Lies Sleeping (Peter Grant, #7)(4)
‘Because you should master at least one tradition before you move on to the next,’ said Nightingale, coming up the corridor.
Carey, following behind, gave me and Guleed a grateful look – I could sympathise. Keeping up with Nightingale could be knackering. Especially when he was in one of his man-of-action moods and forgot that we weren’t all about to parachute into Germany.
We had an impromptu after-action briefing in the corridor before Nightingale sent us off about our business. He was planning to stay outside Richard Williams’s door in the hope that somebody else would turn up and have another go.
‘She had the advantage of both me and David,’ said Nightingale. ‘And yet she felt that silencing Richard Williams was more important. That implies to me that he knows something Martin Chorley does not want us to find out.’
He didn’t need to elaborate.
Obviously if it was worth killing Williams for, we really wanted to know what it was.
Guleed, with her sympathetic manner and better interview accreditation, was actioned to interview Richard Williams’s wife Fiona. Which involved whisking her off to the pastel coloured 1980s retro calm of Belgravia’s Achieving Best Evidence suite and gently prising intimate details of her life out of her while trying not traumatise her further. I was to go over the tapes later to check for Falcon material, but in the meantime I headed back to Chiswick to see if we could learn anything from their happy home.
Fiona was actually wife number two, having met Richard while interning at the company he worked for in 2011. It looked like fast work to me, since he’d only been married to his first wife for five years. They had two daughters, who we’d left in DI Miriam Stephanopoulos’ office for the duration of the interview. There was a son by the earlier marriage but he lived with his mother, who’d moved back to King’s Lynn after the divorce.
A POLSA team had already worked over the house looking for covert hiding places and secret stashes of shameful stuff, but had found nothing. All the computers, laptops, phones and the PlayStation 4 had been whisked off to the Operational Technology Support Unit at Dulwich to have everything stripped out. We had information analysts on the payroll for this operation and, by God, since it was coming out of the Folly budget we were going to give them something to do.
So I was basically there for the magic – which often hides in plain sight.
As a police detective – which, by the way, I had officially become just that month – I get to spend a lot of time in people’s houses, often without their consent. Homes are like witnesses. They pretty much lie all the time. But, as Stephanopoulos says, the longer someone lives in a house the more intrinsically interesting the lies become. When you’re police, an interesting lie can be as useful as the truth. Sometimes more so.
The ground floor had been knocked all the way through from front to back. The living room part had a faux antique leather three piece suite and a kidney-shaped glass coffee table with, amazingly, a couple of thick coffee table books on it. The small lie was in the way the seating was arranged to face the, possibly, original Arts and Craft fireplace and not the medium sized flat-screen TV.
We don’t waste time on the idiot box, the room was saying. But the stack of box sets and the fact that both the remote controls, Blu-ray player and TV, were on the coffee table made it a liar. That was the small lie.
The big lie was the complete absence of mangled toys, random pieces of scribbled-on paper and half-chewed sweets along the whole length of the ground floor. There are no difficult, messy, screaming small humans living in this house. We live in a bubble of serenity.
Now I’m the son of a professional cleaner, but I’m also blessed with enough pre-school cousins to cause your average UKIP voter to relocate to Spain, and I know for a fact that there should have been way more chaos downstairs.
She might have been a homicidal creature of the night but I suspect our fugitive must have been a really good nanny. That, or she’d traumatised the kids into obedience – we were probably going to have to bring in a special child psychologist to find out. I made a note to check to see whether Guleed had asked about that during the ABE interview.
The kitchen was the kind of brushed steel monstrosity that looks more like it’s designed to weaponise viruses than cook dinner. Just to be on the safe side I checked the fridge for Petri dishes – nothing. But there was a reassuring ton of healthy yogurts for tiny tots and genuinely unadulterated fruit drinks made with real fruit.
Just you wait until they start mixing with real children, I thought, and it’s going to be Mars bars and crisps for all eternity.
There was blood on the grey Italian tiles and yellow evidence markers scattered across the floor and on the counter. You could see where Nightingale had pulled the nanny off Richard Williams by the spray of blood droplets running diagonally up the wall.
According to Nightingale, they’d just been settling down to a superficially pleasant but calculatingly sinister chat in the living room when Richard Williams had popped out to the kitchen to prepare coffee. Something furtive in his manner had alerted Nightingale, who’d already started after him when they heard a crash and a scream.
‘I couldn’t tell,’ said Nightingale, ‘who was doing the screaming.’
As per the agreed operational plan, Carey had moved to secure Fiona Williams and the children while Nightingale engaged whatever it was provoking the screams. In the hallway he’d found the nanny chewing on Richard Williams’s neck. We think she’d been going for his throat, but he’d tried to dodge and she’d ended up taking a chunk out of his right trapezoid muscle instead. Nightingale didn’t give her a chance to have a second go – smacking her in the back of the knees with an impello and trying to physically pin her down.