I decided that this was my cue and jumped forward to seize the nanny’s ankles. Before she could react I threw my weight backwards so that her legs were fully extended. Deprived of leverage even the strongest person can’t throw someone off their legs by main strength, and with Guleed on her back we almost had her. We only had to hold her until backup arrived, but we didn’t even have our cuffs out when she rippled like a snake. Guleed tried to hang on, but she was knocked flying into me. By the time we were untangled and on our feet the nanny was away.
‘Where the fuck is Nightingale?’ I asked.
Saving Richard Williams from bleeding out, as it transpired.
‘She tried to bite his throat right out,’ Carey told me later.
2
Site Report
We probably should have guessed something like that had happened when the ambulance screeched up and a pair of paramedics charged past us into the house. Me and Guleed didn’t follow them because we were too busy circulating a description of the nanny and warning responding officers not to go anywhere near her until Falcon qualified officers arrived. Then we grabbed a response car so we could be properly mobile in case she was spotted.
We needn’t have bothered – she’d evaporated into the summer afternoon.
Because we were the second Falcon response team, Nightingale being the first, me and Guleed ended up in a corridor at UCH guarding Richard Williams’s hospital room, along with a reassuringly solid member of Protection Command in full ballistic armour and armed with an H&K MP5 sub-machine gun. Her name was Lucy and she had three children under the age of five.
‘Compared to them,’ she told us, ‘I don’t find this job stressful at all.’
You use Protection Command people for this kind of job because unlike SCO19 they’re trained to do guard duty. You want a certain kind of personality who can stand around in the rain for eight hours and still be awake enough to shoot someone in the central body mass at a moment’s notice.
Nightingale and Carey were still out west hunting the Pale Nanny, and Richard Williams was seriously sedated and so wasn’t going to tell us anything, either. Which at least gave us a chance to write up our notes and for me to ask Guleed about the sound of ripping silk and her impossible bit of vertical parkour.
‘Ripping silk?’ she asked.
‘Not really a sound,’ I said. ‘A vestigium – the sort of noise magic makes when you do it.’
And leaves behind in its wake as well, but I try not to overburden my colleagues with too much explanation. Not even Guleed, who I suspected knew way more than she was letting on.
‘That,’ she said. And smiled.
‘That,’ I said.
‘I’ve been training,’ she said.
‘With Michael?’
Meaning Michael Cheung, the Folly’s ‘liaison’ in Chinatown and a man whose business card listed his profession as ‘Legendary Swordsman’.
‘It’s just like any other martial arts training. You learn the patterns, you practise – you get better.’ She leant closer and tapped my shoulder. ‘And you don’t know if it’s going to work until you try it for real.’
‘Did it work?’
‘I think so.’
‘Can you teach me?’
She laughed.
‘Michael specifically said I wasn’t allowed to. No matter what you said.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because Nightingale called him up and told him to refuse if you asked.’
‘Did he say why?’
‘Because you should master at least one tradition before you move on to the next,’ said Nightingale, coming up the corridor.
Carey, following behind, gave me and Guleed a grateful look – I could sympathise. Keeping up with Nightingale could be knackering. Especially when he was in one of his man-of-action moods and forgot that we weren’t all about to parachute into Germany.
We had an impromptu after-action briefing in the corridor before Nightingale sent us off about our business. He was planning to stay outside Richard Williams’s door in the hope that somebody else would turn up and have another go.
‘She had the advantage of both me and David,’ said Nightingale. ‘And yet she felt that silencing Richard Williams was more important. That implies to me that he knows something Martin Chorley does not want us to find out.’
He didn’t need to elaborate.
Obviously if it was worth killing Williams for, we really wanted to know what it was.
Guleed, with her sympathetic manner and better interview accreditation, was actioned to interview Richard Williams’s wife Fiona. Which involved whisking her off to the pastel coloured 1980s retro calm of Belgravia’s Achieving Best Evidence suite and gently prising intimate details of her life out of her while trying not traumatise her further. I was to go over the tapes later to check for Falcon material, but in the meantime I headed back to Chiswick to see if we could learn anything from their happy home.
Fiona was actually wife number two, having met Richard while interning at the company he worked for in 2011. It looked like fast work to me, since he’d only been married to his first wife for five years. They had two daughters, who we’d left in DI Miriam Stephanopoulos’ office for the duration of the interview. There was a son by the earlier marriage but he lived with his mother, who’d moved back to King’s Lynn after the divorce.
A POLSA team had already worked over the house looking for covert hiding places and secret stashes of shameful stuff, but had found nothing. All the computers, laptops, phones and the PlayStation 4 had been whisked off to the Operational Technology Support Unit at Dulwich to have everything stripped out. We had information analysts on the payroll for this operation and, by God, since it was coming out of the Folly budget we were going to give them something to do.
So I was basically there for the magic – which often hides in plain sight.
As a police detective – which, by the way, I had officially become just that month – I get to spend a lot of time in people’s houses, often without their consent. Homes are like witnesses. They pretty much lie all the time. But, as Stephanopoulos says, the longer someone lives in a house the more intrinsically interesting the lies become. When you’re police, an interesting lie can be as useful as the truth. Sometimes more so.
The ground floor had been knocked all the way through from front to back. The living room part had a faux antique leather three piece suite and a kidney-shaped glass coffee table with, amazingly, a couple of thick coffee table books on it. The small lie was in the way the seating was arranged to face the, possibly, original Arts and Craft fireplace and not the medium sized flat-screen TV.
We don’t waste time on the idiot box, the room was saying. But the stack of box sets and the fact that both the remote controls, Blu-ray player and TV, were on the coffee table made it a liar. That was the small lie.
The big lie was the complete absence of mangled toys, random pieces of scribbled-on paper and half-chewed sweets along the whole length of the ground floor. There are no difficult, messy, screaming small humans living in this house. We live in a bubble of serenity.
Now I’m the son of a professional cleaner, but I’m also blessed with enough pre-school cousins to cause your average UKIP voter to relocate to Spain, and I know for a fact that there should have been way more chaos downstairs.
She might have been a homicidal creature of the night but I suspect our fugitive must have been a really good nanny. That, or she’d traumatised the kids into obedience – we were probably going to have to bring in a special child psychologist to find out. I made a note to check to see whether Guleed had asked about that during the ABE interview.
The kitchen was the kind of brushed steel monstrosity that looks more like it’s designed to weaponise viruses than cook dinner. Just to be on the safe side I checked the fridge for Petri dishes – nothing. But there was a reassuring ton of healthy yogurts for tiny tots and genuinely unadulterated fruit drinks made with real fruit.