The Sixth Soul (2 page)

On the landing at the top of the stairs, DC Eleanor Willis, pale and red-haired, used a pair of long-handled tweezers to drop a hypodermic needle into a transparent evidence bag and then peered
into it.

‘There’s blood on the needle,’ she said to Rosen as he passed.

‘But it won’t be his,’ he replied.

DS Craig Parker was on his knees, cutting the thick, green carpet with a Stanley knife where it met the skirting board at the bathroom door. The carpet showed a fresh drag mark from the bathroom
towards the top of the stairs. Parker pointed this out to Rosen.

‘He got her in the bathroom,’ he said. ‘Dragged her to the stairs.’

‘I love the sound,’ replied Rosen, ‘of a Geordie accent on a cold, gloomy morning.’

‘And a very good morning to you, you cheerless Cockney git.’ Parker peered at Rosen above his mask and added, ‘Are you OK, David?’

Rosen stooped. ‘Come here often, Craig?’

By way of answer, Parker smiled sadly. ‘We can’t find a point of forced entry.’

Craig Parker’s face was the human equivalent of a bloodhound’s. His weary eyes had seen enough and the bags underneath betrayed a tiredness that was three months short of retirement
after thirty years in the Met.

‘Eleanor!’ Parker got to his feet slowly as his assistant appeared from the bedroom and handed the bagged hypodermic to Rosen.

There was a little fluid left in the chamber. ‘Pentothal, no doubt. Herod’s anaesthetic of choice. The hypo must’ve fallen out as he got her out of the house,’ said
Rosen.

Willis stood opposite Parker. On the count of three they raised the piece of carpet in a single clean lift and carried it into the nearest bedroom, an empty space at the back of the house.

‘Anything in the bedrooms?’ asked Rosen.

‘Nothing so far.’
Nothing
was certain;
so far
was full of hidden promise.

‘Craig, how long to go through the whole scene: house, gardens, street outside?’

‘Three days.’ Parker’s voice echoed in the back room.

‘If the pattern stays the same,’ said Rosen, ‘she’ll be dead by then. No sign of forced entry, you say?’

‘First thing we looked for. Nothing.’

‘Next door, number 24?’

‘No one lives there,’ Willis observed, heading to the bathroom, ‘judging by the back garden, the state of the windows and the paintwork outside.’

By contrast, the interior window frames of the bathroom of number 22 were sharp, their brilliant whiteness highlighted as Willis dusted them with dark fingerprint powder.

Rosen looked around at the closed bedroom doors. ‘Which one’s the baby’s room?’

Willis pointed with the bristles of her fingerprint brush.

Being in a nursery made for a baby who would probably never sleep in there, or play, or cry, or breathe between its cloud-daubed walls, filled Rosen with utter sorrow. His failure to do anything
so far to stop what was happening was almost unbearable.

Rosen caught the ghostly outline of his reflection in the glass of the window, the boy-like tangle of black curly hair contradicting the jumbled network of wrinkles and shadows on his pale
face.

He looked out on the neat suburban road, at the desirable cars and the enviable houses, and focussed on DC Robert Harrison standing behind Carol Bellwood as she tried to talk to Phillip Caton.
His gaze wandered.

The trees in the street were tall and broad and narrowly spaced apart.

It was a discreet road, a secluded avenue, a nice place to
live
.

Rosen called Craig Parker, who joined him at the bedroom window.

‘Can you see across the street through the trees? Can you?’ asked Rosen.

‘No, I can’t see much, David,’ replied Parker.

‘And that’s exactly what he banked on. I’m going into number 24.’
I want to get out of here.

‘Why?’ asked Parker.

‘No forced sign of entry. No pregnant woman in London’s going to open her front door in the dead of night, not given the current climate, not given what’s happened. I’m
going next door. I’m looking for a point of entry.’

‘David, man, how could he get into number 22 through number 24—’

Rosen held up a hand. ‘I need to check.’

When Rosen reached the street he noticed that, while he’d been inside number 22, Caton had turned a curious shade of yellow, the colour of wax. A terrible idea crossed Rosen’s mind.
He hoped Caton’s anguish would not be compounded by having made an easy mistake as he left the house to go to the job.

On your way out
, Rosen wondered,
in the dead of night, did you accidentally leave the front door open?

E
ach panel in the fence between numbers 22 and 24 Brantwood Road was old but perfectly intact. The decision to widen out the crime scene came from
a combination of experience and instinct. Back in ’99, Rosen had been at a scene of a crime where there was no evidence of forced entry, but it had become evident that the killer had entered
through a vent between adjoining flats.

He looked up at the roof of number 24: a patchwork of slipped and missing slates, making the house and loft space vulnerable to the elements.

He glanced at his watch. Eight o’clock. Time was flying. A whole hour had passed in what felt like a minute.

To the front of the property, a locked garage attached to the side of number 24 blocked his way to the back garden. Taking hold of the top of the fence separating numbers 22 and 24, he steadied
his foot on the thick knot of a shrub and hauled himself over. The fence panels creaked under his weight as he jumped down into the garden next door.

He watched his feet. The ground was littered with the faeces of several types of beast. At eye level and within an arm’s length, a bird flew out of a bush.

‘All right in there, David?’ Bellwood’s voice came from the garden of number 22.

He called back, ‘Yes!’ but wasn’t sure that this was the truth.

Rosen turned to the sound of Bellwood climbing over the fence. She jumped down gracefully into the garden of number 24.

A bin, long overturned by some fox or other scavenger, lay on its side near the house. The rubbish – food packaging and newspapers showing headlines and sporting triumphs and disasters
from eighteen months ago – lay matted on the earth leading to the back door.

Rosen felt his pulse quicken as he got closer to the door. He looked at his watch again: it was a few seconds past eight. He thought of his wife, Sarah, and her appointment with their GP. Time
was marching on. He wanted to go with her, he’d promised he would and then this . . . Herod’s fifth miserable excursion into other people’s lives.

Something lurched inside him. Every nerve was made jagged by what he saw.

The back door of number 24 was slightly open, a glass panel in the door absent from its frame, cleanly removed.

Someone had gone to the trouble of not bashing the door down, not attracting the attention of the neighbours. Rosen eyed the area around the missing panel. It was a cautious job well done.

‘Carol?’

‘Yes?’

‘Can we rule the husband out at the moment?’

‘His story held up. I called his client. He was in Knightsbridge, as he said.’

‘There’s been a break-in. Who’s here from the team now?’

‘Harrison’s on float, DS Gold is with Caton, Corrigan and Feldman are here and knocking on the neighbours’ doors. David?’

‘Yes?’

‘Harrison’s a liability.’

‘What did he do?’

‘Just when you were going into number 22, Caton said,
Do you think Herod’s got her?
And Harrison chimes in,
It looks like that, yeah.
Caton went into hysterics. I
don’t like him, David.’

‘I understand.’ It explained Caton’s sudden sobbing fit. ‘Did Caton say anything – anything useful?’

‘He kept asking if we knew what Herod was doing with the foetuses.’

‘And you told him what?’

‘We didn’t know for sure. I avoided the forensic psychologist’s word
trophy
. Do you buy that rather obvious speculation, David?’

‘No,’ said Rosen. Unable to offer an alternative theory about the absent babies, he went for something practical. ‘Go and call for a second Scientific Support team for number
24.’

Using the tip of the little finger of his left hand, he pushed the door open at its top right-hand corner.

It was an old lady’s house.

There was an aura, as if someone had died there long ago, undisturbed by compassion or duty, hidden in the muffled light.

——

I
N JUST UNDER
twenty minutes, a second Scientific Support team had arrived, pulled in from Shepherd’s Bush. Silently and efficiently, they had
plated the main passageways from the back door of number 24 to the front door, the stairs and each of the main doorways, upstairs and down.

As the second officer came down the stairs, he said to Rosen, ‘There’s a cadaver in the bed, main bedroom, front of the house. It’s been there some time. We didn’t touch
it.’ The team looked in a hurry to leave. ‘We really need to talk with DS Parker next door, sort out a game plan.’

The Scientific Support officers left. Rosen, alone now, felt oppressed. Something of the earth, something foetid, perhaps a fungus, was growing in the fabric of the house, feeding on the wood
its spores burrowed into, irrigated by the damp that seemed like an indoor weather system unique to number 24.

Where were her relatives? A five-bedroom semi in Brantwood Road added up to a big inheritance. Where were the claimants to this legacy? Why had no one attempted to even clear the house, let
alone sell it?

He imagined his wife Sarah, old and alone, dying, and her death going unnoticed, their home crumbling, broken into by some lunatic, then explored by policemen desperate for clues.

He tried the light switch but the power was dead. As he moved further into the house, it became dimmer still. The red-flocked wallpaper, turning green and brown from the damp, seemed to be
dissolving into the deepening shadow.

Persian rugs shifted under Rosen’s feet, reminding him of the uneasy sensation of the bogus floors of a fairground funhouse. But he could see no physical sign of an intruder, just an old
lady’s world frozen in time. Somewhere else, in another room, a well-made mechanical clock still ticked, a heartbeat to the house.

A patch of yellow light appeared on the wall, its source directly behind him. Rosen span round and Carol Bellwood stepped from the shadows.

He was pleased that the newest member of the team was backing him up.

‘How’s Caton holding up?’ asked Rosen.

‘Not good, but we’re done with him for now.’

As they ascended the stairs, years of stale air formed a backdrop to dust motes that shimmied in the torchlight.

Rosen stopped near the top. Every door upstairs was closed, except one.

He walked towards the open bathroom door.

Weary light filtered into the gloom through the frosted glass.

‘David? Are you OK, David?’

He was staring, lost in thought, looking directly up at the ceiling, at the wooden door to the loft space.

‘Let’s check the bedrooms,’ he said.

——

I
N THE MAIN
bedroom, the top of a human head was visible on the pillow. The quilt on the bed was raised, giving the impression of a relief map, with the
outline below that of a human body. Rosen tugged the edge of the quilt but it was stuck to the sheet on the mattress. When he pulled a little harder there was a tearing sound, cloth from cloth,
surface from surface. Bellwood entered behind him, her torchlight illuminating what was left of the body.

I’m sorry
, thought Rosen.
I’m sorry you’ve been left here without anyone to mourn you or mark your passing.

She lay foetal in death, a frail skeleton, knees tucked to elbows, carpals to teeth, her skull nestled on a clump of grey hair.

Rosen lowered the quilt.

Whatever had caused her death, she’d been left to rot into the bedding and dry out. The thought angered and saddened Rosen in equal proportions.

Tweed. There was a half-used bottle of Tweed perfume on the old lady’s dressing table and an ivory hairbrush in which a gathering of grey hairs remained for ever trapped in the network of
bristles. Her jewellery box was open, neatly arranged, undisturbed. On the dressing table next to it was a gold, heart-shaped locket. It was open. On one side of the heart, a picture of two
children, a teenage girl and a small boy; on the other side, a small lock of dark hair.

‘Who are you?’ Rosen asked the children in the locket.

‘And where are you now?’ Bellwood stroked the locket with her light.

‘What about the other bedrooms?’ asked Rosen.

‘All empty save the one next to this. Shall we?’

The room next door to the old lady’s room was a museum piece. A teenage girl’s room, early to mid-1970s,
Jackie
magazine open on the single bed, an early stereo system with
an RAK 45 record of Mud’s ‘Tiger Feet’, and posters on the wall of David Bowie as Ziggy Stardust and Paul Gadd as Gary Glitter.

‘I wonder?’ said Rosen, eyeing a framed photograph of a skinny thirteen-year-old girl. He picked up the frame, speculating as to what had become of her.

‘Maybe the old lady was hanging on to a moment in time, the girl grew up and—’

‘Maybe.’ He looked at the photo – the girl’s clothes, her blonde hair in a feather-cut, and figured it was around 1973. ‘She was a few years older than I was back
in 1973. Not that our paths would have crossed in a million years,’ said Rosen, wistfully.

‘How come?’ asked Bellwood.

‘ I grew up in Walthamstow. This kind of street, this neighbourhood, was beyond my dreams.’

Rosen was quiet for a long time as he stared at the girl’s picture. He sighed; the dusty air was thick with memory of a time before Carol Bellwood was born.

‘I had a daughter . . .’ Rosen stopped articulating the thought that had escaped unchecked from his mouth and averted his eyes from the bewilderment in Bellwood’s face. He
turned his mind away from the thought of Hannah, the baby who’d once slept in his arms, and raised his voice a little. ‘Come on, let’s crack on. I think I’ve seen a
precedent for this.’