‘I don’t know,’ said Nightingale. ‘It was the same Old Man in 1914, I can tell you that for certain.’
‘How do you know?’
Nightingale hesitated, then he said, ‘I’m not quite as young as I look.’
Myphonerang. I really wanted to ignore it but the tune was ‘That’s Not My Name’， which meant it was Lesley. When I answered she wanted to know where the hell we were. I told her we were just going through Reading.
‘There’s been another one,’ she said.
‘How bad?’
‘Really bad,’ she said.
I put the spinner on the roof as Nightingale put his foot down and we topped 120mph back into London with the setting sun behind us.
There were three appliances parked up in Charing Cross Road, and the traffic was backing up as far as Parliament Square and the Euston Road. We arrived at St Martin’s Court to the smell of smoke and the chatter and squawk of emergency radios. Lesley met us at the tape line and handed us bunny suits. I could see while we were changing that half of J. Sheekey’s frontage had been burned out, and that there were three forensic evidence tents set up in the alley. Three bodies, at least.
‘How many inside?’ asked Nightingale.
‘None,’ said Lesley. ‘They all went out the back emergency doors – minor injuries only.’
‘Something to be thankful for,’ said Nightingale. ‘You’re sure this is our case?’
Lesley nodded and led us over to the first tent. Inside we found that Dr Walid had got there before us and was crouched beside the body of a man dressed in the distinctive saffron robes of a Hare Krishna devotee. The body lay on its back where he’d fallen, legs straight, arms stretched out to either side as if he’d participated in one of those trust-building exercises where you let yourself fall backwards – only no one had been there to catch him. His face was the same bloody ruin as Coopertown’s and the cycle courier’s had been.
That answered that question.
‘That’s not the worst of it,’ she said, and beckoned us over to the second tent. This one had two bodies. The first was a dark-skinned man in a black frock coat, his hair stuck up in clumps and stiff with blood. He’d been hit hard enough to crack open the skull and expose a section of his brain. The second body was another devotee of Krishna. A random good samaritan had tried to help by putting him in the recovery position, but with his face split open the gesture had been futile.
I was aware of a thudding in my ears and a shortness of breath. Blood, presumably from the blow struck to the other man, had splattered the devotee’s robes and made a bloody tie-dye pattern on the orange cloth. The interior of the forensic tent was stifling, and I started sweating inside my bunny suit. Nightingale asked a question but I didn’t really hear Lesley’s answer. I stepped outside the tent, gagged once, swallowed it and stumbled to the tape line where, to my own amazement, I managed to keep my Battenberg cake down.
I wiped my mouth on the cold plastic sleeve of the bunny suit and leaned against the wall. Opposite me was a poster for the No?l Coward Theatre where they were showing a farce called Down With Kickers!.
Two victims with their faces half off meant that the ‘possession’ had affected two individuals at the same time. There was one more tent left. I asked myself, how much worse could that be?
Stupid question.
The third body was seated with its legs crossed but like a child, not a yogi for all that his hands were resting on his knees palm upwards. His robes were drenched in blood and ribbons of red ropey stuff covered his shoulders and upper arms. His head was completely gone, leaving a ragged stump of a neck. There was a flash of white buried amid the torn muscle – I assumed it was his spine.
Seawoll had been waiting for us in the tent. He grunted when Lesley led us in. ‘Somebody’s just taking the piss now.’
‘It’s escalating,’ I said.
Nightingale gave me a sharp look but said nothing.
‘But what’s escalating?’ asked Lesley. ‘And why can’t you stop it?’
‘Because, Constable,’ said Nightingale coldly. ‘We don’t know what it is.’
There were plenty of witnesses and suspects, and people who were helping the police with their inquiries. We paired off to conduct the interviews as fast as possible. I worked with Seawoll while Nightingale paired with Lesley. That way there’d be someone in the room who could spot a vestigium when it slapped him in the face. Sergeant Stephanopoulos handled the collecting of physical evidence and collating the CCTV coverage.