Lies Sleeping (Peter Grant, #7)(2)
‘There they go,’ said Guleed.
I looked over and saw a battered green Vauxhall Corsa pull up outside the target house.
The house had probably cost a couple of million quid, with its two storeys plus loft conversion, red brick, and detailing on the porch roof that hinted at Arts and Crafts without actually making it over the finishing line. It was at least mercifully free of pebble-dash and fake half-timbering. They’d retained the original sash windows but installed the venetian blinds that have replaced net curtains as the genteel response to sharing your neighbourhood with other human beings. The blinds were currently open. But to avoid being bleeding obvious we were parked ten metres up the street, so the angle was too poor for us to see inside.
The burner phone I was holding pinged and a sideways smiley face appeared.
‘Stand by,’ I said.
We were avoiding using our police issue Airwaves as much as possible, and not just because of the danger of them being wrecked if something magical happened. The smiley face had gone out to the team covering the next road over in case somebody made a break out of the back.
Nightingale and DC David Carey got out of the Corsa and started up the path to the front door.
‘Here we go,’ said Guleed, and stifled a yawn.
We’d been swapping roles since we started the operation. Nightingale and Carey had been in the observation car for the last poke – in Chipping Norton. We were calling that one ‘the Aga saga’ because our target hadn’t shut up about his kitchen, which, as far as I could tell, had been designed by the same people who’d decorated Bag-End.
‘Door’s open,’ said Guleed, and I made a note of the time in the log.
Normally the police like to turn up nice and early, preferably around 6 a.m., because not only are people liable to be actually at home but that early in the morning they’re rarely playing with a full deck. Today we were going in Sunday lunchtime because we weren’t looking for shock and awe but aiming for sinister and creepy instead. Nightingale is remarkably good at that – I think it’s the accent.
Richard Williams had once had a job with a company called Slick Pictures, who’d done a lot of work for a land development company that was, via a series of shell companies, wholly owned by a firm called County Gard. Which just happened to be the remote instrument by which Martin Chorley ran some of his criminal enterprises.
It was thin, but we were desperate and, at the very least, it might keep the pressure on.
Guleed fussed with her hijab, an unusually plain one for her, police issue and designed to tear away if somebody grabbed it. We were both wearing the plain clothes version of the Metvest under our jackets – just in case.
I watched a cat leap out of the next door garden and streak away down the road. Something about its frantic pace made me uneasy and I was just about to mention it to Guleed when the burner pinged again and flashed up ‘aa’. We’d worked out a series of codes as part of our operational planning. The character was irrelevant – the code lay in the number of them you sent. Three characters meant stand by, one meant charge in screaming, and two meant we were to take up our prearranged ‘intervention’ positions.
Guleed grinned.
‘That makes a change,’ she said.
We climbed out into the muggy warmth of a suburban Sunday lunchtime and headed for the house. The plan was to loiter as unobtrusively as possible outside the gate and await further instructions. But we were still eight metres short of the house when it all went pear-shaped.
The first I knew of it was a burst of vestigia from the house, as heavy as a mallet and as sharp and as controlled as the point of a needle – Nightingale’s signare. If it was that intense, then he must have really let rip. And the last time he did that we’d needed a JCB to sweep up the remains.
I started running and got to the gate in time to see a fountain of slates erupt over the gable roof. As the slates tumbled and cracked down the front of the house, I saw a figure in pink and blue twist and squirm onto the ridge of the roof. It was a woman, slender, black haired, pale skinned and balanced perfectly on the guttering as if auditioning for the next Spider—Man movie.
She swung around to look down at me, head tilted to one side. Even from that distance I could see a wash of crimson around her mouth and chin, and running down the chest of her blue Adidas sweatshirt. I didn’t think it was her blood.
She was wearing pink tracksuit bottoms and her feet were bare.
I recognised her from the briefing as the Williams’ family nanny and also, from the way her lips were pulled back to bare her teeth, from a fight I’d once had years ago in the Trocadero Centre.
Oh shit, I thought. Haven’t I met your sister?
Having seen us, I assumed she was going to scarper over the roof and down into the back garden. So it was a bit of a shock when she launched herself straight at me. Now, me and Guleed are bona fide detectives with the PIP2 qualifications to prove it, so we’re not really supposed to be fighting anyone. That’s what we have the TSG for.
Still, our careers being what they are at the moment, we’d taken some time with Nightingale, Carey and a couple of other members of the team, discussing what to do in various scenarios. And the principal lesson was – don’t close, don’t grapple, don’t get clever. And don’t hesitate.
I went right and Guleed went left.
The nanny landed like a cat on the pavement in what I thought was clear defiance of the laws of physics. I don’t care how supple you are, landing like that from three storeys up should have driven her shin bones through her knees.