Bryant & May and the Invisible Code (Bryant & May 10) Page 11

‘Grim room? What’s that?’

  ‘A Glass Refractive Index Measurement room. If we’d found a glass fragment from Waters’s clothing, Lambeth would stick the fragments in a special oil, heat it, then cool it down until the point when the bits refract light at the same point as the oil. So the glass vanishes in the oil, giving its refractive index. If this bit and the recovered sample refract light at the same point then they’re probably from the same source, and you could say he was killed here and dumped there. But in this case we know he was killed where he was found because of the CCTVs and witness reports. Anyway, I wouldn’t be able to use the Forensic Science Service now. The government’s closing it down.’

  ‘Why would they do that? I thought it was supposed to be the best in the world.’

  ‘It’s the best, but it’s also losing two million a month, so they’re going to outsource to private firms. A total disaster, in my opinion. The FSS built its rep on shared information, the very thing private companies don’t do.’ He rose and stretched his back. ‘No one else has been here. We’re lucky Waters had a hairy chest.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Hairy blokes can’t help shedding as they move about. You wouldn’t believe the amount of stuff that comes off the human body. There’s not been anyone else in his bed. Look at that.’ Banbury had folded back the cotton covers and was pointing to tiny curls of hair on the bottom sheet. ‘Heavy sleeper.’

  ‘How do you know that?’

  ‘He sleeps on the left but deliberately keeps the alarm clock on the right-hand table. It’s so he has to cross the bed to turn it off in the morning. If it was on the left he knows he would just hit snooze and go back to sleep. So there was no one to the right of him.’

  ‘I can see why you like this job now,’ said Renfield. ‘It gives you a chance to have a right old nose around.’

  ‘I like it’, said Banbury, waggling a dusting brush between his fingers, ‘because it allows me to build a picture of someone without me ever having met them. A ghost imprint, if you will.’

  ‘All right, then,’ said Renfield, folding his arms. ‘Tell me what you know about Waters that you didn’t when you came in.’

  ‘He’s tall, around six three. The apartment’s bespoke, and he’s had the cupboards, sink and counters raised above normal height. That fits with the size twelve trainers, comfortable shoes for standing around. He’s a night person; he drinks brandy alone, which no one does early unless he’s French, in my experience, and his TV viewing history will back that up. Never eats at home; likes to think he’s fit: the cupboards have protein shakes and there’s a note in the kitchen reminding him to renew his gym membership. He probably put his back out two years ago – there are old packets of diazepam and tramadol in the bathroom, strong doses.’

  ‘That’s easy stuff. Tell me something I don’t know.’

  ‘All right. He likes his women young. He’s got serious commitment issues because of his brain-damaged four-year-old daughter.’

  ‘You’re reading that from his apartment?’

  Banbury shrugged. ‘He decorated it alone. This isn’t the kind of flat women would hang around in without altering something. There’s no bath, for a start. Have you ever met a woman who could live without a tub? Plus there are some internet sites on his laptop that tread a bit close to the legal age limit.’

  ‘You got the computer?’

  ‘In his bag.’

  ‘You’re thinking about him talking to the little girl? The porn doesn’t make him a pervert.’

  ‘I agree, I’m just pointing it out. His hours are unsociable and he likes to sleep in late, so he never brings anyone back because he’d have to talk to them in the morning. He hardly ever sees his daughter. From the number of Plaxo reminders about doctors’ appointments and a few of his emailed replies my guess is that she suffered some kind of brain-trauma, maybe meningitis, and the stress wrecked his relationship with his partner. There are a few pictures of her up to the age of three, but they’re in a drawer. She was healthy then, everything was fine. Then he put his past away, a coping mechanism. I’ve got an address for the partner; you can check it out. He’s obviously still involved and concerned because there are over a dozen books in the lounge on the subject of coping with serious child illnesses, so I’d say he was still handling the fallout. He’s got no enemies because he has no friends. All he ever does is work.’

  ‘But he knew something that could get him killed.’

  ‘If the information’s not in his laptop it has to have been in his head.’

  ‘And he never has sex?’

  ‘I didn’t say that. He brought a woman back here eight days ago.’

  ‘How do you know that?’

  Banbury had lifted something from the top of a pillow. ‘Here’s your long blond hair. I’ve got another one.’ He held up a clear plastic pouch. ‘The laundry hamper holds a pile of identical T-shirts, his working uniform. This was between the bottom shirt and the one immediately above it. To my eye it matches the one from the bed. We need to get them under a microscope, and get a sample from Sabira Kasavian. And find out her whereabouts the Monday before last.’ Banbury grinned. ‘I worked back through the number of shirts. You see? The old-fashioned methods are still the best.’

  ‘You don’t think he followed the girl because she reminded him of his daughter, do you?’

  ‘Interesting idea. People sometimes do things they don’t understand. Ask someone to explain their actions and they usually find a justification, but often I think they make it up to cover for the fact that they don’t know themselves. If Waters was just randomly following girls around it would throw everything out of order, and I wouldn’t like that. I’m a very orderly person.’

  ‘I bet you keep a special stick for stirring paint with,’ said Renfield. ‘The unit must drive you nuts.’

  ‘Mr Bryant lives in a whirlwind of filth and chaos,’ muttered Banbury. ‘If anyone murdered him in his office we’d never find out who did it, that’s for sure.’

  16

  WATCHING

  MEANWHILE, JOHN MAY was briefing the remaining assembled staff in the common room. ‘We need to find the girl,’ he said. ‘We have to build this case solidly, step by step. Otherwise we can’t connect Waters’s death to Sabira Kasavian. We have CCTV shots of the children in Salisbury Court. We can match the footage against the entrance camera in Coram’s Fields. That gives us two co-ordinates. Waters spent half of his last day in Belsize Park, so there’s a chance the girl lives in that area.’

  Bryant dug through a stack of ragged notes. ‘Janice, did you talk to the chap on the gate at Coram’s Fields?’

  ‘He saw Waters and the girl enter and assumed they were father and daughter. He thinks Waters was holding her hand but admits he wasn’t paying attention. A big crowd of Chinese children was coming in, and he was checking to make sure they were supervised. Kasavian called back. We’ve definitely got the O’Connor investigation. They’re sending the files over right now.’

  Bryant rubbed his hands together. ‘Good, I thought he’d drag his feet. Where’s Raymond?’

  ‘He had to go home,’ said Longbright. ‘Bad news, apparently. He wouldn’t tell me what was wrong.’

  ‘Right, you two.’ Bryant turned to his PCs, Colin Bimsley and Meera Mangeshkar.

  ‘No bins,’ said Meera. ‘I’m not doing rubbish duty.’

  ‘No, you’ll like this one: warm weather, a leafy square. I want you and Colin to stake out the courtyard and surrounding alleyways tomorrow morning, starting before the offices start filling up, so you’d better be there by seven. You’re on the lookout for someone who knows this little girl.’ He handed them an enlarged still taken from the courtyard camera. ‘There are no schools in the area. You hardly ever see kids around that neck of the woods, so she and the boy must have been with someone, probably waiting for a parent.’

  ‘It shouldn’t take long to check all the offices in the square and find out if anyone brings children to work from Belsize Park
,’ said Bimsley.

  ‘Don’t you want to wait for Dan to match the footage from Coram’s Fields?’ asked May.

  Bryant shook his head. ‘We wasted time before and a man died.’

  ‘Wait, does this mean we’re going on to shifts, because I’m supposed to be going out tonight,’ said Colin.

  ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘I’ve got tickets for Coldplay at the Emirates Stadium. They’re on at half nine.’

  ‘I assume that’s something to do with young people singing?’

  Meera snorted. ‘No, they’re really old and rubbish.’

  ‘Well, I’m sorry to disturb your plans for a musical evening, Colin, but this is rather more important. And get Dan back. And find out what the hell’s going on with Raymond. Then call the Cedar Tree to check on Mrs Kasavian. And somebody make me some bloody tea!’ Bryant stormed from the common room.

  ‘Blimey,’ exclaimed Bimsley, ‘he’s cheered up all of a sudden.’

  ‘Of course he has,’ said May. ‘It’s more than one murder now. He’s got a conspiracy on his hands.’

  ‘Are you all right?’ May came back into the office and sat on the edge of Bryant’s desk.

  ‘No, I’m not all right. I’m very upset.’

  ‘Who with?’

  ‘With myself, obviously. I should have seen this coming. Waters went into St Bride’s. What was he looking for? Did Sabira Kasavian send him there? And why did Amy O’Connor have to die in a church, of all places, when we know Sabira is a Muslim?’

  ‘Why won’t Sabira talk to us?’ May wondered. ‘If she really believes she’s the subject of a witch-hunt, why won’t she try to convince us it’s true?’

  ‘You know, back on Monday, when we first heard about O’Connor, I thought I knew what had killed her.’

  ‘Go on, enlighten me.’

  ‘It looked like there was a wasps’ nest in the bottom of the Roman excavation, just under the tree in the corner of Salisbury Court. I was pretty sure we wouldn’t be given the case, but I did a little checking anyway. After I saw Ben Fenchurch at St Bart’s, I talked to the admitting officer who emptied O’Connor’s pockets at the hospital. I thought she might have been carrying an epinephrine pen. If you’re allergic to wasps you’re supposed to keep one with you at all times, so you can give yourself an injection to stop an allergic reaction. Then I thought maybe she was stung and didn’t notice – it can happen if the sting occurs in an area where there are few nerve endings – or perhaps she didn’t know she was allergic. But Ben didn’t report any broken skin, and something would have showed up in the PM. So we’re back where we started. I kept thinking about St Bride’s being the reporters’ church, that her death was a message of some kind, but that can’t be it.’

  ‘Don’t worry, we’ll find the little girl,’ May assured him. ‘We’re closing in.’

  Just after 10.00 p.m. on Thursday night the fine weather broke, and the effulgent skies dropped across North London. The streets cleared and Hampstead Heath took on the sodden appearance of a beaten-down rainforest. At the Cedar Tree Clinic, water bent the trees, sluicing over the garden slopes.

  Standing at her bedroom window, Sabira Kasavian looked out and watched golden needles passing through the spotlight over the back porch. Even though the room was overheated, she found herself shivering. She prayed that Jeff Waters had done what he had promised, and that she would be saved. She listened to her mobile and counted the rings, seven, eight, nine, and then voicemail.

  ‘Edona, please call me back when you get this. Please, it’s very important.’ She couldn’t remember if her old school friend had gone home to see her parents yet. It didn’t sound as if she had. She closed the phone and slipped it back in her jeans.

  The clinic offered a safe harbour for now, but she also knew there was no way out. She was caught in a race between the forces of good and evil, darkness and light. It was hard being patient, not knowing what was going on in the outside world.

  Not knowing what was going on inside her own head.

  She could hear the rain drumming hard on the roof. The trees were moving beyond the window, and for a moment it seemed there was something dark inside them shifting back and forth. She came closer to the glass and tried to see what it was, but the light in the room was too bright, so she switched off the bedside table lamp.

  Now she could see down into the garden. And there he was, standing in the rain looking up at her window, watching, daring her to call the nurse, knowing that by the time she did so he would have slipped away into the dark wet greenery, and she would look even more disturbed.

  Perhaps I am mad, she thought. Perhaps this is their wish, to make me as mad as them. I’ll show you some real madness before you get to me!

  17

  DESTABILIZATION

  AT 8.00 A.M. on Friday morning, Meera Mangeshkar sat on a rain-sodden bench in the courtyard of St Bride’s waiting for her partner to finish his second breakfast burger. In the branches of the tree above her head, people had tied coloured ribbons to commemorate the lives of journalists killed in the recent conflict in the Middle East.

  ‘It’s amazing how many of these little courtyards and alleys are still around,’ Colin Bimsley said, sucking bits of bacon from his teeth. ‘Mr Bryant lent me a book about them. You can still find old debtors’ jails and the channels of underground rivers round here; they take a bit more digging out but they’re there here all right. I walked past something called the Alienation Office on the way here; 1577 it said over the door, something to do with transferring feudal lands without a licence. And over in Fen Court there are loads of upright sugar canes covered in Old Testament quotes, something to do with the Stock Exchange and slavery. I was coming out of the Cock and Woolpack pub the other night and saw them. Amazing what you find when you get off the main roads.’

  ‘It’d be even more amazing if you stuck to the job and found a murder witness,’ said Meera, taking the lid off her cardboard cup. ‘Starbucks tea is horrible. Why hasn’t the City got a decent chain of teashops? My gran still makes proper Delhi spiced tea.’ She took a sip and grimaced. The flow of workers into offices was steady now.

  ‘This is a chance to prove ourselves,’ said Colin, balling up his fast-food bag and looking for somewhere to put it. ‘Find the little girl and we’ll come off bin duty and surveillance for good. Move up the ladder.’

  Meera was doubtful. ‘That’s not going to happen. There is no ladder. We’re at the bottom of the pile right now, and I can’t see the unit hiring anyone else beneath us. They don’t even have a teabag allowance. So, how do you want to do this?’

  Colin looked up at the steel and glass buildings sandwiched between Georgian and Victorian brick houses. ‘Looks like the offices go a long way back. We’ll have to cover them all. We won’t get much joy asking which employees bring kids in because it was a Saturday, so there would have been different receptionists working. It would be better to find out who was in each of the buildings at the weekend, then see if they brought children. And I think we need to keep it a bit vague. If we tell someone that their kid might have been a witness to two deaths, they’re liable to prevent us from talking to them. City types can be dead arsey.’

  ‘We’re officers of the law, Colin, they can’t “prevent” us from doing anything.’

  ‘Maybe not, but we need a detailed account from a girl who looks like she’s about eight years old.’

  ‘OK – you take those two sides, I’ll take these. And I’ll find her first.’

  Colin grinned. ‘Why are you so sure?’

  ‘Because if I was a parent who had to go into work on a Saturday and my kid wanted to play outside, I’d make sure I could see her from my office window, and those trees are in the way of the rooms on the south and east sides.’

  ‘OK, you have a head start – do you want a little bet?’

  ‘Not if it ends with me having to go on a date with you if I lose.’

  ‘You read my mind. It’s not like you haven
’t been out to dinner with me before.’

  ‘Funnily enough, I don’t count sitting on bins all night doing surveillance while you eat chicken jalfrezi out of a box. First one to finish calls the other.’

  Meera headed into the nearest building on her side of the square.

  Back at the unit on Caledonian Road, Dan Banbury went to see John May. ‘We’ve got a match on the girl,’ he said. ‘It’s definitely the same kid in both screen grabs, the shot from Salisbury Court and the Coram’s Fields footage. It’s just a piece of software that matches physical features and body shapes, so I don’t have an ID for you, but we’re working on it. I put a rush on the test fibres from the Waters apartment and we have a match on those, but it doesn’t make sense to me.’

  ‘You’re talking about the hairs?’

  ‘They’re from Sabira Kasavian.’

  ‘So they were lovers.’

  ‘I didn’t say that,’ Banbury hedged. ‘They just place her in his bed.’

  ‘What, you think she came by to read the Sunday papers with him or something? If she isn’t a murderess she at least cheated on her husband, which means she lied to us.’

  ‘I don’t know that she did.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Something’s not kosher. I tried to picture what happened. Waters invites her back to his flat, or Sabira calls on him. Women are more prone to shedding signifying evidence than men. Make-up and long hairs with traceable dyes, a wider variety of clothing materials; my missus leaves a trail of tissues and trash wherever she goes, and if she opens a handbag – well, it’s like Vesuvius. It might have cost her a grand at a fancy store but basically it’s a dustbin with a strap. God help her if she ever tries to have an affair, I’d be on her like—’

  ‘Dan, get to the point.’

  ‘Sorry, John. Kasavian often works late, but hasn’t been out of the country in more than two months, which means she wouldn’t have stayed over. Even so, I’d expect something else in Waters’s flat – a visit to the bathroom, something from the lounge sofa or the kitchen, but there’s nothing. And it’s not just her, there’s nothing from anyone else other than Waters in the whole place.’