Lies Sleeping (Peter Grant, #7)(15)

Just like that.

I stayed where I was – mostly because I couldn’t think of anything more sensible to do – but Guleed shook my shoulder to get my attention.

‘Peter,’ she said. ‘Richard Williams is dead.’





7

Brand Loyalty

Supernatural creature of the night or not, this was a DSI, death or serious injury, while in contact with a member of the police force and therefore triggered a mandatory referral to the Independent Police Complaints Commission under Section 2 of the Police Reform Act 2002.

That meant it was the Department of Professional Services that arrived to secure the scene and take statements while we waited for the notoriously slow IPCC investigators to get their arses in gear. I knew a couple of the people from the DPS from my many, many visits there and they all shook their heads upon seeing me.

We all knew that this was going to be a full-on independent inquiry conducted exclusively by IPCC investigators, so we didn’t try and co-ordinate our stories or anything foolish like that. It was obvious to me that Lucy had done the right thing, both legally and morally, and any attempt to put the fix in would create more problems than it solved.

Or at least that’s what I told myself, while I waited to be interviewed.

The police don’t like being policed any more than your average member of the public does. But I’ve had more experience of being investigated than most officers my age and have learnt to sit still, be polite and give short, precise answers to any questions. Do not get clever, do not volunteer information and do not offer a helpful critique of your questioner’s interviewing technique – no matter how justified it might be.

One bonus is that you get to keep a copy of the interview tape so you can hone your own interviewing technique, anticipate further lines of inquiry, or auto-tune your responses while you wait for your contact to get back to you.

I did ask if there was any word on Richard Williams’s cause of death. He’d just been lying there, eyes closed, mouth open, left arm limp across his chest, the other lying by his side. There was no sign of violence that me and Guleed could see and definitely nobody else in the room.

‘We’re still waiting on the PM,’ the IPCC investigator told me, and sent me home.

The IPCC were going to want a pathologist of their own choosing to do the PM. Never mind about what they were going to make of the Pale Nanny’s teeth, what were they going to make of Doctors Vaughan and Walid?

So I went back to the Folly, which has the advantage of being both home and work at the same time. Guleed went home because she has, she says, a deep and mystical understanding of the work-life balance. A concept I once tried to explain to Nightingale with the aid of the big whiteboard in the visitors’ lounge. I think he grasped it in the end, and said he was all in favour as long as I understood that this in no way applied to apprentices.

‘And I’ve had quite enough time doing nothing,’ he said.

The main shift in the Annexe was just leaving as I settled into the Tech Cave to see if I couldn’t tie up some loose ends. In deference to the spirit of the balance, however, I had a can of Special Brew while I was doing it.

The Annexe had already produced an IIP check of Gabriel Tate and John Chapman and had determined that both of them had left the country a year earlier. Chapman had left no forwarding address, although Border Force had a record of him boarding a flight to JFK. Gabriel Tate had been much easier to track, not least because he had a webpage advertising his brand new company in Brisbane, Australia. I fired off a formal request for assistance to Australia, who would be fast asleep. It was the middle of the day in the States so I called a contact of mine at the FBI to see if she could help.

I was going through the action list to see if there was anything I could do sitting down when I got a call from Dr Walid, who invited me to an autopsy. I said that I couldn’t think of a better way to spend my evening and called Nightingale to see if he wanted to come.

‘I think I’d rather stay here,’ he said.

‘Here’ being the Whitechapel Bell Foundry, where Nightingale was keeping an eye on the bell just in case. I knew he was hoping that Martin Chorley would turn up in person to try and get his bell back. He’s gone one round with Chorley already and, whatever he says, he’s dead keen to go round two. And, as an operational plan, it had a certain merit. Providing collateral was kept down to – what, a two-to -three block radius?

I doubted Martin Chorley would be that stupid – I also could hear a rhythmic metallic clanking sound down the line.

‘Are you forging?’ I asked.

‘I thought,’ said Nightingale, ‘that since there was all this good metal lying around, I might lay down some enchantments – just in case.’

So it was off down the Horseferry Road to the Iain West Memorial All You Can Stomach Forensic Suite, which is state of the art and a good place to impress outside pathologists who have been requested by the IPCC. Out of tact I waited until the IPCC lot had buggered off, and as a result this was my favourite kind of autopsy. The kind where the conclusions have already been drawn and the bodies have all been sewn up and covered tastefully with a sheet.

Dr Vaughan and Dr Walid were waiting for me in the space between the bodies with faint smiles that were only sinister because of the context. At least I hope it was the context. We started with the cause of death determination for Richard Williams.