the level of damage they’ve sustained, we might be able to triangulate the epicentre of the effect.’
Danni nodded and swished off to get the job done. Another phrase used in her reviews was efficient.
‘Look at you,’ said Guleed. ‘Ordering people about.’
‘Better than the alternative,’ I said, and we went and found the SOCO to make sure all the CCTV cameras and the rest were bagged and tagged.
‘That’s going to cost money,’ said Guleed.
‘We’ll let Nightingale argue the toss with Stephanopoulos,’ I said – that being, in my opinion, what senior officers were for.
‘I love that you still call them by their last names,’ said Guleed.
‘When I’m a skipper like you I’ll call them Thomas and Miriam,’ I said, but I wasn’t sure I ever would – at least not Nightingale. ‘I think I need to have a word with the witness.’
Phillip Arnold was a third-generation silver trader. He was proud to inform us that his family had owned a shop in the London Silver Vaults for fifty years.
‘Although I’ve got to say I worry about the future,’ he said.
Phillip was a young-looking forty-year-old white man with black hair and light brown eyes. He was dressed in a well-cut but, deliberately to my eye, old-fashioned pinstripe suit complete with embroidered waistcoat and matching yarmulke. His movements were nervous and he kept making repetitive little gestures with his hands. In normal policing it’s usually better to wait a bit before you conduct a second interview, but with Falcon cases you wanted to get in quickly. Faced with the supernatural, witnesses tend to rationalise away things they didn’t understand. So it’s better to get a statement before they can convince themselves they didn’t see what they actually saw.
And Phillip wasn’t at all sure about what he’d seen.
‘A light, he said. ‘Only not like a real light but … Have you ever been hit in the head?’
‘Occupational hazard,’ I said.
‘Did you ever get that flash of light?’ he said, making exploding gestures in front of his eyes. ‘It’s not really a flash of light but that’s what it looks like?’