The Babylon Rite. Tom Knox
important people went to be seriously undisturbed in big houses. A teenage au pair living in a strange big house in a strange new country would be reluctant to cause any bother.
‘Here we go, sir.’
The car parked outside a large building fronted by two-storey-high white Doric pillars. A big car in the driveway was covered with some kind of tailored sheet. Ibsen stared: he had never had a car expensive enough to require special protection from the English winter.
‘The body?’
‘This way.’
They were greeted at the door by the Scene of Crime Officer, wearing a paper suit which zipped up at the front. Other forensic and attending officers came out of the building, carrying evidence bags, and walked to a large steel van, parked behind the sheet-covered car.
‘There’s a lot of blood,’ said the SOCO through his paper mask, with the air of a host at a house party greeting his latest guests.
‘Can we see?’
‘You need to nonce up first, sir.’
Stalling at the doorway, Ibsen and Larkham slipped on their plastic gloves and paper masks and translucent overshoes, like politicians visiting a fish factory. Then they stepped through the enormous pillared hall into an enormous pillared sitting room. Ibsen resisted the urge to swear, as he surveyed the crime scene. Then his resistance crumbled.
‘Fucking hell.’
The victim was young, blond, and handsome: maybe twenty-five or thirty at most. He was lying supine on the floor near a large antique desk. A phone and a notepad sat on the desk, to the left of a laptop, which was lightly smeared with blood.
Opposite the desk stood some speakers, and a vast black television: ultra-expensive kit.
The face of the young Russian was slightly turned towards the desk, as if in his last moments he had tried, but failed, to make a desperate call. He was dressed in a neat blue shirt, probably bespoke, from Jermyn Street; and fashionable jeans – perhaps Armani. The new collection. The jeans were loosened at the top, half-unbuttoned.
Ibsen, who cultivated a sincere interest in clothes, would have liked to give an opinion of the kid’s footwear, but that was impossible, as the cadaver had no feet.
Someone had sliced off his feet. The raw stumps were an obscenity: the victim resembled a casualty of some industrial scythe. The body was also missing his right hand: blood had spurted from the severed wrist all over the rich Turkish carpet, making the rich red of the wool richer and purpler. The angle of the brutal amputations was unusual. Ibsen stopped to have a closer look, squinting, clutching his face mask to his mouth, and found there was even a deep grinning cut mark to the right side of the neck, as if the murderer had tried to slice off the head as well, but had given up. Perhaps the killer had got bored, or maybe the victim died of blood loss before the decapitation could be completed, rendering it pointless.
Crouching by the body, Ibsen went through the PMI calculations. How long had the body been here? Forensics would strip the corpse, and check for livor mortis – pooling of the blood at the bottom of the body – and for rigor mortis, and algor mortis, and get a scientific answer; but Ibsen’s instinct told him Pathology’s first guess was good: this body was pretty fresh. You could smell the new blood. Twelve hours at most. That made the overheard violence, at one a.m., very likely the time of death.
‘He dragged himself in here?’ Ibsen gestured at the long, lurid smears of blood along the parquet floor.
‘Yes,’ said the SOC officer, Jonson. ‘Seems he was chopped up in the kitchen, then the killer dragged the body in here, or he dragged himself, trying to reach the phone.’
‘The feet and hand?’
‘Found ’em on the kitchen floor. Gone to Path.’
Ibsen walked through the hallway into the white-and-steel kitchen. At the far end a set of French windows gave on to the lawn. The doors were open to the cold and the drizzle. Bleak, leafless trees bent over the vast lawns; a tennis court, padlocked shut for the winter, lay at the far end of the grounds.
The streaks of blood stretched from the sitting room through the hallway into the kitchen to a larger pool of blood where the butchery must have been committed.
Larkham came alongside.
‘Prints?’ asked Ibsen. ‘In the mud, the garden?’
‘Nothing yet, sir, but we have found … this. Incredibly.’
Larkham was holding a clear plastic bag, inside which was a very large, viciously serrated Sabatier kitchen knife, smeared and gummed with blood. The murder weapon, without question.
The DCI gazed at it in astonishment. ‘The killer just left this?’
‘Lying on the kitchen floor. By the fridge, sir. And look—’ With a pencil Larkham pointed to the black resin handle of the knife. Perfectly visible was a large red thumb print: a patent print. The lottery win of evidential police work.
For the briefest moment, Ibsen felt like celebrating: this was so easy, a patent print, on the murder weapon, an open door to solving the case. But another second told him this was too easy. Way too easy. The door closed, revealing a darker truth. He regarded the puzzle, gazing at the fridge and the blood and the knife. What did he have? Something. Definitely something. He considered the missing right hand. The cut to the right of the neck. The left-hand thumb print on the handle. The strange oblique angle of the amputations themselves.
Ibsen took out his own pen and pointed at the knife. ‘That’s not the killer’s print. I bet that’s the victim’s print.’
Larkham’s face expressed wide and sincere puzzlement.
‘Don’t you see? The murderer has, so far as we can tell, left no other clues, no boot prints, no blatant trace evidence. A truly professional job, then, despite the torture … despite the butchery.’
‘So?’
The French windows creaked in the cold wet wind, and blustered old dead leaves into the kitchen.
‘Would he just leave behind a murder weapon with a big fat print on it? No. So he discarded or ignored the knife for a reason. Because he must have known the print on the blade belonged to someone else. So it would provide no evidence against him.’
‘Ah …’
‘Now think about the corpse,’ Ibsen continued. ‘The slice to the neck was on the right, like someone left-handed, reaching around, trying to cut his own neck. This is a left-handed thumb print on the knife. Likewise, the cuts to the leg are distinctively angled, as if the severing blade was wielded in a particular direction. By someone crouching, doing it to himself.’
‘Sir?’
‘The kid was living here alone, right?’
‘Uh, yes, sir.’
‘Remember the desk. The notepad and the phone were to the left of the laptop. He’s left-handed. He did the amputations himself. Therefore my guess is … the thumb print is from the victim’s own hand.’
Larkham stared moodily at the garden, at the grey enormous lawn. ‘That means, it means …’
‘Yes. That means the killer forced the victim. To cut off his own feet. And his own hand. And even to slice into his own neck. He kindly left the victim with one hand intact, his best left hand, so he could do this to himself. Check the corpse for prints: I wager the thumb print will match.’
For the faintest second, the coolly ambitious Detective Sergeant Peter Larkham of New Scotland Yard looked as if he was going to be sick.
9
Morningside, Edinburgh
Nina McLintock and Adam