The Babylon Rite (15 page)

Yet he didn’t fire. Why? Halfway through the door, Jess saw what the gunman had already seen.

A crowd of villagers was pushing into the room. Jay and Larry had obviously been recruiting: hiring local men, for the dig, as they often did. They’d found a dozen farmers and fishmeal workers; big, dark-skinned Zana men who were staring right back at the gunman, utterly unafraid.

Now the intruder looked seriously confused. It was a stand-off. The locals gazed at the gunman, daring him, chins uptilted; three of them had drawn machetes, used for cane cutting: the challenge was obvious.
You can shoot one of us, maybe two, maybe three – but you can’t kill us all, we will chop you down.

The tension tautened. The fridges buzzed. The Moche pots stared in reproach across the laboratory.

The gunman swore. ‘
Que chingados! Yo matario tu!
’

But he was edging to the door, and the gun was slack in his hand.

The tallest villager lifted the machete. ‘
Tiratu a un poso!
’

The glinting machete was pointing at the exit, inviting the gunman to go.

And he was going. Barging through the dark villagers, the gunman pushed his way to the door, and then he slammed the door open and was away down the steps: sprinting. A few seconds later they heard the noise of his car, screeching away very fast, leaving a cloud of dust which was visible from the tall laboratory windows.

Gone.

Jay and Larry were already at Dan’s side, helping him to his feet, and sitting him on the stool. He asked, limply, for water. Bewildered, and urgent, Jess fetched water from the fridge. As she took the small bottle of Evian from the refrigerated depths, the Moche skulls smiled at her from their yellow foam cushions.

‘Thank you,’ Dan said, gazing deep into Jessica’s eyes. His hand was visibly trembling as he tried to open the little water bottle; but he was shivering so much he couldn’t open the bottle. Jess did it for him; he guzzled the water.

Then someone pushed through the scientists, and poured a liberal measure of the local liquor from a small glass bottle into a plastic cup. Dan looked at it for a moment – and sank the booze.

‘Aguardiente?’ The villager with the bottle nodded, quite shyly.

‘Gracias, amigo,’ Dan said. ‘
Gracias.
’

The villager spoke in a deep Zana voice.
You pay us. You feed our children. You are our friends. We are not afraid of guns.

Dan thanked the villagers again, and then some more. But the men just bowed, and turned solemnly; then they moved to the door, and disappeared.

Jessica watched as Dan took another gulp of the liquor; he saw her scrutinizing him.

‘Jess. Guys. Thanks … I’m OK.’

Jay was the first to ask, ‘How the hell did he get in?’

Dan shook his head. ‘The front door. I guess. Just kicked it open?’

‘Who
was
he? How long had he been here?’

‘Five minutes. Jess was in the washroom, he just marched in and he pinned me to the wall and … started … asking
questions
.’

Jess had so many questions of her own. But her boss – her boyfriend – was maybe too shocked for an interrogation. She looked at Jay. ‘Do we tell the police?’

Dan shook his head. ‘The police? What can they do? I’ll give them a description, but, eh, how many criminals are there in Peru? Who are they gonna ask? What are they gonna ask? Did you see a tall Peruvian?’

Larry persisted. ‘So who
was
he? Race, accent?’

Dan shrugged.

‘Peruvian, probably. Mestizo maybe. South American for sure. Maybe a local villain?’

‘A
Haquero,
perhaps? A graverobber?’

‘Could be.’ Dan sighed, and held the cup in his hand as if it was the Holy Grail, the Eucharist. ‘I just don’t know! He stank a little of this stuff, aguardiente. Not too much. Not a total lush. More professional than that.’

‘The gun was a Glock,’ said Jess. And three male faces turned her way. ‘My uncle is a gun nut. In Utah, I used to vacation on his ranch. A Glock’s a pricey gun for a local criminal. Glock 23, .45-mil, five hundred bucks minimum.’

Jay gestured in frustration. ‘Which means?’

‘I don’t know either!’ Jessica sighed. ‘But this wasn’t some average cane farmer with a grudge. Where would they get a smart gun like that?
How
?’

Larry suggested, ‘A haquero, then, like I said?’

Dan answered. ‘He wasn’t interested in new finds, new tombs. He just kept asking, me the same f— the same damn questions. Endlessly. With that gun.’

‘What questions?’

‘What we were
doing
here. What we’d found, stuff like that …’

Jess walked around the lab, pacing, thinking, thinking hard; she paused by the first large jar, and turned. ‘He was asking you about a man. Wasn’t he? I overheard it.’

‘Did he? Yes. Yes, maybe he did. I was so damn scared. But he did … yes, he did.’

‘Did this guy have a name?’

‘Something odd. Something strange. Yes. I remember:
Archibald McLintock.
’

‘Who?’

‘
McLintock
.’ Dan repeated. ‘Ar-chi-bald Mc-Lin-tock. He said it precisely. What did I know about … Archibald McLintock. Such an odd name – that’s all.’

Jay looked at Jess and at Larry. ‘So who the fuck is
that
?’

Larry snorted. ‘Does it matter? Someone just tried to kill Dan.’

Jessica raised a hand. ‘I think it matters, I think it matters a lot. It’s gotta be
linked
.’

‘To what?’ Larry’s voice was verging on angry. ‘Jess, what the hell are you talking about?’

‘The truck. In Trujillo. That slammed into the garage.’

‘Eh?’

Her voice was almost as passionate his now. ‘Think about it. First an explosion, then a gunman. Can it really be coincidence? All this violence.’

‘Sorry, Jess, no idea.’

‘
Maybe, in Trujillo, it wasn’t the garage they were aiming for.
Maybe it was Pablo himself
,
Pablo
and the museum.
Maybe someone is hunting down people who are connected with the Moche.’

‘Where’s the evidence?’

Jessica insisted, ‘I remember him saying, Pablo, the day it happened, that he’d had people in the museum – asking questions. He said they were … unpleasant people. Knowing Pablo, they could have had guns and he would call them “unpleasant” – isn’t that just a bit strange? And now this. Here. A gunman.’

A silence. Dan looked at her long and hard. ‘So you reckon that whoever they are, they are coming for anyone –
anyone who knows too much about the Moche?
’

‘Yes. I do.’

The only sound in the room was the buzz of the fridges. Containing the smiling Moche skulls in their soft collars of yellow foam.

DCI Mark Ibsen was standing in the scruffy beer garden of a large London pub near Regent’s Park. It was a frigid afternoon in mid-December; the beer garden was deserted. But he wasn’t here to drink, he was here to watch.

Larkham came into the garden with a couple of plastic coffee cups. He handed one over to his boss, then sipped from his own cappuccino.

Ibsen stayed silent, and staring. Larkham followed his superior officer’s gaze: which was directed over the wall of the beer garden, to the curtained sash windows of 74B, Delancey Street, a first-floor flat in a long, early Victorian terrace, which diagonally faced this pub across the road, and also the deep railway tracks that led down to Euston Station.

Larkham frowned, and swallowed his coffee. ‘What do you think, then, sir? We haven’t got a warrant yet.’

‘I know.’

‘Not that always stopped you in the past.’

Ibsen chuckled; but his mood was as sour and cold as the day. They were tracking down all the people they had seen in the photo with the tattooed man. Most of them had been located: more rich kids, all with the same boring story.
I can’t remember that guy. He was probably a friend of Patrick Klemmer. No, I don’t know anything else.

Only a couple of people in the photo were yet to be traced and interviewed. And one of them was Imogen Fitzsimmons, twenty-five years old, an aspiring TV researcher, who lived here in Delancey Street. She was known as a party girl; she was a purposeful socializer. Yet she hadn’t been seen for two days. No one knew where she was; she hadn’t called in sick to work; she did not have a holiday scheduled and she had missed several professional and social engagements. Her close friends said she was maybe out of town with a secret boyfriend – could
that
be the tattooed man?

Ibsen stamped his feet against the cold, staring at the closed and curtained windows of 74B. ‘Larkham. Tell me again about the secret boyfriend. How secret? If he’s secret how come her pals all know about him?’

Larkham opened his notebook. ‘They don’t know for sure. Could be they’re just guessing. Her best friend is Lucinda Effingham, also in the photo. We interviewed her this afternoon. Effingham told me that in recent weeks,’ Larkham tilted the notebook to read better, ‘“Imogen had been acting strangely. Going off in the evening, not telling me where. We all reckoned she might be having an affair, she seemed happy, but she was furtive, and evasive. We speculated that she maybe met a married man at work.”’

Larkham closed the notebook. Ibsen tasted some of the rapidly cooling coffee, and put the cup down on the beer garden table. ‘Neighbours not seen or heard
anything
?’

‘Not in two days.’

‘Her phones …?’

‘Going unanswered. Landline and mobile. We
will
have a warrant by tomorrow. The landlord has keys and we can pick them up tomorrow morning.’

DCI Ibsen scowled. ‘No. This is wrong. This is giving me the collywobbles, Larkham. I think it’s the damn curtains.’

‘Sir?’

‘They are just too bloody
shut.
Look at them.’

‘Too … shut … sir?’

‘Yes, too bloody shut. When you go away for a weekend you don’t close curtains with such emphatic exactitude, do you? I think someone is in there, someone who wants to be in the dark.’

‘But—’

‘Come on – sod the warrant. This is a life-threatening situation. Call for some back-up.’

For the third time that day they asked the downstairs neighbours at 74 to open the external door, profusely apologizing as they did.

Larkham and Ibsen ran up the communal stairs to the flat on the first floor. 74B. They paused on the communal landing.

‘Armed response will be here in a few minutes—’

‘I don’t think she’s going to be armed, Larkham.’

Ibsen stepped back and vigorously kicked at the door; it nearly gave at the first attempt; Larkham kicked it a second time and the door swung open without protest, the lock cleanly snapped.

The flat was black as midnight, made very deliberately dark. And yes, Ibsen could sense a human presence: someone was either here or had been here, very recently. A slightly poisonous fragrance – of something ominous – hung in the stifled air.

Larkham punched the lights on and they gazed around.

The first thing they saw was the blood on the hallway floor, and on the opposite wall. Little seasonings of blood, like sprinkled cinnamon: blood spatter from a serious wound.

‘Jesus,’ said Larkham.

There was more blood in the living room: it was smeared on a white china mug, daubed in childish fingerprints on a magazine, and on a TV remote. Most bizarre was a mouth-shaped splodge of blood on a mirror at head height; as if someone wearing far too much scarlet lipstick had kissed the glass.

‘So,’ said Ibsen, ‘where is she? The blood is contained. She’s in the flat. She must be. She’s still here—’

They searched the bathroom and found trailing smears of blood on the shower curtain and dark crimson blood drops in the toilet bowl. The bathroom floor was oddly clean.

The kitchen revealed something worse: a sink covered with blood, as if a small mammal had been crudely slaughtered over the plughole.

Larkham pointed with a pen. ‘What is that?’

It was a sliver of flesh, lying on the bottom of the metal sink, surrounded by thick gobbets of blood. Was the flesh human? It was so mangled it was impossible to tell.

Ibsen didn’t know whether to feel sick or scared. ‘Larkham – the bedroom – she must be in there.’

The bedroom door was at the end of the landing. They pushed against it, but it seemed to be obstructed by a rucked carpet: a second, heavier shove got it open.

Ibsen didn’t know what he had expected to find in the bedroom; he didn’t care to imagine it. But he certainly didn’t expect to find nothing.

Yet there was no one in the bedroom. No body, no suicide victim, nothing. The bedsheets were liberally marked with blood, a white cotton T-shirt was also rusted with drying blood. The room was in chaos: a mirror was smashed, a TV was lying on the carpet, drawers had been flung open and clothing scattered, as if a fetishist had been seeking underwear, but there was no one here, and no one in the bedroom. Lots of blood but no body?

The flat was empty.

‘So what happened?’ Ibsen gazed at his own crazed reflection in the shattered mirror. ‘The guy came here and took her? Why did no one see this? Or hear anything?’

Larkham was opening the floor-to-ceiling wardrobes. The wardrobes were big; the whole flat was large and airy. This was a rich girl, yet another rich kid, with her own flat in a pricey part of town and lots of nice clothes, and she was very probably dead and yet her body had disappeared.

‘Sir.’

‘What?’

‘Jesus …’ Larkham’s voice was uncharacteristically choked. ‘She’s here, sir.’

Ibsen stiffened his resolve, and came across the room. If Larkham was shocked by the sight of the body, it had to be pretty bad.

It was far worse than pretty bad.

Imogen Fitzsimmons’s body was huddled in a corner of her own wardrobe, kneeling on the floor staring at the expensive coats.

In her stiff, blood-caked left hand the girl clutched an old-fashioned cut-throat razor, stained with blood.

The body was clothed: she was wearing tight skinny jeans and white socks. And a black T-shirt with a small Guinness logo. The blackness of the T-shirt made the body look almost normal – from the neck down. It had evidently absorbed a lot of blood but the redness didn’t show. And before she died, this young woman had obviously used the razor to progressively mutilate her face.