“Anyway, like I said, they must have been already in the house when we arrived.”
“Which means that their man in Yorkshire tipped them off as to where to find Peverell well before we did our little favor for our colleagues up north.”
“Well, boss,” said Linwood. “In all honesty, they’re pretty lucky we did it at all, given the circumstances.”
“So they were in there for over four hours?”
“Looks that way.”
“And you didn’t clock anyone else coming or going?”
“No way.”
Jones came back with the Bodum and cups on a silver tray. “We’ll just let it brew a few minutes, sir, huh?”
“Where did they go from here?” Burgess asked.
“Ferguson and Wilkes followed them to a hotel on the Old Compton Road. Mid-range. Nothing too ostentatious. Lot of tourists. Americans, mostly.”
“I don’t need the pedigree of the fucking hotel,” said Burgess. “I hope Fergie and Wilkes are sitting tight.”
“They are, boss. Nobody’s going anywhere without us knowing.” Jones poured the coffee and they all took grateful sips. “Well done, lad,” said Burgess. “Terrific coffee. We’ll make a detective of you yet. The way I see it is like this. Brody and French were in there an awfully long time. Either Peverell wasn’t in and they were waiting for him, or he was in and…”
“They worked him over, got what they wanted?”
“Something like that. Either way, soon as we’ve finished our coffee, we’d better get over there and suss out the situation.”
“It might be an ambulance job, boss,” said Linwood. “If they were in there that long. Maybe we should go in right away.”
“After DC Jones has taken the trouble to make us this wonderful coffee? Peverell is a scumbag who helps smuggle in underage girls forced into prostitution,” said Burgess, ever fond of the crude American slang he picked up from TV and movies. “Letting him bleed a few minutes longer won’t do anything but good for the human gene pool. It’s Brody and French who’ll lead us to McCready and the DCI’s daughter now.”
So they finished their coffee in peace as the light grew slowly outside. A weary-looking shift worker got out of his car a few houses down. It was still a dull, overcast morning, and bedroom lights started going on as people got up to get ready for work. This was a decent neighborhood, Burgess thought. People had worked hard for their little piece of England, and while they weren’t rich, they were mostly comfortable in their middle age, despite the recent credit crunch. Perfect protective coloration for a smooth operator like Justin Peverell. Not that he’d be home all that often, anyway, in his line of work. But if Peverell was expecting McCready, and, more to the point, expecting handsome payment for forged documents, then there was every chance he would have thought it worthwhile hanging around for a day or two.
“Okay,” said Burgess, putting down his empty coffee cup and getting to his feet. “Let’s go. You got the door-opener, Col?”
“In the boot.”
First they picked up the battering-ram on their way. They wouldn’t use it unless they had to, a quiet entry being far more desirable than waking up the entire street. Then they would have to send for reinforcements just to keep the neighbors back if anything went awry, as things so often did when Burgess was around.
The door was maroon, with pebble-glass windows at the top. First, Burgess knocked gently and rang the doorbell. Nothing happened. He glanced over at Linwood, who shrugged, then tried the handle. The door opened. The three of them paused a moment on the threshold, then entered.
They found themselves in the hall, with hooks for coats and a mat for shoes. Burgess calculated that the living room was off to the right, through another door. The front curtains had been drawn, so they hadn’t been able to see inside from the street.
Burgess went in first and switched on the overhead light. He stood transfixed and appalled for a split second, then he turned and stumbled into Linwood and Jones before he doubled up and vomited up last night’s curry and lager all over the hall mat. The other two held on to him as he gasped for air and cursed. It was the first time he had ever been sick on the job since he’d been a cadet, and he had seen some things in his time.
When Burgess had regained his equilibrium, helped by a glass of water Jones brought from the kitchen at the back, he took a deep breath and led them in. The scene was so posed, so markedly surreal, that it took everyone a few moments to put the pieces together and work out exactly what they were looking at. Then Jones and Linwood staggered back, handkerchiefs over their mouths. The smell was awful. Piss, shit and fear desecrating a nice upper-middle-class London semi.
Two hard-backed chairs, the kind that had probably been at the dining table, faced each other about eight feet apart. In one chair sat what had once been a very beautiful woman. Probably Peverell’s girlfriend Martina, Burgess guessed, long black hair trailing over her pale naked shoulders. Naked as the rest of her, as far as he could see.
From what Burgess could make out on a preliminary examination, it had taken her a long time to die, and it had been a very painful process. Gray duct tape covered her mouth and bound her hands to the chair behind her back, one ankle to each front leg. It was hard to say exactly what had killed her. There were cuts and areas where the skin had been stripped, or peeled, from her flesh, blood between her legs. On her left hand, her index and middle fingers had been docked at the first joint, the flesh peeled off and the bone sharpened like a pencil point. One eye was wide open, dead and staring, but the other socket contained only the raw remains of an eyeball; a viscous trail streaked down her cheek like bloody, unset blobs of egg white.
There was more, much more, things the likes of which Burgess had never imagined before and would remember till the day they put his body in the ground. He was crying, he knew, but he couldn’t help it. Such beauty. Such pain and horror. Linwood and Jones weren’t in any condition to notice his tears, anyway.
In the other chair sat Peverell, fully clothed, also gagged and secured with gray duct tape. At first glance he seemed dead, too, nobody home behind the glazed eyes, but Burgess noticed that when he looked carefully, he could see Peverell’s chest rising and falling. There wasn’t a mark on him, but if Burgess had to choose, he couldn’t for the life of him decide in which position he would rather be.
“Right,” he said, turning to his men. “Stop staring at her tits, Jone-sey. Get on to Fergie and Wilkes and tell them to bring French and Brody back here right now. Back here. Got it? I want a word with those bastards before we have to get the brass and the lawyers involved. And Col, the SOCOs will have our balls for this, but get a sheet from upstairs and cover the poor cow up, would you? Then somebody see if they can’t find a bottle of decent whiskey in the place.”
TRACY AWOKE with a start, Jaff shaking her shoulder, and realized that she must have dozed off in the early dawn light. Perhaps Jaff had, too. But now he was wide awake, fully dressed and looming over her, fiddling with the ripped sheet to untie her. “Come on, wake up,” he said. “Wake up. It’s time to go.”
Tracy opened her eyes and moved her head groggily. Jaff was fresh out of the shower, but she hadn’t heard a thing. The curtains were open, and she could see people already at their desks in the office tower. She gathered the sheet around her and headed for the bathroom. “What time is it?” she asked.
“Eight o’clock. Get a move on. You’ve got ten minutes.”
Tracy showered as fast as she could. There was no time to do anything with her hair except give it a quick rub with the towel. Luckily, it was short and it would dry quickly. She wished she had more clean underwear, but she was wearing the last of her new pairs of knickers. The best she could do was turn them inside out before she put them on. She binned her bra. She had always thought her breasts were too small, anyway, so she really didn’t need one. The outer clothes she had put on last night in the van were still fine.