The Babylon Rite Read online

  The victim was young, blond, and handsome: maybe twenty-five or thirty at most. He was lying supine on the floor near a large antique desk. A phone and a notepad sat on the desk, to the left of a laptop, which was lightly smeared with blood.

  Opposite the desk stood some speakers, and a vast black television: ultra-expensive kit.

  The face of the young Russian was slightly turned towards the desk, as if in his last moments he had tried, but failed, to make a desperate call. He was dressed in a neat blue shirt, probably bespoke, from Jermyn Street; and fashionable jeans – perhaps Armani. The new collection. The jeans were loosened at the top, half-unbuttoned.

  Ibsen, who cultivated a sincere interest in clothes, would have liked to give an opinion of the kid’s footwear, but that was impossible, as the cadaver had no feet.

  Someone had sliced off his feet. The raw stumps were an obscenity: the victim resembled a casualty of some industrial scythe. The body was also missing his right hand: blood had spurted from the severed wrist all over the rich Turkish carpet, making the rich red of the wool richer and purpler. The angle of the brutal amputations was unusual. Ibsen stopped to have a closer look, squinting, clutching his face mask to his mouth, and found there was even a deep grinning cut mark to the right side of the neck, as if the murderer had tried to slice off the head as well, but had given up. Perhaps the killer had got bored, or maybe the victim died of blood loss before the decapitation could be completed, rendering it pointless.

  Crouching by the body, Ibsen went through the PMI calculations. How long had the body been here? Forensics would strip the corpse, and check for livor mortis – pooling of the blood at the bottom of the body – and for rigor mortis, and algor mortis, and get a scientific answer; but Ibsen’s instinct told him Pathology’s first guess was good: this body was pretty fresh. You could smell the new blood. Twelve hours at most. That made the overheard violence, at one a.m., very likely the time of death.

  ‘He dragged himself in here?’ Ibsen gestured at the long, lurid smears of blood along the parquet floor.

  ‘Yes,’ said the SOC officer, Jonson. ‘Seems he was chopped up in the kitchen, then the killer dragged the body in here, or he dragged himself, trying to reach the phone.’

  ‘The feet and hand?’

  ‘Found ’em on the kitchen floor. Gone to Path.’

  Ibsen walked through the hallway into the white-and-steel kitchen. At the far end a set of French windows gave on to the lawn. The doors were open to the cold and the drizzle. Bleak, leafless trees bent over the vast lawns; a tennis court, padlocked shut for the winter, lay at the far end of the grounds.

  The streaks of blood stretched from the sitting room through the hallway into the kitchen to a larger pool of blood where the butchery must have been committed.

  Larkham came alongside.

  ‘Prints?’ asked Ibsen. ‘In the mud, the garden?’

  ‘Nothing yet, sir, but we have found … this. Incredibly.’

  Larkham was holding a clear plastic bag, inside which was a very large, viciously serrated Sabatier kitchen knife, smeared and gummed with blood. The murder weapon, without question.

  The DCI gazed at it in astonishment. ‘The killer just left this?’

  ‘Lying on the kitchen floor. By the fridge, sir. And look—’ With a pencil Larkham pointed to the black resin handle of the knife. Perfectly visible was a large red thumb print: a patent print. The lottery win of evidential police work.

  For the briefest moment, Ibsen felt like celebrating: this was so easy, a patent print, on the murder weapon, an open door to solving the case. But another second told him this was too easy. Way too easy. The door closed, revealing a darker truth. He regarded the puzzle, gazing at the fridge and the blood and the knife. What did he have? Something. Definitely something. He considered the missing right hand. The cut to the right of the neck. The left-hand thumb print on the handle. The strange oblique angle of the amputations themselves.

  Ibsen took out his own pen and pointed at the knife. ‘That’s not the killer’s print. I bet that’s the victim’s print.’

  Larkham’s face expressed wide and sincere puzzlement.

  ‘Don’t you see? The murderer has, so far as we can tell, left no other clues, no boot prints, no blatant trace evidence. A truly professional job, then, despite the torture … despite the butchery.’

  ‘So?’

  The French windows creaked in the cold wet wind, and blustered old dead leaves into the kitchen.

  ‘Would he just leave behind a murder weapon with a big fat print on it? No. So he discarded or ignored the knife for a reason. Because he must have known the print on the blade belonged to someone else. So it would provide no evidence against him.’

  ‘Ah …’

  ‘Now think about the corpse,’ Ibsen continued. ‘The slice to the neck was on the right, like someone left-handed, reaching around, trying to cut his own neck. This is a left-handed thumb print on the knife. Likewise, the cuts to the leg are distinctively angled, as if the severing blade was wielded in a particular direction. By someone crouching, doing it to himself.’

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘The kid was living here alone, right?’

  ‘Uh, yes, sir.’

  ‘Remember the desk. The notepad and the phone were to the left of the laptop. He’s left-handed. He did the amputations himself. Therefore my guess is … the thumb print is from the victim’s own hand.’

  Larkham stared moodily at the garden, at the grey enormous lawn. ‘That means, it means …’

  ‘Yes. That means the killer forced the victim. To cut off his own feet. And his own hand. And even to slice into his own neck. He kindly left the victim with one hand intact, his best left hand, so he could do this to himself. Check the corpse for prints: I wager the thumb print will match.’

  For the faintest second, the coolly ambitious Detective Sergeant Peter Larkham of New Scotland Yard looked as if he was going to be sick.

  9

  Morningside, Edinburgh

  Nina McLintock and Adam Blackwood halted at the corner of Springvalley Terrace. The night had cleared and it was now piercingly cold, with a keening wind off the Firth of Forth, and the street was wholly deserted. Glittery with silent frost.

  ‘It’s in that block there,’ Nina said. ‘Stepmother’s flat. He moved in with her a coupla years ago.’

  Adam followed her anxious steps, looking up at the severe windows as he went. The terrace comprised one of those sandstone tenements which in England would have been considered lower class, if they existed at all; in Scotland these large, sombre blocks of Victorian apartments had a posh ambience, especially here in Morningside, the upmarket inner suburb of Edinburgh.

  A burst of noise behind them – drinkers falling out of a shutting pub – hurried the two of them around the curving pavement to the front door of the tenement block.

  ‘How are we going to—’

  ‘I know where he kept his spare key. He was a bit of a lush. If you get home drunk a lot, you learn to hide a spare key.’

  Adam nodded. He could empathize with that, all right. He remembered his own days of drinking: the fights and the forgetfulness. Locked out of his home in Sydney. After Alicia.

  ‘Here.’ Nina thrust a hand through some railings, and scrabbled in the soil of a small front garden. ‘Just here, under the rosebush. Second rosebush on the right.’

  She rummaged under the dead roseless plant while Adam glanced up and down the street, increasingly fretful. This didn’t look good. Two people loitering on an empty street at one in the morning, digging in a stranger’s garden.

  He strove to repress his greater anxiety: the unnerving two-way logic of what he was doing. Either Nina was deluded and he was painfully wasting his time because he was so pathetically desperate for a story; or she was right, and Archie McLintock had been murdered. Which meant a murderer.

  ‘Quick!’ He could hear footsteps, somewhere. Round the curving corner, coming their way.

  �
��Got it.’ Nina stood, brandishing two very muddied keys.

  The footsteps were louder now, right behind them. It was one of the drinkers from the pub. Tall, shaven-headed, wearing a dark coat. The man abruptly paused, under a streetlamp, to light a cigarette, scratching a match into flame. Adam stared, even as he tried not to stare. There was something odd about the man’s hands, cupped around the cigarette: they were decorated with large tattoos. Tattoos of skulls. Was he really just a drinker? Or a murderer?

  The secret that can get you killed.

  This was nonsense; Adam calmed himself. Just a drinker …

  Flicking the match, exhaling smoke, the man continued, passing by. He gave them a fraction of a glance, and a trace of a boozy smile, as he loped on down the road.

  Adam and Nina stared at each other in the cold and frosted lamplight. She shook her head. ‘Come on.’

  Wiping the mud from the keys with the sleeve of her big anorak, Nina turned and paced to the front door. The first key slotted in; they stepped inside. The hall was dark and hushed with tragic silence, it felt like the shrouded hallway of someone who had recently died. Adam’s hand reflexively moved to the wall, but Nina shook her head and whispered, ‘No light switch.’ Instead she used the light on her mobile phone to guide them, warily, up four steep flights of stairs.

  Faint noises echoed. A soft Edinburgh voice floated up from somewhere; he heard a TV turned off. The muffled noises of posh tenement life.

  ‘37D.’ The effete beam of her mobile phone just picked out the number on the doorway and she lifted the second key to the Yale lock.

  Then a shrill voice from below sent a rush of schoolboy fear through Adam. As if he had been caught, in the most flagrant way, by a headmistress.

  ‘What is it? Who is it? I’ll call the police!’

  Light flooded the stairwell.

  ‘Crap,’ Nina said, very quietly. ‘It’s the landlady. Sophie Walker. Say nothing.’ She stepped to the banister and stared down. ‘Oh, God. Sophie, hello, I’m so sorry to scare you – we didn’t want to wake anyone – it’s just … you know …’

  The woman was briskly climbing the stairs. She was about fifty, with a hint of hippyishness: wearing a Greenpeace T-shirt under a thick purple cardigan, and supermarket jeans and sandals. Her stern face softened as she ascended.

  Because Nina had started to cry.

  It was probably an act, Adam reckoned, but if so it was a brilliant act. The grieving daughter of the beloved father. How could anyone object to Nina returning to her dead father’s apartment, no matter the unusual circumstances?

  ‘I know Rosalind is away, and this is a terrible intrusion,’ Nina sniffed. ‘I just wanted a few wee photos. Of my father. Please forgive me.’

  Sophie Walker crooned with sympathy as she came over and hugged Nina. ‘Oh please. Nina. Don’t you worry, please sweetheart. I’m so awfully sorry about what happened – and of course I understand.’ The landlady flickered a glance at Adam.

  Nina explained, her voice tremulous, ‘This is Adam. He’s … he’s a good friend who’s been helping me. Y’know, deal with this. But I know it’s late and this must appear crazy.’

  ‘I lost my own father last year, I entirely understand, it’s such a terrible thing – it always hits you more than you expect. The only reason I was so paranoid is because of the break-in. Before. But you know about that.’

  Nina lifted her face. And gently detached herself from the hug. ‘Yes. He told me, of course. Were you frightened?’

  ‘Not me, no! But he was so upset. You know they took all his notebooks, don’t you? His precious notebooks from his trip.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But why did he refuse to go the police? Very odd. And then of course that man – the argument – anyway that’s why I’m so paranoid.’

  ‘Which argument? There were lots, Sophie. His mood swings at the end.’

  ‘In the flat, a few days later. With the American. I heard the voices.’

  Adam watched the two women, bewildered, unable to gain a purchase on the conversation.

  Nina sighed. ‘Was he really that upset?’

  ‘Oh I think so. Oh yes, he was very unsettled. First a break-in, then the arguments. A colleague perhaps? Anyway.’ The woman hugged her arms around herself, her purple cardigan tight around her chest. ‘Look at me, this is not the time for chatter. I’m so sorry for everything Nina. If you ever want to … you know … just call. I’ve been through it. You have to give yourself space, let yourself grieve.’ She gave Adam another glance, this time entirely unsuspicious. ‘It’s such a raw night, I’ll be going, and I’ll let you … get on with things. Goodbye. And call me!’

  ‘I will Sophie, I will. Thank you.’

  The two women hugged again. Then Sophie Walker disappeared down the cold tenement stairs, heading for her ground-floor apartment. Without a word Nina, swivelled, turned the key in the lock, and she and Adam entered the flat.

  It was very cold and truly dark inside, the apartment exuding a maudlin scent of beeswax polish. Adam flicked a hallway switch, which engulfed them with sudden light.

  ‘You never told me any of this. A break-in? An argument? Surely this is relevant?’

  Nina’s reply was fierce: she turned and gazed at him with her green eyes wet and wide. ‘Because he never told me. Any of it.’

  10

  East Finchley, north London

  ‘Er, dad, what are you doing?’

  ‘Nothing, son, nothing.’

  Mark Ibsen was flat on his back on the living room floor in their small house in East Finchley. His wife was Sunday shopping with his younger daughter Leila. His son was unimpressed with his dad’s answer.

  ‘Dad. You’re lying on the floor.’

  ‘Luke. I’m fine. Haven’t you got some Xbox thing you can go and play for seventeen hours on your own, like normal kids?’

  ‘It’s more fun watching you, Dad.’

  DCI Ibsen sighed, and gazed up. He was trying to conceptualize the final hours of Nikolai Kerensky, their murder victim. So here he was, theoretically lying on the kitchen floor of the big house at 113 Bishops Avenue, with no feet. And one hand. Blood gushing everywhere. The killer was – what? – looming over him with a gun, or another knife, some sort of weapon? The blood would have been everywhere.

  Why slide from the kitchen into the sitting room? Fully sixty yards? In deep agony? Slowly bleeding to death?

  Maybe the killer fled, therefore allowing Kerensky to make a desperate bid to reach a phone.

  Ibsen glanced up at the kitchen window of their small terraced house. Weak winter sunlight was shining through the bottle of Tesco’s lemon-scented washing up liquid poised on the kitchen window sill.

  He tried to imagine his kitchen as five times the size, with big French windows flung open to a massive garden, windows through which the killer had presumably made his ingress and egress. But how did the murderer do that without leaving any signs whatsoever? It was a true puzzle: they had no trace evidence, no fibre evidence, no hint of forced entry, no shoe marks in the muddy garden, no eye witnesses, nothing.

  And why would the murderer flee halfway through his task? No one had disturbed him at his grisly business: it was a cook returning the following morning who had discovered the mutilated corpse of Nik Kerensky. The only ‘witnesses’ to the incident were those passers-by and neighbours who heard unusual noises – and did nothing.

  ‘Can you shift the cat, Luke, don’t want to squash him.’

  ‘He’s too fat to pick up! Mum gives him all the leftovers.’

  ‘Try?’

  With a manful effort that made his father proud, Luke picked up their enormous cat Mussolini, and moved him to a nearby stool.

  His route cleared, Mark Ibsen slowly dragged himself across the hallway, into their living room, again trying to quadruple the distance in his mind, and conceptualize the pain of having severed feet and a severed hand as he did this. At what point did the killer force Kerensky to try to cut his own
neck? Why did he stop doing this? When did he loosen Kerensky’s trousers? Was that the prelude to some hideous castration, or was there a sexual element?

  The hint of a glimpse of an idea caught the light of Ibsen’s mind, like a jewel momentarily illuminated. Gay sex. Gay sexual murders were often the most brutal. Was Kerensky gay? All they knew, so far, was that he was a bit of a playboy. They had yet to receive the toxicology and serology reports but friends had spoken of drugs and nightclubs.

  Now he had reached his immediate goal. Their IKEA dining table had been laid out exactly as the antique desk in Bishops Avenue had been laid out: notepad and phone to the left, laptop to the right.

  ‘Have you finished, Dad?’

  ‘Nearly.’

  Ibsen was lying on his back on the living room floor. Their ceiling needed painting. He let his thoughts coalesce to a quietness, then hoisted himself on one theoretically amputated arm – the blood theoretically spurting everywhere – and reached for the phone. But he didn’t make it, of course – they already knew no phone calls had been made from the house that night – so Ibsen fell back, in his mind smearing blood on the laptop. And then he theoretically died. The last blood jolting from his horrible wounds.

  ‘Dad, open your eyes. It’s scary now.’

  ‘Sorry, lad.’ Mark stood up, and tousled his son’s hair; then stared at the laptop on his dining table, slightly smeared with marmalade from breakfast.

  The laptop.

  The laptop.

  The laptop.

  Grabbing his mobile, Ibsen stepped urgently into the hall, calling Larkham’s mobile. ‘It’s Ibsen.’

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘You’re at the Yard?’

  ‘Yesssir. We don’t all get Sundays off—’

  ‘Nor do I, I’ve got an idea. Have we checked the laptop yet?’

  A telephonic pause.

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘Has anyone checked the laptop, seen if it was used?’

  ‘Ahh, no.’ Another pause. ‘We’re getting round to it eventually, sir. Tomorrow, probs. Course it’s been fumed for prints but all we’ve got is Kerensky’s as he reached for the phone like you said …’