‘She won’t thank me if something bites her leg off either,’ I said.
‘Do you think that’s likely?’ said Nightingale. ‘David Moore’s death could be an isolated incident – we don’t even know if there was a third party involved.’
‘You think he did it to himself?’
‘Possibly,’ said Nightingale. ‘It’s much easier for a practitioner to affect their own body than somebody else’s. But there’s also the possibility that he either carried an enchanted artefact in with him, or he encountered one already in the Silver Vaults.’
Or even that he was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time.
None of those choices seemed likely, but if I’ve learnt one thing on the job, it is that a coincidence can kill someone just as easily as malice. Was David Moore a practitioner? Did he have access to other enchanted items, and was the whole business with the ex-wife and the ring actually relevant to the case?
We needed more information, which was why Danni and me were heading for Poplar to check out David Moore’s gaff while Nightingale would sit in on Guleed’s interview with Althea Moore and see if he could cop a feel of her ring. We’d conduct an initial Falcon assessment and then call in search teams and forensics if necessary.
‘And I mean necessary,’ said Stephanopoulos. ‘Unless you want to pay for it.’
The government were in their sixth year of trying to cut crime by reducing the number of active police officers. So management were getting shirty about expenses.
David Moore had owned an ex-council flat in a brick-built workers’ housing estate in Poplar. Built in 1937, it was finished just in time to suffer a bit of light bombing during the Second World War. This close to Canary Wharf, and with the dull uninspiring bulk of One Canada Square looming over it, many council tenants had exercised their right to buy in the 1980s – followed by selling on to posh provincials exercising their right to gentrify in the 2000s. As a result, I wasn’t surprised to find an eclectic mix of low-end hatchbacks and impractical compact SUVs crammed into every available parking space.
We’d driven over in my orange Ford Focus ST, the one with the mileage and the dent in the bonnet where something had thrown a deer at me in Richmond Park.
The deer was startled, but fine – I never did find out what had thrown it.
Looking worse for wear as it did, the orange Asbo had the double advantage of being weirdly inconspicuous and unlikely to be TDA’d by local ruffians – not even the ones on six-figure salaries.
We parked by the bins and trotted up the stairs to the first-floor balcony, where David Moore had the last flat on the left. All the flats had brand-new composite wood doors with continuous locking and anti-ram bolts. The kind being installed by many councils to save local drug dealers from having to install steel reinforcements themselves. David Moore’s door had a large sheet of unvarnished plyboard covering an area from knee height to just below the spyhole. It looked like the sort of thing the council put up to cover racist or other abuse until they can replace the door.
The doorbell wasn’t working and the knocker, which should have been below the spyhole, was missing, so I gave the door a sharp rap with my knuckles. When that didn’t get an answer, we quickly escalated to the open palm slap combined with shouts of ‘Open the door, we’re the police!’ But fortunately, because it was covered by plywood, we didn’t have to resort to the vaguely demeaning shouting through the letterbox stage.
Stephanopoulos had wangled a section eight PACE warrant from a magistrate, so now we’d established that the flat was uninhabited I used a spell called clausurafrange to slice the bolts on both sides of the door. Danni was gratifyingly impressed.
‘You never said we could do shit like that,’ she said, and after a moment’s thought, ‘What on earth do you record as your method of entry?’
‘I put “authorised Falcon entry method”,’ I said.
‘And they let you get away with that?’
‘So far.’
I pushed the door open and squatted down to check there wasn’t a demon trap or other, more mundane, booby trap on the threshold. This is not something you usually have to worry about entering a suspect house, but I’ve learnt to be careful. Once my healthy paranoia was satisfied, we stepped inside.
The flat was painted in various shades of blue, ranging from indigo in the kitchen to a vaguely turquoise tinge in the hallways. The floor was fake parquet effect lino but, as Danni said, it was expensive fake parquet flooring. The bathroom, straight ahead from the front door, was tiny – barely big enough for a shower cubicle, toilet and basin. There were two bedrooms, but interestingly David Moore had used the larger of the two as an office.
Inside the smaller bedroom the queen-sized bed had been stripped to reveal a memory foam mattress and a pair of hypoallergenic pillows. A large rectangular section of the wall above the headboard had obviously been repainted recently – the fresh paint not quite matching the sky blue of the rest of the wall. When I crouched down to look underneath I got a strong whiff of bleach, which of course made me instantly suspicious. Even my mum, who practically drinks bleach, doesn’t use it that much in a bedroom.
‘Forensic countermeasure?’ said Danni when I pointed it out.
I thought of Althea and her busy spring cleaning and wondered if there was a connection.
‘Don’t know,’ I said.
We both slipped on our plastic booties just to be on the safe side. In my experience, the bleach usually only comes out when members of the public want to shift those troublesome incriminating bodily fluids.
Especially if they’ve been watching a lot of Silent Witness.
The desk in the office had a space for a missing laptop and the shelves were mostly filled with rows of box files with hand-lettered labels. Fewer books than I expected, and none seemed to be fiction. Hefty tomes on development economics, environmental activism and the like, with titles such as Lean Startups for Social Change and How to Save the World. There was a brand-new desktop Spanish dictionary sitting on top of its Amazon packaging next to an A4 ring-bound notepad. I could see the little remnants left on the rings where several sheets had been ripped out.
‘This man had a boring life,’ called Danni from the living room.
I joined her and immediately saw what she meant – it was hard to tell that anyone had spent time in the living room. A couple of Billy bookshelves were half empty, the TV was five years old and stood in splendid isolation without so much as a Blu-Ray player or cable box. The sofa looked brand new and there were no photographs anywhere.
‘It’s weird, isn’t it?’ said Danni. ‘These charity types usually have lots of pictures of themselves doing good deeds – you know, holding starving refugees and the like.’
The gateleg table didn’t have so much as a coffee ring on it.
‘Also, who did he work with?’ asked Danni. ‘There must have been charities or something helping him do good.’
‘Sahra’s looking into that,’ I said. ‘Our priority is checking for Falcon before we call in a search team.’
‘Are you waiting for me to make suggestions?’ asked Danni.
I said I was, and she pointed out the patch of fresh paint in the bedroom and said we should check that.
‘And then we should lever off the board on the front door and see what’s underneath.’
‘Good idea,’ I said, but not before we’d run through the potential practitioner checklist – if only because it had taken me a sodding day to compile it.