A Killing of Angels (8 page)

‘How do you know what he was up to?’ Burns asked.

‘He told me he kept a laptop at work, so he could arrange things without Marjorie finding out.’

The butler arrived with Morgan’s tea. ‘That took a while, Liam. I thought you’d forgotten me.’

‘Can’t get the staff,’ Burns said as the man hurried away.

‘Oh, he doesn’t work for me, at least not any more. Liam was my personal trainer, but now he’s my husband.’

Burns’s neutral expression didn’t flicker, but I wondered what he was thinking. Maybe he hadn’t met many men who lived in thrall to their wives.

‘Time’s up I’m afraid.’ Morgan looked regretful. Perhaps flirting with a gruff policeman was more fun than a film crew invading her home. ‘I’m glad you stopped by, Inspector. Leo was an old charmer, I still can’t believe it.’

There was a quaver in Morgan’s voice, and I thought her emotions might be defeating her, but her eye make-up stayed intact. Evidently it would take more than the death of a close friend to reduce her to tears. Burns looked stunned when we reached the car.

‘The poor sod, running round like a slave whenever she rings her little bell.’

‘Maybe he enjoys it,’ I replied. ‘He’s passive and she’s active. The ideal match. She’s right about the bank’s ex-employees though. Plenty of them must be nursing grievances.’

Burns nodded. ‘The bank are still stalling on handing over their employment records. If it carries on like this we’ll need SOCA to get involved.’

‘Who’re SOCA?’

‘The Serious Organised Crime Agency, commonly known as the heavy mob. They can open any door they like, if there’s enough evidence.’

When I closed the car door, Burns pulled away in a hurry, like he was performing an acceleration test for
Top Gear.
His emotional outburst at the station already seemed as unlikely as something I’d witnessed in a dream.

10

Bette Davis was glaring at me like I’d stolen her one chance of happiness. She was dressed in a lavish, bright red ball-gown, screaming abuse into her fiancé’s face. It was a relief to mute the sound when the phone rang. I recognised Lola’s giggle immediately.

‘I saw you flirting in the café, you reprobate.’

‘It’s called having a conversation, Lo. Grown-ups do it all the time.’

‘My arse. When are you seeing him again?’

‘I didn’t give him my number.’

‘Are you mad? The man’s perfect for you.’

I didn’t reply, because no reason on earth would have satisfied her. If I admitted that I fancied him, but he’d arrived too soon, she’d have grabbed me by the scruff of my neck and delivered me to his front door.

‘Jesus,’ Lola moaned. ‘You’ll die in a bedsit, surrounded by cats.’

Bette Davis looked keen to join the tirade, her expression even more hostile than before. I reminded Lola that she’d agreed to bring her toyboy out for a drink the next evening. My friend Yvette would be coming along too. I wanted to ask her a few questions, because she knew everything there was to know about the banking world. By the time Lola said goodbye, the excitement had drained from her voice. She seemed convinced that my romantic prospects had fallen to zero.

When the film finished I behaved virtuously for the rest of the afternoon, collecting Will’s dirty clothes from the floor in his room, cursing quietly to myself. A full ashtray was balanced precariously on the windowsill, used crockery piled by his bed. It was hard to remember the man who made his guests take their shoes off before admitting them to his Pimlico flat. Before his breakdown he could spend hours trawling Bond Street for a shirt in exactly the right shade of blue. Maybe the old Will still existed in a parallel world, holding down his big-money job and taking models to Annabel’s.

I heard his key in the lock as I loaded the washing machine. He looked so relaxed I couldn’t bring myself to tell him off.

‘I went to the market, Al.’ He beamed at me as he dumped a carrier bag full of vegetables on the counter. ‘I’ll make us a risotto.’

It was a struggle not to look amazed. ‘Brilliant. I’m just getting in the bath.’

The lavender oil gradually soaked into my pores. The details I’d heard about Jamie Wilcox were still bothering me. His son was too young to understand that his dad would never come home. It seemed incredible that Wilcox hadn’t even made it to his twenty-sixth birthday. I sat up and watched the bathwater disappear down the plughole. At least Will was making progress. A few days ago he could hardly drag himself off the settee, but now he was going out more, and keeping himself busy. Eventually I forced myself to get dry.

Will was hard at work in the kitchen. It was a miracle to see him cooking a meal by himself, for the first time in months, but his heels were clicking on the lino as he passed me the dish, making the whole table quiver. He delivered his bombshell before I’d eaten my first mouthful.

‘I’ll be leaving soon, Al.’ His pale eyes glittered. ‘I’m going to Brighton, then I’ll move on.’

‘Move on where?’

‘I don’t know yet. The clouds showed me I’d start travelling again; all I had to do was meet the right people.’ His face was open as a child’s, confident that his fate was written in the sky.

‘Who are these friends, Will? How long have you known them?’

‘A month or so, they’re from my NA group.’

‘That’s not long. You don’t need to rush, do you?’

My brother’s smile switched off, like a light bulb shattering. ‘I knew you’d be like this. Why don’t you want me to have fun?’

‘I do. But you don’t have to burn your bridges, that’s all.’

‘That’s crap.’ His expression was turning vicious. ‘Some bridges need to go up in flames.’

‘Okay,’ I said quietly. ‘I’m just suggesting you take your time.’

‘Stop controlling me, Al.’ His voice had risen to a shout. Then he leant over, his face a few inches from mine. ‘Your trouble is, you wouldn’t know happiness if it smacked you in the face.’

Will reached out to grab his stick, knocking his glass of water to the floor. The shattering sound was followed by the slam of the front door. Maybe I should have chased after him, but anger had paralysed me. I’d spent years carrying him through crisis after crisis, yet he’d flung everything back in my face. It made me realise how people commit acts of violence; the mist that drops down before you stab or shoot someone. All I could do was wait for it to pass, which gave me time to take a long hard look at myself. It worried me that my anger could still erupt at any minute. How could I help my patients when it was so hard to govern my emotions? Months of worrying about Will and going back to work before I was fully recovered had taken their toll. Most of the time I felt like an automaton, my emotions so blunted it was hard to empathise. I hadn’t shed a tear since my release from hospital, but on the few occasions when my feelings surfaced, they were too powerful to contain. I drew in a deep breath and did my best not to panic.

The evening sun was still glowing, but it felt like the walls of the flat were closing in on me, so I hauled my bike downstairs without thinking of a destination. My muscles were fuelled with enough nervous energy to race to Dover and back without stopping. I headed west towards the City. The Square Mile’s an ideal place to cycle at night, because it’s a ghost town. Three hundred thousand workers flood in every day, but hardly anyone lives there. Streets lined with banks and insurance offices hold their breath, until the rush hour starts their lifeblood pumping again. The Bank of England looked like a fortress, guarded by huge pillars − men in grey suits must have spent the weekend hunkered inside, arguing over the state of the economy. Every street name was advertising its wares: Ropemaker Street, Cloak Lane, Milk Street. Four hundred years ago, people would have known exactly where to buy what they needed, and the walk across town would have taken fifteen minutes. Now the urban sprawl had swallowed so many villages, the same journey would last for days.

I turned right on Princes Street, then carried on to Angel Court. The passageway opened onto a deserted square, and the bank was lit up, pale as a ghost against the darkness. Two life-sized angels were guarding the entrance. I leant my bike against the wall to study them more closely. Their stone faces were impassive, features softened by decades of rain. They looked as though they’d been uprooted from the gardens of a nunnery − relics from a time of greater benevolence, when building societies helped savers, instead of turning a profit for their shareholders. Gresham would have walked between the angels a thousand times without stopping to ask for a benediction, but Wilcox was still new enough to be impressed by the Angel Bank’s façade. I felt certain that the clean exterior was only skin deep. Will’s experience had convinced me that there was a shortage of humanity in the banking world. No one cared if you quit your job, so long as the money kept rolling in. I wondered how many people had even noticed Jamie Wilcox’s absence. A few miles away, his fiancée would be in meltdown, while her son slept in his cot.

I turned my bike around, but I couldn’t face going home to scrape Will’s congealing risotto into the bin. Flashes of anger kept threatening to overwhelm me. Was I meant to be overjoyed that he’d found some other junkies to hook up with? Jamie Wilcox’s face had been so badly mutilated, they’d advised his wife not to identify him. His future had been stolen from him, yet Will seemed happy to abandon his in a single weekend. I set off again, standing on my pedals, racing in circles through the empty streets.

11

Dr Paul Gillick looked nothing like an expert on angels. I’d been expecting a thin-faced ascetic with a page-boy haircut, but he was a dead ringer for Santa Claus. He must have been close to seventy, with a thick white beard and a gentle smile. His office was in the basement at the National Gallery, but it had a celestial atmosphere, with hundreds of cherubim and seraphim covering the wall by his desk. Their round eyes fixed on me as I sat down. A committed atheist would have lasted thirty seconds before running screaming from the room.

‘I need a crash course on angels, please,’ I said.

He smiled at me. ‘How much do you already know?’

‘Very little, I’m afraid.’

He folded his hands across his ample stomach. ‘They’re a bit weighed down with social meaning, unfortunately. We call people angelic when they’re pure and unselfish, but in mythology they’re a mixed bunch.’ Dr Gillick glanced at me, as though he was afraid of dashing my hopes. ‘There’s a hierarchy of nine different kinds of angel. It goes all the way from the lowest hand-servants, up to the archangels, like Michael and Gabriel, and that’s where the problem starts.’

‘The problem?’

‘According to the Bible, God defeated one of the archangels in a battle and he was banished from heaven, taking a third of the angels with him. He and his followers became the fallen third.’

‘You’re talking about Satan?’

Dr Gillick smiled. ‘I prefer to think of him as a former angel.’

‘But the rest are sent to do good, aren’t they?’

He shook his head. ‘Not always. You’ve heard of avenging angels, haven’t you? They can start fires, release clouds of locusts on unbelievers, hand out all sorts of terrible punishments. They wreak havoc, basically.’ Dr Gillick looked apologetic, as if he was accountable for the angels’ poor behaviour.

‘Why would a killer be obsessed with them?’

He stared into the distance, fingers buried in his beard. ‘Because no human can win a fight against an angel. You could say they’re the original superheroes.’

‘Like Batman and Superman?’

‘Exactly. They can fly, but they can pass as ordinary mortals, and they punish wrongdoers.’

I handed Gillick the images that had been left at the crime scenes and he peered down at them.

‘At least he’s got taste,’ he murmured to himself. ‘
An Angel in Green
was painted by a pupil of Leonardo’s. Renaissance beauty doesn’t get much lovelier, does it?’ He shifted his attention to the second picture and frowned. ‘Now this is a different style altogether. It’s a close-up of an angel’s face, from a bigger painting by Guercino, done more than a century later.’

He showed me an illustration in a book on his desk. The picture was of two angels, looking down at the dead Christ. One of them was gazing at his wounds, as if she was trying to make sense of his death, but the other was inconsolable, eyes hidden by his bunched hands.

‘You can feel their despair, can’t you?’ Gillick glanced up at me.

I stared down at the two pictures the killer had left behind. The angel in green was an image of submission, head bowed over her violin, playing music to please her God. But the angels who stood beside Christ’s body seemed far more human. They looked like servants, dressed in rough clothes, with their sleeves rolled up, weeping for their dead master. I kept trying to analyse what the paintings told me about the mindset of the killer; he’d chosen an image of devotion, then one of grief. Maybe he’d been a loyal servant, but he’d been let down. Everything he believed in had been stripped away.

Gillick helped me for a while longer, running through a whistle-stop tour of religious iconography. I was about to thank him and leave when he rose from his chair.

‘Let me show you something by Spinello before you go,’ he said.

I followed him up four flights of stairs, and a painting of a battle scene stopped me in my tracks. A gang of angels was terrorising a crowd, daggers and spears raised above their heads. Black wings protruded from their shoulders, but the most disturbing thing was the ethereal calmness on their faces as they slaughtered their victims. At any minute it looked as if they might fly out of the canvas and hack us to death.

‘That’s the avenging angels, casting Lucifer’s followers from heaven.’ Gillick’s Santa Claus smile slipped from his face. ‘Enough to give you nightmares, aren’t they?’

Angels buzzed around my head while my bus headed south. Their perfect, expressionless faces floated in front of me, and it was easy to see why an intellectual killer could become obsessed. Their complexity was fascinating. They were capable of the most extreme forms of violence, yet they could show mercy and tenderness. Maybe the killer saw himself in the same role, handing out rough justice to every sinner who crossed his path, but treating his family with angelic kindness.