Lies Sleeping (Peter Grant, #7)(5)
She’d turned and run at that point – sensibly, she hadn’t wanted to face off against Nightingale.
But why up the stairs? Why not out the back or front doors? She could have had it away over the back fence and garden-hopped to the end of the road. Judging by the speed with which she moved, I doubt our perimeter teams would have even seen her.
There was more blood drip on the stairs and a couple of red handprints on the banister’s handrail. I put my forensic booties on, as much to protect my own shoes from cross-contamination as to preserve the site, and up I went.
The first floor was more honest than the ground floor. The master bedroom had a custom built king-size bed with carved white head and footboards. The polished floor had coarse wool rugs woven with rectangular blocks of red, blue and yellow, identical to those on the ground floor. There were no visible bookshelves, which always looks weird to me, nor any books by the bed. I was pretty certain this was odd, for people who worked in a ‘creative’ industry, but perhaps they’d gone over to ebooks to save on space.
The walls were painted the same bland white with a hint of white as the living and dining room. It looked fresh, and when I got my nose in the dark corner between the bed and skirting board I found droplets of white paint in the hard to reach places. Done recently, and off the books, because the work hadn’t registered in the official family expenditure. I’d been right. The whole house reeked of being ready for Zoopla, estate agents and home viewings. They’d been planning to sell and had been stripping down for the move. I made a note to action a check of the local charity shops – to see if they’d dumped their books there.
There was a hardback copy of Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant on the side table in the en-suite bathroom, sitting next to a neat pyramid of toilet paper rolls. The flap of the cover had been tucked into page 15, but there was a thin film of dust on the exposed front.
Nice try, I thought, but one of you bounced right off it, too.
If the master bedroom hinted that the family was moving out, the kids’ bedroom said that nobody had told the girls yet. I’ve been in enough rich people’s houses not to be surprised at the sheer amount of stuff their kids have. Piles of board games and drawing kits and kites and dolls and life-sized teddy bears. The girls had bunk beds, an industrial sized bin full of Lego and enough Barbies, Kens and cheap knock-offs to cast a major stop-motion picture. It was clean but it wasn’t tidy – which was a relief, because I was beginning to worry about what the nanny’s idea of discipline might have been.
And I’m saying that as the son of an African mother.
The bunk beds surprised me, but it turned out that Richard Williams had grabbed the back bedroom to serve as his home office. Again, the room had been recently painted but you could still trace the outline of extensive bracket shelving by the filled-in screw holes. There was a small blond wood gate-leg table under the window to catch the light and various connection and charging cables, although the tech guys had had it away with the actual laptop and phone. There were a series of cardboard boxes which the POLSA team had methodically opened, leaving their contents neatly piled on the floor awaiting inspection.
Most of it looked like a decade’s worth of invoices, utility bills and insurance forms – that was all going to have to go back to the Annexe. One pile caught my attention. At first I thought they were brochures or thick company prospectuses, but they were actually site reports from MOLA – Museum of London Archaeology. Slim technical documents with card covers and spiral plastic bindings – full of nice technical drawings and at least thirty pages of endnotes.
Martin Chorley had had an interest in archaeology and a romantic view of the Dark Ages – I wondered if this was a connection.
Sitting on its own was part of a film script which the POLSA team had found buried among the insurance documents. It was, I was told later, professionally formatted and had originally been held together with the metal two-hole binders popular with aspiring screenwriters. Part of the binder remained and held shreds of paper that indicated that the missing part of the script had been ripped out with some force. Leaving only the first fifteen pages. I read the title.
AGAINST THE DARK
By Richard Williams & Gabriel Tate
From a story by John Chapman
The opening scene on the next page started.
FADE IN
EXT: THE RUINS OF ROMAN LONDON – LATE EVENING
Which was enough to have me call the Annexe and ask for a full IIP check on Gabriel Tate and John Chapman. Since all we had were the names and the connection to Richard Williams they started grumbling almost immediately, but the good thing about Operation Jennifer was that we had now had plenty of bodies to do that sort of thing.
I went up to the loft conversion and saw there was a hole in the roof where Nightingale had thrown the Pale Nanny through it.
I could still feel the sharp tang of the vestigium and detected a weird crispy lemon taste on my tongue that might have been magic or the smell of bathroom cleaner.
‘She was going for the front window when I caught up with her,’ Nightingale had told me. ‘There’s quite a good spell for holding people in place.’ He’d held up his hand to stop me asking. ‘Next year. You will be ready to learn it next year. And it proved less use than you might think, given that our suspect managed to wriggle free.’