Broken Homes (PC Peter Grant) (2 page)

‘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.

‘Are we sure there was a body in the Volvo?’ I asked.

‘We’re still waiting on DNA but the lab has confirmed that the blood is human,’ said Manderly. ‘And that it came from a body in the early stages of rigor mortis.’

‘So not a kidnapping then,’ said Nightingale.

‘No,’ said Manderly.

‘Where is Mr Weil now?’ asked Nightingale.

Manderly narrowed his eyes. ‘He’s on his way here,’ he said. ‘But unless you have something substantial to add to his interview I’d rather you left it to us.’

Now that it was clear that we weren’t going to relieve him of this troublesome case he wasn’t going to let us near the prime suspect until he had that case tied up in a neat bow.

‘I’d like to talk to Constable Slatt first,’ said Nightingale. ‘I assume that Weil’s home has been searched already?’

‘We have a team there,’ said Manderly. ‘Is there anything specific you’re looking for?’

‘Books,’ said Nightingale. ‘And possibly other paraphernalia.’

‘Paraphernalia,’ said Manderly.

‘I shall know it when I see it,’ said Nightingale.

The principal difference between town and country policing, as far as I could tell, was one of distance. It was thirty kilometres back up the A23 to Crawley where Robert Weil lived, which was further than I drove in a working week in London. Mind you, without London to get in the way we made it in less than half an hour. On the way we passed the spot where the accident had taken place. I asked Nightingale if he wanted to stop, but since Weil’s Volvo had already been towed we pressed on to Crawley.

In the 1950s and ’60s the powers that be made a concerted effort to rid London of its working class. The city was rapidly losing its industry and the large numbers of servants who were needed for the Edwardian household were being superseded by the technological wonders of the age of white goods. London just didn’t need that many poor people any more. Crawley, which up until then had been a small medieval market town, had sixty thousand residents dumped on it. I say dumped but in fact they went into thousands of sturdy three-bedroom semis which my mum and dad would have loved to have lived in, if only they could have brought London’s jazz scene with them, and Peckham market, and the Sierra Leonean expatriate population, or at least the half my mum was currently still talking to.

Crawley had managed to avoid the blight of out-of-town shopping centres by the simple expedient of dumping one in the middle of the town. Beyond this were the council offices, the college and the police station, all clustered together as neatly as something from a game of SimCity.

We found PC Slatt in the canteen which was as reassuringly unimaginative as its London counterparts. She was a short, red-headed woman who filled out her stab vest like a three-bedroom semi and had clever grey eyes. She said she’d already been briefed by her inspector. I don’t know what she’d been told, but she stared at Nightingale as if she expected him to grow an extra head.

Nightingale dispatched me to the counter, and when I got back with the tea and biscuits PC Slatt was describing her actions at the crash site. Spend any time around traffic accidents and you have no trouble recognising blood when you see it.

‘It glistens when you shine the torch on it, don’t it?’ she said. ‘I thought there might have been another casualty in the car.’

It’s quite common for people who’ve been involved in car crashes to escape from their vehicles and wander away in a random direction even with severe injuries. ‘Only I couldn’t find a blood trail and the driver denied there was anyone else in the vehicle.’

‘When you first looked in the back of the vehicle did you notice anything odd?’ asked Nightingale.

‘Odd?’ she asked.

‘Did you feel anything unusual when you looked inside?’ asked Nightingale.

‘Unusual?’ asked Slatt.

‘Weird,’ I said. ‘Spooky.’ Magic, particularly strong magic, can leave a sort of echo behind it. It works best with stone, less well on concrete and metal and even worse with organic materials – but strangely well with some varieties of plastic. It’s easy to spot the echo if you know what you’re looking for, or if the source is very strong. It’s where ghosts come from, by the way. And it’s a bugger to explain to witnesses.

Slatt leaned back in her chair – away from us. Nightingale gave me a hard look.

‘It was raining,’ said Slatt finally.

‘How did he strike you?’ asked Nightingale. ‘The driver?’

‘At first, like every car crash victim I’ve ever met,’ she said. ‘Dazed, unfocused, you know how it is – they either babble or go catatonic. He was a babbler.’

‘Did he babble about anything in particular?’ asked Nightingale.

‘I think he said something about the dogs barking but he was mumbling as well as babbling.’

Slatt finished her meal, Nightingale finished his tea and I finished my notes.

I drove as PC Slatt directed me past the train station, over the tracks and through, as far as I could tell, the Victorian bit of Crawley. Certainly Robert Weil’s house was a stumpy detached brick Victorian villa with squared-off bay windows, a steep roof and terracotta finials. The surrounding houses were all Edwardian or even later so I guessed that the villa had once stood proudly in its own grounds. You could see the remnant in the big back garden that was currently the focus of a cadaver dog team – on loan from International Rescue, I learnt later.

PC Slatt knew the PC on door duty, who signed us in without comment. The house was big enough that its owners hadn’t felt the need to knock down all the intervening walls and had, recently I thought, restored the decorative moulding. The dining room had been abandoned and overrun by their children, aged seven and nine according to my notes, and was treacherous with toys, broken xylophones and DVDs that had come adrift from their cases. The kids were staying with friends but the wife remained. Her name was Lynda, with a Y, with faded blonde hair and a thin mouth. She sat on the sitting-room sofa and glared at us while we searched her house – the locals were looking for bodies, we were looking for books. Nightingale took the study. I did the bedrooms.

I did the kids’ rooms first, just on the off chance that something interesting was hidden amongst the Lego Star Wars stickers, the Highway Rat and some slightly sticky colouring-in books. The eldest already had a laptop of his own in his room although, judging from its age, it looked like a hand-me-down. Some kids have all the luck.

The parents’ bedroom had a fusty unaired smell and not much in the way of interest to me. Real practitioners never leave their
important
books lying around, but you pick up pointers. The key is unlikely juxtapositions. Lots of people read books about the occult, but if you find them alongside books by or about Isaac Newton, especially the long boring ones, then hackles are raised, flags hoisted and, more importantly, notes made in my notebook.

All I found in the bedroom was a dog-eared copy of the
Discovery of Witches under the bed along with the Life of Pi and The God of Small Things.

‘He hasn’t done anything,’ said a voice behind me.

I stood up and turned to find Lynda Weil standing in the doorway.

‘I don’t know what you think he did,’ she said. ‘But he didn’t do it. Why can’t you tell me what he’s supposed to have done?’

It’s good policing, when you’re engaged in other tasks, to avoid interacting with witnesses or suspects and especially with those individuals that might straddle both categories. Besides – I didn’t know what her husband had done, either.

‘I’m sorry, ma’am,’ I said. ‘We’ll be finished as soon as we can.’

We were finished even sooner because a minute later Nightingale called me downstairs and told me that the Major Crimes Team had found a body.

They’d done it with a wicked bit of policing too. I was seriously impressed. The MCT had CCTV footage of Robert Weil heading out through the Pease Pottage roundabout and off down the ominous sounding Forest Road – so called because it ran along the central axis of St Leonard’s Forest, a patchwork of woods that covered the ridge of high ground that ran from Pease Pottage to Horsham.

Prime body dumping country, according to PC Slatt, easily accessible via footpaths and forest tracks and not covered by speed cameras. Wherever he’d gone, Robert Weil hadn’t returned to Pease Pottage for over five hours so he could easily have been anywhere in the forest. But they’d caught a break because Lynda Weil had phoned her husband at nine forty-five, presumably to ask him where the hell he was, and that allowed the Sussex Police to triangulate the position of his phone to a cell just short of the village of Colgate. After that, it was just a matter of checking the appropriate stretch of the road until they spotted something – in this case tyre tracks from a Volvo V70.

The grey overcast was darkening to countryside black when we arrived at the murder site. There wasn’t a proper turn off, so I had to park the Jag further up the road and walk back.

PC Slatt explained that the landlord had only recently blocked off the entrance to an access route through the forest here.

‘Weil probably remembered the turn off from a walk in the area,’ she said. ‘He hadn’t planned on it not existing any more.’

Important safety tip for serial killers – always scout out your dumping locations before use. We had to clamber over an artificial hillock made of sticky yellow mud and discarded tree limbs, because the marginally visible path was still being checked forensically.