Lies Sleeping (Peter Grant, #7)(16)

‘We don’t have one,’ said Dr Vaughan. ‘For what it’s worth, we can call it heart failure. But that’s not particularly useful, now, is it? Just about everything is heart failure when you get down to it.’

Cause of death can be hard to determine even when the victim has a knife sticking out of their forehead, let alone with no visible wounds or gross pathology. Half a litre of Richard Williams’s blood was now distributed among labs from Euston to Cambridge, but unless you know what toxin you’re looking for, you can’t screen for it. Besides, I could tell from the ever more sinister smiles on Dr Vaughan’s and Dr Walid’s faces that they had a theory – and not one that involved a neurotoxin.

‘Voila,’ said Dr Walid.

He twitched the sheet off Richard Williams’s leg to reveal a large abstract tattoo – almost one of those faux Maori sleeves, but not. The lines were too angular and yet very familiar. I thought one patch looked fresher until I realised that its darkness was not fresh ink but burnt flesh.

‘Burnt down to a depth of two centimetres,’ said Dr Walid. ‘We were just about to excise it so we could have a closer look.’

‘You can watch if you like,’ said Dr Vaughan.

I barely heard her because I’d just recognised the shape of the tattoo. A long upright stroke with two right-hand strokes going diagonally up.

‘G for Gandalf,’ I said.

Specifically G in Tolkien’s imaginary Dwarvish runes or actually, as I learnt from a bit of googling, his imaginary early Elvish. I explained this to the doctors, which at least had the effect of wiping that sinister smile off their faces.

‘And I suppose you’re fluent in Elvish?’ said Dr Vaughan, by way of retaliation.

‘No,’ I said. ‘But G is what Gandalf stamps on his fireworks. Gandalf is the wizard, by the way.’

‘I know who Gandalf is, thank you,’ said Dr Vaughan.

‘I think we can assume that this is Martin Chorley’s work,’ said Dr Walid.

He was right. Martin Chorley really did have a sick sense of humour. He’d once labelled a demon trap in Elvish script.

‘And the rest of the tattoos?’ asked Dr Vaughan.

‘It’s all Dwarvish iconography,’ I said. ‘From the films, though, not the books.’

‘We’re still waiting on the lab work,’ said Dr Walid. ‘But Jennifer here thinks there may have been metallic particles under the skin.’

‘A small demon trap, I was thinking,’ said Dr Vaughan. ‘Or something working along the same principles. I’d like to see if your boss knows something about it.’

I said I’d set up a meeting.

‘If there was a remote trigger of some kind,’ I said, ‘it must have quite a short range. Why else would Chorley sacrifice his killer nanny as a distraction if he didn’t have to get close himself?’

Which meant someone was going to have to go back over the hospital CCTV looking for Chorley. More work for some unlucky sod in the Annexe, or perhaps lucky sod, if they had no social life and needed the overtime.

‘We’re calling her Charlotte Green,’ said Dr Vaughan primly.

‘What?’

‘Well, it’s a bit unfeeling to keep referring to these young women as “killer nannies” and the like,’ she said. ‘Whatever they did in life they’re in my care now and I don’t think it’s too much to expect a bit of respect.’

‘Why Green?’

‘Because I didn’t want to use Gamma as a category name,’ she said. ‘And Charlotte because she’s our third Jane Doe.’

The first being the young woman with the unusual teeth who’d died at the Trocadero Centre.

‘Alice Green,’ said Dr Vaughan.

The second being the weird half-man, half-tiger person who’d tried to kill me on a roof in Soho and got himself shot in the head for his trouble.

‘Barry Brown.’

‘You’ve started a new classification system, haven’t you?’ I said.

‘Well, we couldn’t go on with what we had, could we?’ said Dr Vaughan.

Dr Jennifer Vaughan had taken one look at the various cataloguing methodologies for the fae and come to the same conclusions I had – that they were bollocks. She’d been threatening to devise her own system ever since. Now, for solid historical reasons, I’m not comfortable with dividing people up into groups. But the medical profession cannot sleep easy until it has a category for everything.

‘It’s all about instilling confidence,’ Dr Walid had explained once.

Apparently patients much preferred doctors who sounded like they knew what they were talking about – even when they didn’t. Perhaps especially when they didn’t.

‘If it helps, think of it as provisional,’ said Dr Vaughan.

So Brown for the chimera – the cat-girls and tiger-boys, and God knows what else Martin Chorley’s sick little brain might have come up with.

‘Brown for Beta, right?’

‘Just so,’ said Dr Vaughan.

‘And Green for Gamma.’

‘Oh, he is bright, isn’t he?’ said Dr Vaughan to no one in particular. ‘Subjects that are not the product of modification, or at least modification of their phenotype.’