To Dwell in Darkness (13 page)

“I'd say it's more than decent.” Having eaten as if he were starving, Kincaid popped the last bite of sandwich into his mouth and fished a card from his wallet. “I expect we'll be coming and going from the upstairs flat for a bit.” Through the window, he saw the SOCO van pull up. “Hopefully we won't disturb your business. If you do think of anything unusual going on upstairs, you can always give me a ring.”

Atias took the card, his eyes widening as he read it. “You didn't say you were a detective superintendent.” His tone was suddenly wary. “I hope something bad hasn't happened upstairs.”

“Not upstairs,” Kincaid said noncommittally. “As far as we know.”

As the SOCOs climbed out of the van, Kincaid recognized the techs from last night's crime scene at the railway station. “Did you work all night?” he asked as the men joined them.

“We've just finished,” said the one with the red-blond beard. Scott, he had said he was called. “But as we were here and there wasn't another team available in the area, we said we'd take this one, too.” He looked tired, as did his partner, who was taller, thinner, and clean shaven.

“Scott—is that first or last name?” asked Kincaid.

“Last. I'm called Arthur, so you can see why I prefer it. This is Chad Mills.” Scott indicated his partner. “What have you got for us here? Is there a connection with the poor bugger in the station?”

Kincaid explained what they'd learned and how he wanted to process the scene, as Mel the locksmith started on the street-level door.

Mel made quick work of it, shaking his head. “Some people's idea of security,” he muttered. Kincaid, Callery, and the two techs followed him up the stairs, waiting on the first-floor landing while he tackled the door to the flat itself. His tsk of disapproval was audible from the flight below as he opened the interior lock. “There you are, then,” he said as they climbed up to the second floor. “The door will lock itself, so be careful you don't shut yourselves out.” He handed Kincaid a card. “Just give me a ring if you need anything else.”

The flat was bone-chillingly cold, and looked considerably less appealing in the gray light filtering through the dirty front windows than it had the previous night.

Kincaid and Callery put on latex gloves and slipped paper booties over their shoes while the techs got into full gear. “We were in the flat last night,” Kincaid explained. He and Callery stood just inside the doorway, studying the place, as Scott and Chad Mills opened their collection kits and prepped their digital SLR cameras.

There were the sleeping bags he'd noticed the previous night, stuffed under the sofa, and a few more were folded in another corner of the sitting room. There were several duffel bags and sturdy cloth shopping bags against the wall as well. A laptop sat open on the coffee table, and beside it a stack of newspapers and magazines, but none of the publications looked out of the ordinary. Various items of outerwear hung on coat hooks he hadn't noticed before. There was a threadbare rug under the sofa and coffee table, but the flooring in the rest of the room was bare boards, much worn and scuffed.

There were no cupboards except for those in the kitchen area. A breeze for the forensics team, then, except for trying to figure out what belonged to whom.

“I can take your ID shots with my phone camera,” said Scott, “so you won't have to wait for a digital transfer. You won't need the level of detail we get with the SLRs. How many people live here?”

“Six, we think,” Kincaid answered. “Plus the victim. Since we haven't made a positive identification we're hoping we can find something here that will give us a lead.”

He wondered how the occupants of the flat decided on sleeping arrangements, if any of them slept together, if anyone shared the bedroom with Matthew, and how they shared a bathroom. The thought of the bickering he and his sister Juliet had done over the bathroom when they were in their teens made him smile, earning an odd glance from Callery.

“Something funny?” asked Callery.

Kincaid shook his head. “Just wondering how so many people managed to live in this small space without killing each other.”

“Who says they didn't?” Going to the coffee table, Callery touched the laptop with a gloved fingertip and a lock screen popped up. “Here's one for the boffins.” He shrugged. They hadn't expected access. “Let's just make certain there's no bomb-making factory in the back room, shall we?”

Jasmine Sidana sat in Interview Room A across from Cam Chen, who was definitely the worse for wear after her night in the custody suite.

Jasmine brushed a stray hair from her crisp white blouse and straightened her skirt, then concentrated on the computer monitor that had been set up where they both could view it.

Turning on the room recorder, she identified them both and gave the time and date, then said, “Cam, do you understand what we're going to do here? We've got some digital photos, and I need you to tell me about the things in the room. We need to identify Ryan Marsh's possessions.”

Cam stared at her. “I can tell you anything you want. None of us have much—Matthew won't allow it. But I can't show you which things are Ryan's.”

“Why not?” asked Jasmine, wondering if the girl was acting out of some stubborn and misguided sense of loyalty.

“Because Ryan never left anything in the flat,” said Cam. “Not even his toothbrush.”

They had not found anything in the flat's bedroom. Not unless you counted the double bed—upon which Kincaid imagined Matthew Quinn must sleep diagonally in order to fit—a wardrobe, a battered chest of drawers, and various items of clothing that were labeled
tall
and obviously belonged to Quinn. The adjoining bathroom yielded much the same—one bottle of shampoo, one bottle of shower gel on the rim of the clean tub. The medicine cabinet held toothbrush, toothpaste, and shaving things that again obviously belonged to one person, presumably Quinn, and various over-the-counter medications, plasters, and tweezers.

If there was a trace of white phosphorus or any other explosive, it would be up to the forensic techs to find it.

“If he's making bombs or harboring terrorists, I doubt it's here,” Callery had said, and shortly thereafter took himself off, talking on his mobile as he left.

Kincaid took a phone call from Simon Gikas, who relayed what Cam had told Sidana. When he'd rung off, Kincaid stood for a while, watching and thinking, as the SOCOs methodically took photos and collected trace evidence.

Matthew Quinn was looking more and more like a little despot who let the others literally camp in the flat, dependent upon his charity. Why? And why had Ryan Marsh tolerated it? And who had introduced a white phosphorus grenade into this seemingly innocuous group who seemed capable of little more than amateur protests?

When his phone rang again, he answered quickly, expecting Gikas. But it was Rashid Kaleem, calling from the morgue at the Royal London Hospital.

“I think you'd better come and have a look at our victim,” said Rashid.

Having spent the morning being poked and prodded, having blood drawn and oxygen levels checked, by a little before ten o'clock Melody had been told she was discharged from hospital. She'd just got out of the horrid hospital gown they'd given her in the room and back into her own clothes when there was a tap at the door.

Andy put his head in, then came into the room with a look of relief. “Oh, good, you're decent.”

“You would mind if I weren't?” she asked, giving him a quizzical look as she brushed at a smudge on her sweater. Did she just imagine that her clothes bore the odor of fire and singed flesh?

“Of course not. It's just—” He gestured at the hospital paraphernalia surrounding the bed. “I didn't want to—”

“I know.” Melody studied him. He, too, wore the same clothes as yesterday, including the sky-blue cardigan under his peacoat. His face looked drawn, the skin under his eyes blue tinged. “Have you slept at all?” she asked.

“A bit of a kip on the sofa at Tam and Michael's. The dogs were glad to see me.”

Melody sank down on the edge of the hospital bed, her legs suddenly weak. “Have you seen Tam this morning? How is he?”

“I've just come from the Chelsea and Westminster. There's no change, really. He's still in critical care, and they're still monitoring his organ function. They say it's too early to tell how bad the damage is.”

“What about Michael and Louise?”

“Michael's finally convinced Louise to go home and get some rest. He's gone home, too, for a bit, to look after the dogs. And to make sure Louise does as she's told,” he added with a ghost of a smile.

“I don't envy him that,” Melody said, and earned another smile. She reached for her boots.

“They've released you, then?” asked Andy.

“I have to come back tonight for more blood work, but yes, I can go.”

“Let me take you home.” He straightened, as if a renewed sense of purpose had given him a much-needed boost.

Hating to disappoint him, Melody said, “I'm not going home. Duncan's going to want to debrief me.” She had a thought. “Can I shower and change at your place? I can go to Holborn from there.”

Tucked away behind the intersection of Oxford Street and Tottenham Court Road, Andy's building would surely fall victim to the Crossrail redevelopment scheme at some point. In fact, it surprised Melody that it hadn't already been condemned. Of the two rooms in his first-floor flat, the alleged bedroom served as a guitar workshop. The sitting room held a futon that Andy folded out into a bed at night. Most of the rest of the space seemed to be taken up by more guitars and amplifiers and Andy's large orange cat, Bert.

But in spite of the grubby building and cramped quarters, Melody had quickly come to prefer it to her own much nicer flat in Notting Hill. She slept there more often than she did at her own place, stocked a few things in the fridge, and had found space for enough odds and ends of clothing that she thought she could make herself presentable.

And she found that today, especially, she didn't want to go home alone.

“You don't seriously mean to go into work today, after what you've been through?” Andy said, frowning.

“It's my job,” Melody answered, as she had last night.

“But it's not your case.”

She thought of the smoke and the smell and the panicked faces of the mob she'd pushed her way through. She thought of the man burning before her eyes in what must have been unimaginable pain, of the cries of the injured, of the Good Samaritan who had helped her, of Tam.

“It is now.”

“Poor bugger.” Rashid Kaleem sat behind his desk in his tiny office at the back of the basement in the Royal London Hospital. Beneath his white lab coat, he wore one of his usual pathologist-humor T-shirts, this one more unsettling than most. Against a black background, the white bones of a rib cage were split down the middle. A stylized heart hung suspended outside the ribs, with the slogan
DON
'
T
LOSE
YOUR
HEART
beneath it.

“Rashid, you really should reconsider your sartorial choices,” Kincaid said, looking, as usual, for someplace to sit. Every surface in the room was covered with papers, books, or computer monitors. He settled for the edge of an overflowing filing cabinet.

“Really?” Rashid pulled out the front of the T-shirt and studied it. “I rather like this one. At any rate, your bloke in there would wish his ribs looked half as good.” He glanced up and nodded towards the postmortem lab down the hall.

Kincaid could smell it, always, as soon as he came into the basement—the pinch of chemicals at the back of the nose, and beneath that, the slightest sweet taint of death. He supposed Rashid was used to it.

“Want to see your bomber?” Rashid stood and shrugged out of the lab coat. Hanging it on a hook that protruded from one of his heavy-metal posters, he added, “Bloody cold down here. The coat adds an extra layer. And it makes me look important.”

“I suppose I can't say no, can I?”

“My description wouldn't do him justice. But you'll need full gear. And a respirator. Believe me, you don't want to smell him. And what's left of him is saturated in white phosphorus, so you don't want to risk contamination, either.”

They changed in the lab's anteroom, after which Kincaid followed Rashid into the lab proper. When he saw what lay on the table, he was very glad of the respirator.

The corpse looked worse than he remembered, perhaps because the removal of remnants of clothing had left exposed bone, perhaps because Rashid had bisected the chest and the fragments of rib looked much more obscene than the pristine white slivers on Rashid's T-shirt.

And because, in the aftermath of the chaos in the railway station, he hadn't realized that the corpse's hands were gone.

“I take it you are sure this is a male?” Kincaid asked. His voice sounded odd through the respirator.

“From the shape of the skull and what's left of the pelvic girdle, the height, and what was left of the shoes, yes. Ninety-nine percent, anyway.” Rashid's enunciation was perfect, even with the distortion from the respirator's mouthpiece. “My rough estimate is that he was a bit less than six feet tall, and was probably between twenty and thirty.”

“Helpful.” Kincaid didn't curb the sarcasm. “No distinguishing marks?”

The roll of Rashid's eyes was visible through his protective goggles. “Not bloody likely. And no fingerprints. Obviously.”

“Dental?”

Rashid shook his head. Moving closer to the body, he pointed with a gloved finger. “You can see he was holding the grenade at just about waist level when it went off. Maybe he had it in his pocket and took it out at the last minute. The blast traveled upwards, taking his hands, his chest, and most of his face. I doubt even a forensic odontologist could put much together from what's left of his teeth.”