My mum was different – she would have settled for jazz musician.
So, anyway, the coroner decides when, where and under whose scalpel you get unzipped. Which is why we let Thomas Nightingale, gentlemen wizard, war hero and posher than an afternoon tea at the Savoy, do the negotiating. He has an arrangement with the Westminster coroner and, as a result, Dr Abdul Haqq Walid and, more importantly, his better-qualified assistant, Dr Jennifer Vaughan, get first dibs on potential Falcon cases.
In addition, the Westminster coroner, who obviously has a thing for the macabre, has an agreement with the other London coroners that she, the coroner, gets first dibs on any Falcon cases that would normally fall outside her jurisdiction. Her colleagues are usually happy to surrender what often proves to be a complicated and frustrating case.
There are several ways into the Iain West Forensic Suite, and while our victim went in feet first via the loading bay, Guleed, Danni and me – after stopping off at Joe’s café round the corner for refs – went in via the back and trooped up the stairs to the observation room. This looks like every other institutional meeting room built since the 1990s, with magnolia walls and a genuine wood-effect conference table, except for the big flat TV screen upon which is broadcast a live feed from the lab below. There’s a little joystick thing so you can move the camera around, but if you wiggle it too much Dr Vaughan starts making sarcastic comments.
You are not allowed to record anything off the TV, on pain of the coroner’s displeasure. And given that she’s actually a judge, as well as everything else, that displeasure can be manifested in many legally prolonged ways.
Still, we were perfectly happy to sit upstairs drinking our coffees and working our way through our baguettes while watching Dr Vaughan do her work at one remove.
I should have known it wouldn’t last.
About half an hour in, Nightingale stepped away from the table and spoke in a voice loud enough that he could be sure it was picked up by the CCTV’s mic.
‘Peter, I’d like you and Danni to come down and see this directly.’
Danni pulled a face, but Nightingale wouldn’t have called us down if it wasn’t important.
‘Can I have your doughnut?’ asked Guleed as I quickly finished up my coffee.
‘No,’ I said and dropped it into my bag.
‘What does he want us to see?’ asked Danni as we changed into our PPE.
The big hole in the victim’s chest where his heart should be.
Cleaned up, I could see that it was the size and depth of my fist and smashed right though the ribcage. White shards of bone poked through red and grey tissue. No, not smashed … because the ends of the bone looked sheared rather than broken, and the sides of the wound cavity were horribly regular. It looked as if someone had cut out the man’s heart with an enormous ice cream scoop.
‘What the fuck,’ said Danni when she’d had a look, ‘does that?’
‘Nothing, in my experience,’ said Nightingale. ‘It would be difficult for a practitioner to cast a spell that would so overwhelm the human body’s defences that you could excise a portion of a victim’s chest.’
‘What defences?’ asked Danni, who’d been due to do that particular class next Friday. Part of the Identifying Falcon Incidents Unit III: Physical Injury. I’d been planning to finish writing it Thursday night – honest.
Still, nothing beats on-the-job training.
‘It’s hard to affect the human body directly,’ I said. ‘Anything with a central nervous system seems to generate a sort of anti-magic shield. You can knock people down or throw things at them, but you can’t reach inside with magic and mess with their guts.’
‘That’s a relief,’ said Danni.
‘At least not this crudely,’ said Nightingale, gesturing at the horrible gaping wound.
‘It makes sense from an evolutionary point of view,’ said Dr Walid. ‘Any species that couldn’t resist magic would be at a survival disadvantage over the long run.’
Danni shrugged.
‘But obviously,’ she said, ‘you can mess with someone’s guts.’
‘We’re sure there wasn’t some weapon involved?’ I asked – slightly desperately.
‘We did find a foreign object in the wound track,’ said Dr Walid.
He produced a stainless-steel specimen tray. On it rested something that looked like a short ceramic tube, just wide enough that I could get my little finger inside. It was an iridescent blue-grey colour, and one end had clearly snapped off leaving irregular shards, but the other looked like it had been fashioned into a hollow point, like that of a bamboo spear.
I assumed that it was this, rather than the hole in the chest, that Nightingale wanted me to sense.
‘Shall I?’ I asked, and extended my hand towards the tray.
Nightingale nodded and I let my gloved fingertips rest on the tube. Even through the nitrile the surface felt rough and gritty. At first I thought it was as devoid of vestigia as the empty space back at the Silver Vaults. But then, like a coin at the bottom of a well, I felt it.
I stood back and let Danni have a go.
‘Nothing,’ she said after touching the tube. ‘The same nothing we felt at the scene.’ Despite the mask and safety goggles, I could see her frowning. ‘No, wait – there’s something very faint, like a sort of light or a musical note.’
I looked over at Nightingale, who was nodding.
When you train someone, I thought, you don’t muck about.
A light like what you get when you hit your head, Phillip Arnold had said.
‘I believe the object is a piece of worked fulgurite,’ said Dr Walid. ‘Otherwise known as lightning glass.’
Which happened when lightning struck sand and fused it into a glass tube. Although, Dr Walid pointed out, if it was the same then the exterior had been smoothed or polished in some fashion.
‘I’ve heard of something like this,’ said Nightingale. ‘But I can’t remember where. I’ll need to check the libraries at the Folly.’
Guleed was waiting for us in the changing room.
‘We’ve found the ex-wife,’ she said.
Danni was due a training session with Nightingale back at the Folly so, after clearing it with Stephanopoulos, me and Guleed headed over to Richmond to have a chat. While me and Danni had been fondling lightning glass, Stephanopoulos had persuaded Samuel Arnold & Co to access their sales records and this got us an address.
‘She only came in last week,’ said Guleed, as we walked out to the nasty Hyundai she’d snagged from the MIT pool. ‘And she didn’t sell any rings, just some antique candelabras.’
It had started to rain as we negotiated the traffic on the Brompton Road. Shoppers and tourists were hunched under umbrellas, heads down and walking quickly. As we passed it, I saw that the Harrods windows were tastefully minimalist displays of bicycles and dummies dressed in what looked like 1920s flapper dresses.
I wondered if they’d fixed the consumer electronics hall. It had been over a year, and the management hadn’t sued the Met yet, so I figured the damage must have been covered by their insurance. We never had figured out how Lesley May had rigged her iPhone to create the magical explosion which sanded every upmarket plasma screen TV and ruinously expensive Bang & Olufsen entertainment centre within twenty metres.
That had been easily as powerful as whatever had knocked out the CCTV in the Silver Vaults, but hadn’t been nearly so clean.
‘I wonder where she is?’ said Guleed, and I knew she was thinking about Lesley, too.
‘Somewhere without an extradition treaty,’ I said. ‘Probably with better weather.’
By the time we’d crossed the Chiswick Bridge, the inside inquiry offices had texted us some of the results of their integrated intelligence platform (IIP) check. I summarised for Guleed as we picked our way through the leafy backstreets of Richmond looking for the address.