She was wearing a pair of stethoscopes which she was using to take Beverley’s blood pressure in the old-fashioned way, with a manual pump and a stopwatch. I felt a sudden wash of panic – we weren’t due any medical bollocks until the big day, which was any time now. And that, I knew for certain, would not involve tweed.
Or a mischievous smile.
‘Ah,’ said the woman, turning the smile on me. ‘You must be the father.’
Beverley, the love of my life, languished on the sofa, the bulge naked and proud and serving as a convenient pedestal for a small bowl of something red and crunchy. Curried shrimp, by the smell.
‘Hi, babes,’ she said when saw me. ‘This is Dr Crosswell. The Old Man of the River asked her to pop by.’
‘Haven’t done a house call for yonks,’ said Dr Crosswell.
‘How is the old man?’ I asked.
I collected up the trail of plastic food containers, bowls, plates and empty Jaffa cake boxes. The twins were obviously going through an eclectic craving phase. I dumped them on the kitchen table for later,
‘Oh, you know him,’ said Dr Crosswell. ‘As wonderful as ever.’
She let the cuff deflate and Beverley lifted her arm so it could be unwrapped.
‘Well?’ asked Beverley.
‘Oh, you’re just perfect,’ said Dr Crosswell. ‘As, of course, you should be. Although if these two wait much longer you might want to consider induction.’
‘They’ll be along soon enough,’ said Beverley. ‘They’re just arguing about who gets to go first.’
Dr Crosswell had rounds in Oxford first thing the next morning and so, after packing her gear away in a very modern black nylon carryall, she bid us farewell.
‘Senior Consultant Obstetrician at John Radcliffe,’ said Beverley after I’d shown Dr Crosswell out. ‘I expected Mum to go wavey … but Father Thames?’
She patted the sofa next to her. But, before I could sit down, she changed her mind and sent me back to the kitchen for another bowl of curried prawns. I took the opportunity to ensure the backup rice cooker was filled and ready to go and check the dishwasher was properly loaded before turning it on.
‘We’re starving in here,’ called Beverley from the living room.
I opened the fridge and sorted through the contents.
‘We’re out of prawns. Do you want the jellied eels instead?’
‘Yes please,’ said Beverley in what was practically a growl.
This was another ‘gift’ from the fishmongers of Billingsgate. And while I’m willing to assert, through my dad’s family, my claims to honorary Cockneyhood, there are limits … however much hot sauce you cover them in. Still, Beverley liked eels even before she hit the weird craving stage, and part of a successful relationship is learning to live with your beloved’s questionable taste. I decanted the horrible mess into a bowl but took the bottle of God Slayer chilli sauce separately – Bev preferring to add it to taste.
While I was at it, I microwaved a mountain of rice topped with my mum’s famous bone-free beef knuckle soup, put the whole lot on a tray and carried it into where Beverley languished, weak from lack of food. She had a pained expression, and by the way she held her hand on the bulge the twins were kicking up a fuss.
Before I could sit down, Beverley grabbed my hand and placed it on her belly. I felt a kick against my palm.
‘Tell them to be quiet,’ she said. ‘They’re not listening to me.’
‘Shush, you two,’ I said. ‘Give your mum a rest.’
I got an extra-hard thump and then the bulge was quiet, although not the owner of the bulge, who loudly demanded her jellied eels and a glass of milk. Once she was nomming her way through the gruesome mass, I sat down beside her and started on the rice and soup.
Once she’d finished the eels, she sequestrated my leftovers.
‘So, could you rip someone’s heart out?’ I asked.
Beverley finished chewing and swallowed before asking, ‘Literally or metaphorically?’
‘Literally,’ I said.
Beverley held up her free hand and made an experimental clawing motion. I thought of the neat hole in David Moore’s sweatshirt and the ice cream scoop smoothness of the wound tract.
‘Not like that,’ I said. ‘With your …’ I paused to try and think of a phrase that wouldn’t make me sound like I was in a superhero film – and failed notably. ‘Your power.’
‘My power?’ said Beverley, her lips twitching.
‘Yes, your power.’
‘Don’t know. Never tried,’ she said. ‘It’d be hard work. Much easier to shoot them or something.’
‘Could any of your sisters do it?’ I asked.
I strongly suspected that Bev’s older sister Lady Ty had killed a would-be assassin from across the street by thrusting a metre of ghostly sword through his heart. Hard enough that it left a hole in the assassin’s shirt – front and back.
‘Again,’ said Beverley, ‘why would you? Is there something you’re not telling me? Is one of my sisters a suspect?’
‘Not really,’ I said, and explained about the death of David Moore, the hole in his chest and the lightning glass.
‘I’m not saying Mum couldn’t do it. And if Mum could do it then Father Thames could do it, but …’ She dragged out the ‘but’ and then burped. ‘It’s not their style, it’s not how we work. At least not these days. We’re thoroughly modern goddesses, aren’t we?’
An old god, maybe? I was thinking.
I doubted it, but it was, as they say, a line of inquiry. And it wasn’t like we was overrun with those. Bev passed me the empty plate to put next to her bowl on the coffee table, and I lay down beside her and put my arm around her shoulders.
She sighed and rested her head on my shoulder.
‘Don’t get too comfortable,’ she said. ‘I’m going to need a wee in about sixty seconds.’
Thursday Fear …
3 Harsh Language
Modern police inquiries are all about information management – extracting it, processing it, and using it to gather even more information and then repeating the process. Unlike response officers, who get to spend their shifts being attacked by drunks, chasing pickpockets and trying to stop members of the public tearing lumps out of each other, detective officers like me spend their shifts asking questions.
Occasionally this involves being physically or verbally abused, but mostly it involves paperwork.
A homicide with no obvious suspect is an automatic Category B inquiry, which means it gets a code name and a senior investigating officer who manages a mixed bag of detective sergeants, detective constables and wannabe PCs in plain clothes: in this case, OPERATION MURGATROYD, DCI Alexander Seawoll, and the long-suffering members of the Belgravia Major Investigation Team, including DS Guleed and DI Stephanopoulos. They gather the information, which is fed into the maw of the HOLMES computer system, which then showers its lucky acolytes with further ‘actions’ which usually involve gathering more information.
When the Special Assessment Unit is involved, some of these actions will be marked with an F for Falcon. And these end up with my name on them in the in-tray on the desk I share with Guleed. I used to squat at that desk with a third DC called David Carey, but since he went on long-term sick leave I’ve got his place and Danni has mine.
Although I wasn’t sure we should be dropping Danni into a case this serious.
‘She won’t thank you for underestimating her,’ Nightingale had said when I broached it at the morning Falcon assessment. Which was basically me and Nightingale grabbing a coffee for five minutes outside Belgravia nick before we went in for the MIT briefing.