As soon as I was inside, with Toby shaking his wet fur and getting under foot, I fired up my Dell that is tasked as our AWARE terminal, fielded an email reminder that I was due to take my Officer Safety refresher in two weeks and rechecked the alert which referred me to Operation Sallic on HOLMES — which wouldn’t give me access. I considered logging in using Nightingale’s warrant card, which seems to have access to everything, but the powers that be had been getting twitchy over unauthorised access to databases recently. So I asked myself what would Lesley say in this circumstance, which was, Call the incident room, duh!
So I did and after ten minutes on the phone talking to the MCT office manager I rushed off to tell Nightingale all about it — but I made a point of switching off the master switch as I went out.
An hour later we were heading south in the Jag.
Nightingale let me drive, which was good, though he still won’t let me solo in the Jag until I’ve done the Met’s advanced driving course. I’ve got my name down but the trouble is that just about every officer in the Met wants to take that course and priority goes to the boy- and girl-racers who drive the response cars for the borough commands. I had a tentative spot open in June. Until then I had to be content with being supervised as I opened up the inline-six engine and did a restrained seventy-six mph down the M23. She did it without any appreciable effort, which is not bad for a car that’s almost as old as my mother.
‘He was on the list that Tyburn gave us,’ I told Nightingale once we’d mercifully escaped the terrifying traffic singularity that is Croydon.
‘Why haven’t we spoken to him before now?’ asked Nightingale.
We’d been tracking former members of an Oxford University dining club called the Little Crocodiles ever since we’d discovered that a former wizard named Geoffrey Wheatcroft had, against custom and practice, been teaching them magic. He’d been doing this since the early fifties so, as you can imagine, there were a lot of names to cover. Tyburn — that’s Lady Ty to you, peasant — genius loci of one of the lost tributaries of the Thames and Oxford graduate herself had spotted some members of this clique during her time there. She claimed, and I believed her, to be able to literally smell a magical practitioner. So we gave her list priority.
And our dead Volvo driver was on it.
‘Robert Weil,’ I said. ‘With a W. We were working through the list alphabetically.’
‘Just goes to show that there’s such a thing as being too methodical,’ said Nightingale. ‘I presume you have been pillaging the computer records — what have you found out?’
Actually the office manager I’d talked to had emailed me the results of their inquiries, but I wasn’t going to tell Nightingale that.
‘He’s forty-two years old, born in Tunbridge Wells, dad was a barrister, mum stayed at home. Educated privately at Beachwood Sacred Heart-’ I said.
‘Day boy or boarder?’ asked Nightingale.
I’ve picked up a smattering of posh since working with Nightingale, so at least I understood the question.
‘The school’s in Tunbridge Wells, so I’d guess a day boy,’ I said. ‘Unless his parents were really keen to have him out of the house.’
‘And thence presumably to Oxford,’ said Nightingale.
‘Where he studied biology-’ I started.
‘Read,’ said Nightingale. ‘You read subjects at university.’
‘Where he read biology, graduating with a second,’ I said. ‘So not the brightest banana in the bunch.’
‘Biology,’ said Nightingale. ‘Are you thinking what I’m thinking?’
I was thinking of the Faceless Man’s chimeras, the manufactured cat-girls and tiger-boys that had issued from what we’d taken to calling The Strip Club of Doctor Moreau. That and the Pale Lady who’d done away with people by biting their dicks off with her vagina dentata. And the other things in the club that Nightingale had deemed too horrible for me to see.
‘I really hope not,’ I said but I knew, I really was thinking what he was thinking.
‘And after he was sent down?’ asked Nightingale.
He’d gone to work for ICI for ten years before moving into the burgeoning field of environmental impact assessments. Worked for the British Airport Authority as an environmental control officer until he was sold, along with the rest of Gatwick Airport, in 2009.
‘Made redundant last year,’ I said. ‘He was management so he got a good package and he’s currently listed as being a consultant.’
The Incident Room had been established at Sussex House on the outskirts of Brighton in what looked like a 1930s light-engineering plant converted into offices. At some point in the last thirty years the site had sprouted warehousing, a Matalan and an AS DA the size of a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier. It was the sort of out-of-town development that causes sober environmentally minded men and women to foam at the mouth with outrage and bite the rim of their Prius’s steering wheel but I couldn’t help thinking from a copper’s point of view it would be bloody convenient for shopping after work. In fact, given that the Brighton Detention Centre was stuck just behind it, it was convenient for the suspects as well. And there was a Big-Box Self-Storage next door which would be handy if the cells ever got overcrowded.
DCI Douglas Manderly was a copper in the modern mould, understated tailored pinstripe suit, brown hair cut short, blue eyes, an up-to-date mobile in his pocket. Sober, works late, drinks lager in halves and knows how to change a nappy. He’d be looking to make Detective Superintendent soon-ish but only for the extra pay and pension. Good at his job, I guessed, but probably not at ease with things that fall outside his comfort zone.
He was going to love us.
He met us in his office to establish his authority but stood and shook our hands in turn to evoke the correct collegial atmosphere. We sat in the offered seats and accepted the offered coffee and did about a minute and a half of the niceties before he asked us straight out what our interest was.
We did not tell him we were witch hunting, as that sort of things tends to cause alarm.
‘Robert Weil is possibly connected with another inquiry,’ said Nightingale. ‘A series of murders that took place over the summer.’
‘Would this be the Jason Dunlop case?’ he asked.
Better than just good at his job, I thought.
‘Yes,’ said Nightingale. ‘But not directly related.’
Manderly looked disappointed. People have got the wrong idea about police territoriality — a full-scale murder inquiry is going to set you back a quarter of a million quid minimum. If Manderly could dump it on the Met then it would be our budget and our problem, not to mention it would improve his crime counting at the end of the year. He certainly didn’t want to assign one of his precious DCs to escort us around, but he wasn’t particularly pleased when Nightingale asked for PC Maureen Slatt.
‘That’s a matter for her line manager,’ said Manderly.
Then he asked whether, given our interest, he should be looking for anything in particular.
‘You could inform us if you discover anything out of the ordinary,’ said Nightingale.
‘Does that include a body?’ he asked.
Technically, you don’t have to have a corpse to convict for murder but detectives always feel better when they’ve found your actual victim — they’re superstitious like that. Plus nobody wants to think they might be blowing a quarter of a million only to have the victim turn out to be living in Aberdeen with an insurance salesman called Dougal.