The Bug House (4 page)

The main problem is that it was pitch-black at 8.45 p.m.

Huggins and Fallow have commandeered the digital recordings from a company called Arctos SecuriVision, who have a lucrative contract to provide remote household security for all of Newcastle United’s millionaire superstars. The managing director is a former Special Branch detective who now drives an Aston Martin and lives in Darras Hall, where most of the millionaire footballers live.

‘Aren’t there any security lights at the back of the house?’ Huggins had asked the ex-detective.

‘Of course,’ he’d said. ‘But it’s all about sensor coverage. How far from the house did this bloke land?’

‘Fifty, sixty feet,’ said Fallow. ‘It’s a big garden.’

‘Well, you might be in luck. We fit all our properties with 150-watt Steinels with twelve-metre coverage. Then again, sometimes the agency turn them off to save electricity when the house is not being used. We warn them not to, but they’re fucking tight.’

In the Bug House, Huggins and Fallow are watching the TV screen. In their world it is now 8.35 p.m. on Sunday evening. All being well, ten minutes to touchdown.

‘Where were you at 8.35 p.m. on Sunday night, Johnny-boy?’ says Huggins, gazing blankly at the TV monitor in Vos’s office.

‘Having supper with Shirley, I expect.’

‘Finger food from M&S? Nice bottle of Pinot Grigio before you settled down for
Downton Abbey
?’

Fallow shrugs. ‘And I suppose you were jetting back from Monaco after your weekend on the yacht.’

‘Cap Ferrat, actually,’ says Huggins. He stretches his long frame and emits a roar. On the TV monitor the darkness suddenly explodes into light, and Fallow sits forward expectantly. A fox pauses for a moment, white-eyed in the full glare of the 150-watt Steinels, then pads insouciantly across the patio. A few moments later the light winks out again.

‘That’s what “Vos” means in Dutch, you know,’ Huggins says. ‘ “Fox”. Mayson told me.’

Fallow looks disbelieving. ‘The boss is Dutch?’

‘Obviously not. But we all have ancestors, Johnny-boy. “Fallow” is Norwegian for One Who Is Pussy-Whipped by His Wife, so make of that what you will.’

‘Fuck off,’ Fallow says.

They watch the darkened screen in silence for a while longer, then Huggins levers himself out of his chair and grabs a
pain au chocolat
from a bag on Vos’s coffee table.

‘Where the hell is everyone this morning?’ he says.

‘Bernice and the boss are down at the morgue,’ says Fallow.

‘And what about Mayson?’

‘Christ knows,’ says Fallow. ‘Probably discussing aerodynamics and terminal velocity with his pals at the university.’

Huggins goes to the glass window that makes up one wall of Vos’s office. ‘Who’s that with Una?’ he says through a mouthful of pastry.

Una Cattrall’s name is not on the portrait, but since she has run the squad’s outer office for as long as anyone can remember, she is therefore arguably its single most important component. She is a blowsy-looking woman with peroxide hair and a spray tan who is aged anywhere between forty and sixty. Huggins watches her walking across the deserted squad room with her familiar urgency, her brawny arms folded over her sizeable bosom. Behind her, having to half trot in order to keep up, is a slender, blonde-haired woman wearing a dark suit.

‘Una, my dear,’ says Huggins, holding open the door. ‘Top of the morning to you.’

‘I found this waif and stray wandering around outside,’ Una says in her forty-a-day rasp.

‘DC Kath Ptolemy,’ the blonde-haired woman says as Fallow’s eyes swivel towards her. ‘Are you DCI Vos?’

‘Do you have a name for him?’ asks Tunderman, the pathologist.

‘For the moment we’re sticking to Ahmed Doe,’ says Vos.

‘Very PC.’

‘Superintendent Anderson seems to think it’s got a ring to it. What have you got for me, Mr Tunderman?’

‘Well, the injuries are consistent with a substantial impact,’ Tunderman says. ‘However the damage to the skeletal structure and internal organs, while catastrophic, is not as severe as one might expect.’

Bernice Seagram is looking at the smashed body on the metal mortuary table. ‘What
would
you expect, Mr Tunderman?’

‘Almost
total
destruction,’ Tunderman says almost wistfully. ‘I’d guess our man was struck more of a glancing blow. You say he was suspended from a bridge?’

‘That’s right.’

‘Then it’s possible the air pressure from the approaching train moved him slightly. Or perhaps he wasn’t positioned centrally. Either way the bulk of the impact was down the left side. Hence the missing leg and the crush injuries to the ribcage and pelvis.’

‘But he would have died instantly,’ Seagram says.

‘Oh good Lord, yes. Although I can’t imagine his last moments alive were terribly pleasant.’

‘What’s to say it wasn’t suicide?’ Vos says.

Tunderman tugs at his top lip. ‘Nothing in theory. But I did find this.’

He grips the dead man’s head and moves it slightly to one side to expose two bluish marks on the right side of his neck, down near the shoulder.

‘Vampire bites?’ says Vos.

‘Taser marks,’ says Tunderman, who is not renowned for his sense of humour. ‘More specifically, stun-gun marks. The electrodes were applied directly to the skin rather than being attached to propelled darts.’

‘So he was immobilized?’

‘I should say so,’ Tunderman says. ‘You get 150,000 volts zapped into your neck, you aren’t going far.’

‘What about the body itself?’ Seagram asks. ‘Any distinguishing marks?’

‘Well it’s interesting you should say that, because as a matter of fact there is one very distinct anatomical anomaly. However I doubt very much the fall caused it, and I am absolutely certain it is not a natural defect.’

Seagram looks at Vos, who in turn looks at Tunderman as the pathologist carefully leans over the body and removes the sheet covering it.

‘Ouch,’ says Vos.

Outside the hospital, in the sheltered area reserved for recuperating patients to get some air, Seagram lights a menthol cigarette.

‘Give me one of those, will you?’ Vos says, grabbing one from the packet.

‘I thought you’d moved to mini-cigars, boss,’ Seagram says, passing him a lighter.

‘I’m smoking too many of them,’ Vos says. ‘I’m going back to poncing cigarettes off you.’ He lights the cigarette and draws the smoke down deep into his lungs. ‘Christ, it’s like sucking on a Polo mint.’

They smoke in silence together for a while. Then Seagram says: ‘Fuck me, somebody branded his
balls
?’

‘Don’t tell Huggins. He’ll be blaming it on militant feminists.’

‘I don’t know any militant feminist organizations with the initials “KK”.’

‘Me neither. But I’m no expert. All I know is, it must have been painful.’

‘Tunderman said it wasn’t recent. What do you think? Torture?’

‘Possibly. Maybe initiation?’

‘You think he went to public school? That could explain the stun gun to the neck as well. These Eton types are all fucking masochists.’

It’s meant as a joke, but Vos says nothing. He is gazing at a young man in a wheelchair being pushed lethargically around a small maze of bushes by a porter who looks like he would much rather be doing something else – and Seagram knows he is thinking about Vic Entwistle. His consigliere. Lying in a hospital bed with a bullet in his spine and unlikely to walk again.

‘You want another ciggie, boss?’

‘No thanks,’ Vos says. ‘Let’s get back.’

‘Ptolemy?’ Huggins says. ‘What sort of name is that?’

‘Greek Cypriot.’

Fallow looks at her in surprise. Her green eyes and pale, freckled complexion suggest Celtic ancestry, even if her accent is unadulterated Cumbrian.

‘My husband’s family are from Famagusta. He always said that by marrying him I would stand out from the crowd.’

‘He was right.’

‘So what does he do,’ Fallow says. ‘Your husband?’

‘Long-distance lorry driver.’

‘Must be hard.’

‘We get by,’ Ptolemy says.

‘How long have you been married?’ says Huggins.

‘Two years.’

‘And how old are you?’

‘Twenty-four. Is this an interrogation?’

‘We’re just wondering what the fuck you’re doing here, to be honest.’

She looks at Huggins blankly. ‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean, you’ve got a cushy number up there in – Alnwick, is it? Rounding up red-diesel thieves and sheep rustlers? Investigating burglaries at the golf club? Stick around long enough and you’ll be a DI before you’re thirty, a regular Sunday evening TV detective. Why the hell would you want to come here? To the Bug House?’

Ptolemy fixes him with her pale eyes. ‘It wasn’t my decision,’ she says.

‘You didn’t put in a transfer request?’

‘The first I knew about it was when Detective Superintendent Anderson said I was being seconded.’

Huggins and Fallow look at each other.

‘Christ, the boss is going to love that,’ Fallow says.

Ptolemy is about to speak when her attention is caught by something on the TV screen. ‘Bloody hell,’ she says. ‘Rewind that.’

Fallow, who along with Huggins was too busy interrogating the new recruit to pay attention to the screen, grabs the remote and scrolls back a few seconds.

‘There!’ Ptolemy says, pointing at the screen.

As she speaks, the darkness is illuminated as something moves with great speed in the periphery of the picture – and suddenly, as if by some cinematic trick or time-lapse photography, there is a body lying on the lawn.

Ahmed Doe has landed. In the world of Huggins and Fallow, it is 8.47 p.m. on Sunday evening.

There is a fly in the window of the site office Portakabin bashing itself drunkenly against the plastic pane with a
tok-tok-tok
sound. Delon Wombwell stands poised beside it, his rolled-up newspaper raised in a white-knuckled fist, the red point of his tongue poking from his mouth.

Tok-tok-tok
.

WHUP!

Delon brings the newspaper down onto the pane. The fly drops to the sill and spins spastically on its back.

WHUP! WHUP! WHUP!

‘Fuck’s sake, Delon,’ Philliskirk says irritably. ‘I think it’s dead.’ He is sitting in the far corner of the rectangular box, his tin of rolling tobacco open on the table in front of him. Through the window behind him, a huge metal claw plunges into a stack of written-off cars and closes inexorably around the shell of a smashed-up Renault.

Delon peers at the business end of his newspaper. The fly is smeared across the newsprint like black and red marmalade. Its limbs and wings are crushed into tiny colons, commas and full stops.

‘Fucking bastard,’ Delon remarks. He wipes the newspaper on his trousers and throws it on the floor.

‘Where the fuck is Tiernan?’ Philliskirk says.

‘He’s here.’

Severin, standing at the window, watches a stocky, well-dressed man with white hair climb out of a dark-blue Range Rover and make his way across the yard. He says nothing. A moment later Tiernan stands in the doorway, one hand jabbed into the pocket of his expensive leather jacket, the other holding a slim case containing a laptop computer.

‘Afternoon, gentlemen,’ he says briskly.

Delon jumps. Philliskirk reaches for his tobacco tin and papers and begins methodically constructing a cigarette.

Severin points at his watch. ‘You’re late.’

‘You’re not the only crew I’ve got,’ says Tiernan with a grin. ‘But if you’d like to make something of it, I’m all ears.’

Dust and curlicues of cigarette smoke are caught in the bare strip light. The only sound is the squeal and crash of metal being mangled.

‘Thought not,’ Tiernan says. ‘So what have you got for me, boys? If you’re in a hurry, I don’t want to keep you.’

Severin pulls a memory stick from the back pocket of his jeans. Mr Tiernan opens the laptop and plugs the attachment into a USB port on the side. The display on the screen is reflected in the lenses of his glasses as he scrolls down.

‘Porsche Cayenne. Very good, boys,’ he says presently. ‘Very good indeed.’

Over by the door Delon, who has been holding his breath, lets it out noisily.

Tiernan closes the laptop and zips up the case. ‘There’ll be some good commission on this one all right, boys,’ he says.

‘When do you want it done?’ says Severin.

‘I’ll need to sort the paperwork,’ says Mr Tiernan. ‘I’ll let you know.’

At the door he pauses and stoops to pick up Delon’s discarded newspaper.

‘You read about this stiff they found in Enrico Cabaljo’s back garden?’ he says, unrolling the paper and flapping the front page at the four men. ‘I reckon they should sign him up. Got to be better than the midfield they’ve got at the moment.’

Vos and Seagram get back to the West End at midday, having spent a fruitless morning waiting for any sort of definitive forensic reports from the scene or DNA identification of the victim. All they have is the postmortem result, which does not answer the pressing questions that lie at the heart of the whole conundrum, namely who is Ahmed Doe? And why did someone tie him to a railway bridge?

On the way upstairs to the second floor, Vos’s phone rings.

‘Get the team ready in the meeting room,’ he tells Seagram, peering at the number on the screen. ‘I’ll see you there in a minute.’

When he eventually stalks onto the floor of the Bug House five minutes later, it seems to Seagram that Vos is in an even worse mood than before.
Who the hell was the call from?
she wonders.
The tax man?
What worries her is that any second now the boss’s black dog is going to start ripping out throats. As he heads across to the meeting room, she hurries across to intercept him.

‘Boss, the replacement is here,’ she says, careful not to say ‘the replacement for Entwistle’.

He stops and looks down at her. ‘Yes,’ he says. ‘I know.’

The meeting room is a cosy little annexe separated from the squad room by a partition wall. Its focal point is a large pull-down screen for the overhead projector, but as no one has ever figured out how the projector works in over ten years, the screen is used instead as an oversized memo board and is scarred with pinholes, Sellotape marks and crusts of Blu-tack from hundreds of different cases. Right now the board looks distinctly bare: a handful of assorted photographs from the scene, a map of the area around Stannington, a few desultory Post-it notes.