The Bug House (2 page)

‘Is it cool?’ Vos asks him. ‘Have I missed something? I’m genuinely baffled.’

Alex shrugs and digs his spoon into his bowl of cereal. ‘Speaks the man who buys his jeans from Asda.’

Vos stalks across to the sink and refills the kettle. ‘Yeah, well . . .’

‘And sits in a deckchair in his dressing gown,’ Alex continues. He picks up the remote and activates the DAB radio on the counter with a stabbing movement of his left hand. ‘
Like someone from a psychiatric unit
,’ he adds, sotto voce, for good measure.

Vos reaches over and yanks his son’s long, dark fringe. ‘You can get that cut as well, you bloody yob.’

They listen to the breakfast show until the presenter’s relentlessly upbeat jabber is drowned out by the roar of the kettle; then Alex puts his empty bowl in the dishwasher and goes upstairs while Vos spoons Nescafé into his mug and wonders how anyone can possibly eat muesli when there is a café no more than two hundred yards down the road that serves the finest bacon rolls in Christendom. Then the kettle clicks off and he refills the mug, stirring the contents absently as he listens to a fragment of a story on the 8 a.m. news bulletin about a row over queues at the airport – and he wonders, as he always does, what is
really
going on today, and what grim human drama has unfolded while the city slept.

*   *   *

In the bathroom, Vos stares at his face in the mirror. It is not a pleasant sight. He has clearly slept for several hours with his right cheek hard against the orthopaedic pillow, so that the loose skin around the eye has rippled upwards like a Shar Pei’s in a wind tunnel. When he opens his mouth and sticks out his tongue, it’s threadbare and there are hatched fissures at the tip – the result, the dentist says, of age, like the incipient gum disease festering between his increasingly snaggled teeth.

But then he can’t blame it all on age and decrepitude. The layer of khaki slime on his tongue is pretty much all down to the whisky he drank last night; the ivory hue to his teeth he can blame on excessive smoking. Yet it wasn’t a heavy one – three or four glasses of Grouse and a couple of Café Crème cigars – and what with the Astroturf against the soles of his bare feet and the view out over the marina, it had been a very pleasant evening, thank you very much.

‘
Dad!
’

‘What?’

‘Your phone’s ringing.’

‘Well answer it.’

‘What do I say?’

‘Try “Hello”. Then tell whoever it is I’ll call them back in five minutes.’

Naked, he steps heavily into the shower. Every movement he makes seems to be heavy these days. Nimbleness is a thing of the past. He has not been lithe for about twenty years. OK, maybe it was a couple more than three or four glasses of Grouse. And he’ll have to check the crushed butts in the tin lid to confirm the number of mini-cigars he puffed his way through during the course of the evening, although judging by the tightness in his chest and his stinking fingers and hair, he’d guess it was all of them. The scalding water drums against his head.
Café Crème cigars
, he thinks.
The last refuge of a scoundrel trying to quit cigarettes
.

Downstairs, Alex is teasing his hair in the hall mirror and staring ruefully at a swatch of acne that has materialized on his cheeks. He is, thinks Vos, the very picture of a gawky teenager.
How the hell has he got so tall? When the hell did he get to be sixteen?

‘I’m off,’ Alex says, swinging his haversack over one skinny shoulder and heading for the door.

‘Who was it?’

‘Uh?’

‘On the phone.’

‘Someone from work, I think. Can you call them back.’

‘Did they give a
name
?’

‘Dunno. It was a woman, though.’

‘Superintendent Anderson?’

‘Nah.’

‘Bernice Seagram?’

‘Yeah. That was it. Look, I got to go.’

‘Done your homework?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Got an apple for teacher?’

‘Er, no.’

‘I don’t know what’s happened to this country,’ Vos says. ‘No respect.’

Alex shakes his head sorrowfully. ‘Tragic, old man,’ he says. ‘Truly tragic.’

Vos watches him go and winces as the front door slams behind him.
The hell of adolescence
. At least the next logical step is rebellion. This, Vos thinks, will be easier to deal with. Right now Alex is a cerebral kid with a sweet nature, but sometimes his almost supernatural placidity gives Vos the creeps. When Vos was sixteen years old he’d already laid his feckless wife-beater of a father on his back and warned him that if he ever came back, he’d kill him. And while he would never in a million years want Alex to end up like him, Vos thinks it would be nice to see just a molecule of his own DNA making a fleeting bid for recognition. Alex’s mother walked out six years ago, but in many ways Vos sees her every day of his life.

He picks up his mobile from the kitchen counter and punches in the number of Acting DS Seagram, who answers on the second ring.

‘You ever hear of a Newcastle United player called Enrico Cabaljo, boss?’ Seagram says.

‘The No-Goal Wonder from Venezuela? What about him?’

‘I’m standing in his back garden.’

Enrico Cabaljo cost £10 million from Caracas FC and failed to find the net in twenty-five starts. He is currently on loan to a team in Italy while a way is found to terminate his £120,000-a-week contract. Meanwhile his £2 million house stands empty, the security gates locked except on Monday mornings, when the gardener turns up to cut the grass, tend the flowerbeds and check there are no dead koi carp floating belly-up in the pond.

It was the gardener who found the body.

The house is situated on the outskirts of Stannington, a village fifteen miles north of Newcastle populated mainly by lawyers, stockbrokers and other wealthy commuters. Today they have been obliged to find an alternative way to work, because the narrow road through their adopted village has been blocked off at either end by a clot of police patrol cars, emergency vehicles and cordon tape.

Vos abandons his car outside the village hall, walks towards the flashing lights, ducks under the flapping tape and picks his way through the uniforms and white-suited Crime Scene Investigators to the gates of Enrico Cabaljo’s house. Here he pauses to slip on a pair of polythene overshoes and a paper suit and continues up the long gravel path and round the side of the house to the garden, where DC Mayson Calvert is emerging from a white protective tent that has been erected on the lawn like the marquee for a summer drinks party. Calvert has horn-rimmed glasses perched on a beaky nose, and his suit hangs from his thin frame like a sloughed skin.

‘Extraordinary,’ he says, blinking as if he has just witnessed a particularly awe-inspiring chemical reaction, so lost in thought he does not recognize Vos at first. ‘Morning, boss,’ he says.

‘Where’s Bernice?’

‘She’s ah—’

Seagram’s voice comes through the doorway of the tent. ‘In here, boss.’

At thirty-six, Bernice Seagram is the most experienced of the junior detectives on the squad and the obvious choice to step into Entwistle’s shoes. Indeed there are some who wonder why she hasn’t already been promoted, if maybe she lacks the ambition required to move up the ranks in CID. But they don’t appreciate that if that happened, Seagram would have to leave the squad – and while ambition is one thing, loyalty is another. The only reason Seagram would ever leave Vos’s squad is if Vos told her to.

She is a squat woman with short, spiky hair who favours dark eyeliner and just a hint of lipstick. She is also an inveterate smoker, and you can always find her at the end of a trail of menthol butts smudged with plum-coloured Revlon. Right now she is standing with a knot of CSIs, staring down at the body of a man lying on the grass.

Or at least what remains of the body.

The man is mid-thirties, with a Middle Eastern appearance, wearing a white shirt and grey chinos. He is lying on his back with his right arm and leg splayed out; his other arm is jammed in tight against the left side of his ribcage and sternum, which in turn have been crushed almost flat, like a collapsed concertina. His left leg is missing, torn away at the hip.

‘He’s not a Venezuelan footballer, is he?’ Vos says, peering at the dead man’s face, which, considering the catastrophic damage to the rest of his body, seems remarkably intact. Peaceful, almost.

‘We don’t know who he is, boss,’ says Seagram. ‘The gardener found him shortly after seven this morning when he opened up.’

‘No ID?’

‘No.’

‘And what about that?’ Vos says. About six feet away from the body, two of the CSIs are hunkered down with a tape measure, calculating the dimensions of a lozenge-shaped divot in the lawn.

Seagram shrugs. ‘Difficult to be certain, boss – but it looks like that’s where he landed.’

One of the CSIs stands up from the hole and comes across. His name is Gordon Watson and he is the head of the Crime Scene Investigation team. He nods a rueful greeting to Vos, then pushes back his elasticated hood and runs a hand through his brush-like silver hair.

‘Hell of a way to start the week, Theo,’ he says briskly.

‘When is it not, Gordon?’ Vos says. ‘So what do you think?’

‘We’ll have to do the sums, but judging by the depth of the impact crater I’d say our friend wasn’t wearing a parachute.’

Vos looks at Watson and then Seagram and then back again. ‘You’re telling me he just fell out of the sky?’

Watson shrugs. ‘I don’t know
what
I’m telling you. All I know is what I can see – and that’s a bloody great impact crater and a body with injuries that would appear consistent with a fall from a great height.’

Vos looks from the crater to the body. He frowns. ‘Have you moved him, Gordon?’

‘That’s how far he bounced,’ Watson says. ‘Two solid weeks of rain, the ground’s like a sponge.’

‘Where’s his other leg?’

‘Still looking.’

There’s a sudden rumble and a shimmering pulse of metallic noise, and two hundred yards away, beyond the trees at the end of the garden, a high-speed train explodes into view. Everyone in the garden stops to watch the carriages racing past and then, just when it seems it will go on forever, the train has gone.

Vos hunkers down next to the body. ‘If he did fall out of a plane, how fast would he have been travelling when he hit the ground?’

‘Terminal velocity of a falling body is between 120 and 125 mph,’ Watson says. ‘Look on the bright side – he could have landed in a built-up area. But these footballers love their privacy.’

‘Every cloud, eh, Gordon?’ says Vos.

Maybe it is prolonged exposure to nature’s relentless cycle of life and death, but the gardener who found the body does not seem terribly traumatized by his discovery. In fact he seems more concerned by the unsightly hole in his pristine lawn, and by the army of police and forensic officers trampling all over his flowerbeds.

‘Do you live locally, Mr Souter?’

The old man swivels his eyes beneath the brim of his tweed cap and fixes them on DC Phil Huggins. His lips remain clamped around a needle-thin roll-up and he says nothing, but the implication is clear –
do I look like the sort of person who could afford to live locally?

The gardener’s blue Ford panel van is parked in front of the house. Huggins has already checked it for obvious bloodstains or anything else that might indicate it was involved, and forensics will want to do the same, even though the idea that the old man transported the body here, dug an impact crater, then called the police, is patently ridiculous. But at this stage it’s all about going through the motions and nobody, least of all Huggins, wants to be the one who overlooks the vital piece of evidence just because it’s patently ridiculous.

In any case the reason they are all gathered here today is because it would appear a Middle Eastern guy fell out of the sky and landed in Enrico Cabaljo’s garden. Enrico Cabaljo, who cost Newcastle United £10 million and scored no goals in twenty-five appearances, whose every clumsy, pigeon-toed touch ended up being jeered by the 52,000 fans – including DC Phil Huggins – who had paid upwards of £500 for a season ticket to pay his £120,000-per-week wages.
Patently ridiculous? Don
’
t get me fucking started
, Huggins thinks.

The gardener is staring at him through his cigarette smoke.

‘I’ve got to get on,’ he says.

Huggins thanks him and puts his notebook in his pocket. He walks down to the gate and out onto the main road. He pulls out his mobile and speed-dials DC John Fallow, who is somewhere in the village coordinating the house-to-house inquiries with the local uniforms. Fallow informs him that if he turns left and walks for two hundred yards he will come to a village shop run by a sweet and enterprising old lady who is dishing out bacon rolls and mugs of tea. Huggins informs Fallow he will meet him there in five minutes.

Huggins is six feet five inches tall, and his long, loping stride takes him beyond the cordon tape to the shop in less than two. When Fallow arrives, Huggins is already sitting on a wall outside the shop munching cheerfully on a sandwich and talking football with a uniformed sergeant from Morpeth station and a reporter from the local newspaper who has got wind of some action on his patch. Fallow, who has already had a sandwich this morning, goes inside for another mug of tea. The old lady’s face lights up, but then he has that effect on all old ladies, who are immediately reminded of their own cherubic grandsons when they see him. At the age of thirty, Fallow curses his persistently boyish features – the smooth, glowing cheeks; the dimpled satsuma chin; the puppy fat that tenaciously obscures the lines of his lower jaw. He envies Huggins’s gothically pronounced cheekbones and Vos’s rugged, lived-in face. He draws the line at Mayson Calvert – who the fuck would want to look like Mayson Calvert? – yet even so he cannot help but think that even Mayson has the potential to look vaguely interesting if he did something with his hair, or got a more fashionable pair of glasses, or wore a suit that didn’t look like it had been handed down to him by his old history professor.