The Lonely Hour, page 2
She was trying to decide her best course of action when she looked up and saw someone staring at her. The man was just as startled to see her and dropped out of sight, vanishing into a thicket of wet gorse.
Before Sparrow had time to close her mouth he popped up again and stumbled towards her. He was now no more than ten feet away. There was a thrash of foliage as he fell once more.
If he’s looking for bats he’s not going about it very professionally, she thought.
The man reappeared directly in front of her, through clumps of reedy grass, making her jump. He had an incredibly thin skull-like face and huge eyes. He climbed painfully to his feet. He was skeletal, young and Indian, with a neatly trimmed beard and a look of startlement.
A second figure divorced itself from the penumbral gloom of the nearby bushes. It blundered into some low branches and swore. Sparrow wondered how many others were here. The young Indian yelled something unintelligible but easily understood. He needed help.
‘Are you all right?’ she asked. She had no idea what he said in reply – it sounded like a mixture of English and Hindi – but he was clearly terrified.
Before he could speak again there was a crunch of sticks and leaves and he disappeared from sight once more. From the noise of torn bracken and the movement of the ferns she could tell he was being dragged backwards. The thing that was pulling him (she had difficulty imagining it was human) slowly unfurled itself in a patch of moonlight and glowered down at her. It wore a long black coat and looked like a pig. In one hand it held a silver spear.
This demonic vision was simply too exotic for Sparrow. With a wail rising in her throat she rose, snatched up her bag and ran, climbing up through the grasses and bushes, the spikes of winter branches snatching at her clothes. She scrambled over hillocks and across ditches, no thought in her head but to get as far away as possible from whatever these people were doing.
She did not stay to see the pig-thing drop on to his victim’s back and loop a cord around his neck as if roping a steer, yanking it tight as he lifted the helpless young man from the ground by his neck.
It wasn’t until she had reached the main road that she realized she had left behind her notebook. When she finally managed to locate Pamela and Matilda, they seemed less concerned about her hallucinatory encounter than the fact that she had lost the bat journal. Pamela told her primly that imagination could be triggered by too much food.
Upset, Sparrow left the others and rode her bicycle home. The nocturnal sojourn of the Brandt’s bat was destined to remain unglimpsed and unrecorded. The journal would prove to be of no interest to non-bat lovers, but it did contain Sparrow’s name and address, a fact which was noted by the pig-man, whose name was Hugo Blake.
Sophie Ward didn’t know it, but she was approaching the spot where Sparrow had confronted unexpected night-time activity on the heath four hours earlier.
Her journey here had been undertaken because of a drunken resolution on New Year’s Eve, when her husband had thoughtfully given her tips on looking better in front of his friends. This would be the year she got fit and showed him who was boss. She had decided to start with an early-morning regime, and to this end had purchased a fitness wristband, a pair of hi-vis lemon Lycra shorts, a sports bra, trainers, a micro-weave sweat-top and a gym bag. Then she thought about what kind of exercise she should try. Running had seemed a good idea because you could stop whenever you wanted without being judged, and didn’t have to shower in front of other people. She had carefully planned out her route.
Less than twenty minutes into her first run things had started to go wrong. First she snagged her top on a branch and slipped over on a patch of mud, and now she was hopelessly lost.
It was not quite light, and at 7.55 a.m. the woods had a fairy-tale quality. Patches of milky vapour cocooned the bases of the trees, parting and closing behind her as she trotted through them.
The heath was notoriously tricky to negotiate in half-light. Pitted paths plunged across each other and doubled back in tangled loops, leading to clumps of foliage so identical they might have been purchased by a model-railway enthusiast to furnish a track layout. There was more likelihood of breaking an ankle on a half-submerged root than getting fit.
As Sophie pounded past a lethal-looking holly bush that she felt sure she had seen several times before, she was halted by a pathway that split and twisted into three different routes, all going downhill.
Although her sense of direction was poor, she was fairly certain that she needed to start heading upwards towards her car. After all, it was only her first day. She was out of breath and feeling unnerved. Her husband had suggested that she should start out by jogging through the backstreets, but it seemed such a waste of nature. The heath, London’s vast hilltop common land, had survived for more than a millennium. Here you could walk for a day without redoubling your tracks, but it was clearly not a jogging circuit for beginners.
Sophie turned about, trying to regain her bearings. She had never been good with nature. Trees all looked the same, although she was fairly certain that the one beside her now was a willow. Its fine branches were bent over like whips, making natural curtains dense enough to conceal …
… a body.
It was hanging upside down inside the willow like a human bat. Its ankles were tied with blue nylon cord, the backs of its hands brushing the ground. The other end of the nylon rope had been knotted around the trunk of the tree. The hanging man was skinny, young and Indian, dressed in a pale blue work shirt and rather old-fashioned navy trousers.
Sophie looked down at her feet. Her new Nikes now sported a plimsoll line of blood. She was standing in a dark pool of it.
She thought about helping him down until she saw the hole in his bony throat. The coagulated gore had leaked from it. The puncture looked deep. Sophie gingerly stepped out of the blood pool and felt for her phone. As a nurse at the nearby Royal Free Hospital she was inured to deathly visitation, although it normally came to her attention in a neat white bed, not dangling by its feet from a tree.
Afterwards she admitted that although it had crossed her mind that the attacker might still be nearby, curiosity had got the better of her. She tried to see if there were signs of life left in the hanging body.
Light had begun to show through the trees. Her first attempt at visual diagnosis ruled out any kind of stupid accident and went for suicide, quickly revised to murder when she realized that it would have been impossible for the poor man to kill himself in such a manner.
There was no knife lying in the cropped grass beneath him, but there were plenty of other strange items lying around. Her right heel disturbed something round and hard – a red church candle, half buried in the mulch of leaves. When she looked about, she saw that nearly a dozen candles had been arranged in a circle before the hanging man. Two of them were still burning beside a pile of headless dolls, a couple of inverted crucifixes and a snakeskin.
There was no point in calling for an ambulance. She rang the police instead, and as it was early on a Sunday morning she was put on hold. The music sounded suspiciously like Morrissey’s ‘First of the Gang to Die’.
While she waited, she took a pace back and looked up at the body. He had been hoisted high enough to bring his throat to eye level. His eyes were wide and surprised. Some kind of small fluttering insect, a bug or even a tiny bat, flew out of his open mouth.
Sophie Ward finally became unnerved upon considering these strange details, because what she had stumbled upon was not just a scene of violence, but an act of madness.
2
REPORT
Raymond Land sat staring at the white sand beach fringed with tall coconut palms. The sun was rising in a crisp azure sky, promising another hot day, with only a single small cloud on the sea’s horizon. He was in Mexico, on the Yucatán Peninsula, an ecologically protected coast that was home to miles of pristine shoreline, exotic tropical birds and one of the world’s great cuisines.
He was thinking about what to have for lunch, and had narrowed it down to red snapper or octopus, when he noticed that the small grey cloud had grown much bigger. A dark shadow had started to stain the sand. When he looked up again he was shocked to see that it had taken over the whole of the sky.
As he stared into the dense charcoal-coloured mass he began to see a face in it. The face was chubby and wrinkled and had innocent blue eyes, a striped scarf (partially unravelled) and a squashed trilby hat. There was a roll of thunder and it began to rain.
Land awoke with a start and found himself still staring at the deserted beach on his laptop’s screensaver. He turned about in his chair and groggily looked out of his office window in King’s Cross, London. Stumpy the one-legged pigeon stared through the rain-spattered glass at him with a malevolent orange eye. With a deep, world-weary sigh Land returned to the keyboard and began to type.
PECULIAR CRIMES UNIT
A specialized London police division with a remit to prevent or cause to cease any acts of public affright or violent disorder committed in the municipal or communal areas of the city.
The Old Warehouse
231 Caledonian Road
London N1 9RB
STAFF ROSTER SUNDAY 6 JANUARY
Raymond Land, Unit Chief
Arthur Bryant, Detective Chief Inspector
John May, Detective Chief Inspector
Janice Longbright, Operations Director
Jack Renfield, Operations Director
Dan Banbury, Crime Scene/Forensics
Meera Mangeshkar, Detective Sergeant
Colin Bimsley, Detective Sergeant
Giles Kershaw, Forensic Pathologist (off-site)
Crippen, staff cat
PRIVATE & CONFIDENTIAL MEMO
FROM: RAYMOND LAND
TO: ALL PCU STAFF
This wasn’t my idea, coming in on a Sunday. Even God took the day off. He wouldn’t have been able to if he’d been working for the Home Office, though, as they’re determined to make us try flexible working hours. Perhaps they can also convince criminals to work from home.
I trust you all had an enjoyable Christmas. Thank you for your cards and gifts. Whoever bought me the aftershave can have it back. Apart from the fact that it smells like burnt oranges, Aqua Manda was discontinued in 1973 so I’m assuming it was a regift from Mr Bryant. He might have taken the price off, especially as it was in shillings and pence.
While you were off gorging yourselves with loved ones I was in temporary accommodation on Cable Street with Crippen and her intestinal parasites for company. You know there’s something seriously wrong with your life when the high point of your Christmas Day is worming a cat, but, as Mr Bryant likes to remind me, anyone seeking dignity will find it in the dictionary just after ‘Death’, so let’s move on.
This week’s roster includes two newly promoted job titles. The unit’s most senior detectives have finally accepted official status as Detective Chief Inspectors in order to ratify their pay grades with the Met’s homicide division. This does not entitle them to Luncheon Vouchers, first dibs on the Friday cake or any kind of special treatment. Mr Bryant has promised me that his new status won’t change him at all, which is a pity. The change will move you all up a peg, so everyone gets a Crackerjack pencil except me.
In the accompanying spreadsheet you’ll find the latest bulletin from the School of the Bleeding Obvious, aka the annual Metropolitan Police crime stats for Central London. Of course we’re not technically part of the Serious Crimes Division but their problems affect us, so give it a shufti. That chattering noise you hear is officers’ teeth; there’s a cold wind blowing through the Home Office right now. The Met is so stretched that CPS cases are repeatedly collapsing due to incomplete evidence.
Knowing the length of your attention spans I can summarize for you: officers on the street are down 32 per cent, violent crime is up 29 per cent, gun and knife crime up 46 per cent, anti-social behaviour, hate crimes, rape and assault are all soaring.
‘No wonder London is ranked fifty-third in terms of liveable cities,’ said John May as he read the memo back to his partner.
‘Yes, but what’s in the top ten?’ asked Bryant, patting pockets for his pipe. ‘If you want to go and live off-world in the empty corners of the Mercator map, good luck to you. I want to be where something outrageous is happening.’
Domestics and violence with fatal injuries are up, so-called ‘honour killings’ are up, daylight drug deals are everywhere and we have the reappearance of a charming form of gang violence indigenous to the East End; chucking sulphuric acid in someone’s face is something I associate with The Phantom of the Opera, not a spotty nonce with a Sideshow Bob haircut who thinks somebody nicked his bird or disrespected his trainers.
The policy of reducing the service in favour of electronic surveillance has been dealt a swift kick up the jacksie by the latest stats, which show that its new national facial recognition system is 95 per cent inaccurate. At least it explains why Mr Bryant is able to confound our own state-of-the-art system by wearing his scarf the wrong way round.
The national picture isn’t looking good. Knife-crime figures are skewed by gang attacks within specific communities, especially rural ones, which increase in direct proportion to cutbacks, the so-called ‘debt and threat’ trap. There are now some thirty thousand children in criminal gangs. If you’re poor, schooldays are definitely not the happiest days of your life.
Only 40 per cent of all calls made to the Met last year were about crime; they’re still picking up the pieces from the galloping retreat of State instead of catching criminals. There were the usual time-wasters, including people calling to complain that the KFC was shut and one old dear who rang the emergency services because she couldn’t get the lid off her biscuit tin. In between dealing with toilet-seat-related incidents and members of the psychopaths’ union who think they’re being sent alien messages through their toasters, they did manage to put away a few career crims causing social unrest. Unfortunately they also lost over forty London police stations in the last twelve months, which means that the most vulnerable and disadvantaged members of society have been left without support. It seems they no longer come forward and we no longer have the resources to go looking for them.
On a lighter note, there were over seven hundred thousand mobile phones snatched last year, so many that the Met no longer regard it as an actionable crime. Quite right too. You can’t count every little Stone-Island-wearing street-slug on a moped waiting round the corner for the coast to clear before pouncing on a pissed-up City boy pestering his coke dealer, that’s just social Darwinism.
‘He’s a bit minty this morning,’ said Bryant.
‘He’s been cooped up with the cat,’ said May.
Which brings me to the statistics for the Home Office’s outsourced special units, of which, you may be amazed to learn, you are still one, even after Mr Bryant got the building quarantined and nearly managed to burn us down again. How did we do last year? Percentage of crimes we solved: 72 per cent. Number of important officials we upset during the course of our investigations: 165 per cent.
‘How could dissatisfaction be above a hundred per cent?’ asked Arthur Bryant. ‘I assume the American consul was happy that we found his missing son.’
‘Buried in our basement,’ May reminded him. ‘I would not say “happy”.’
Let’s look at our own data. Four murderers apprehended, one London regatta disrupted, one capital-wide riot provoked, one siege staged in our own unit and a near-fatal strangulation in that well-known hotbed of violence, the British Library. I know you sometimes have to break a few laws to get results but must you always break them so publicly? The next time you feel the need to trash a national institution or pull a Sweeney through the backstreets could you at least wait until everyone important is in bed? I don’t like opening my copy of the Metro and seeing your faces leering out at me before I’ve had a coffee and one of my tablets.
Despite the fact that most murder investigation teams would kill for your strike rate, we still have plenty of enemies out there who would like to see us taken down. Historically speaking, we know what happens to units that attract public attention. Clue: nothing good. The government had Alan Turing chemically castrated. Let that be a caution.
I’m not pretending this year is going to be easy. A few weeks ago, the body of the son of the US consul was found in the cellar of these premises and was removed to a secure military facility somewhere outside of Chicago, Illinois, for independent analysis. The consulate is now actively pursuing a case against us.
In addition, we have the usual problems to contend with: funding restrictions, limited resources and an ageing – in some cases, extremely ageing – workforce. The public surgery will continue to be held each Monday morning from nine to twelve, and everyone will be taking their turn in the barrel. Janice will handle this week’s gathering of nutters. I’m not putting Mr Bryant on the roster because he’s too old to be punched.
Now, house business. Our Christmas children’s weekend was meant to allay fears about meeting the police. Instead, several parents complained that you traumatized a group of under-sevens by locking them in a cell and misplacing the keys. I think you owe Janice an apology for leaving her with the mopping up.
This week’s inter-unit football match has been cancelled due to a complete and utter lack of interest in any kind of sporting activity from everyone except Colin, who’ll have to find someone his own size to knock unconscious.
The PCU Saturday Night Film Club screening will be This Happy Breed, and was of course chosen by Mr Bryant, who says he missed it in cinemas, probably because it was made in 1944. Perhaps he was washing his hair that night.
I’ve asked the two Daves to stay on and repair the fire damage on the first floor. It would be cheaper to put them on the payroll, except that I’m loath to take advice on the policing of the capital from a pair of Turkish builders. They’ll repartition the open-plan arrangement and turn part of it back into separate offices, seeing as you don’t seem capable of sharing a workspace without turning it into some kind of Goth student squat. We’re keeping the operations room but could whoever brought in the Emmanuelle chair, the goat’s head table lamp and the portable barbecue please take them away again?
