Rivers of London (Rivers of London #1)(18)

‘All right,’ said Lesley, ‘I won’t freak out if you don’t.’ She took my hand, squeezed it and let go.

‘Do you think our back-up is walking from Hampstead nick?’ I asked.

The ambulance arrived first, the paramedics rushing into the garden and spending twenty minutes trying futilely to resuscitate the child. Paramedics always do this with children, regardless of how much it damages the crime scene. You can’t stop them, so you might as well let them get on with it.

The paramedics had just got started when a transit van’s worth of uniforms arrived and started milling around in confusion. The sergeant approached us cautiously – mistaking us for civilians covered in blood and therefore potential suspects.

‘Are you all right?’ he asked.

I couldn’t speak – it seemed like such a stupid question.

The sergeant looked over at the paramedics, who were still working on the baby. ‘Can you tell me what happened?’ he asked.

‘There’s been a serious incident,’ said Nightingale as he emerged from the house. ‘You,’ he said, pointing at a luckless constable, ‘get another body, go round the back and make sure nobody gets in or out that way.’

The constable grabbed a mate and legged it. The sergeant looked like he wanted to ask for a warrant card but Nightingale didn’t give him a chance.

‘I want the street closed and tapped off ten yards in both directions,’ he said. ‘The press are going to be all over this any minute, so make sure you’ve got enough bodies to keep them back.’

The sergeant didn’t salute because we’re the Met and we don’t salute, but there was a touch of the parade ground in the way he swivelled round and marched off. Nightingale looked over to where Lesley and I stood shivering. He gave us a reassuring nod, turned on one of the remaining constables and started barking orders.

Soon after that, blankets appeared, a place was found in the transit van and cups of hot tea with three sugars thrust into our hands. We drank the tea and waited in silence for the other shoe to drop.

It took less than forty minutes for DCI Seawoll to reach Downshire Hill. Even with the Saturday traffic it meant he must have been doing blues and twos all the way from Belgravia. He appeared in the side doorway of the van and frowned at Lesley and me.

‘You two all right?’ he asked.

We both nodded.

‘Well, don’t fucking go anywhere,’ he said.

Fat chance of that. A major investigation, once it gets under way, is as exciting as watching reruns of Big Brother, although possibly involving less sex and violence. Criminals are not caught by brilliant deductive reasoning but by the fact that some poor slob has spent a week tracking down every shop in Hackney that sells a particular brand of trainer, and then checking the security-camera footage on every single one. A good Senior Investigating Officer is one who makes sure their team has dotted every I and crossed every T, not least so that some Rupert in a wig can’t drive a defendant’s credit card into a crack in the case and wedge it wide open.

Seawoll was one of the best, so first we were taken out separately to a tent that the forensic people had erected near the front gate. There, we stripped to our underwear and traded our street clothes for a stylish one-piece bunny suit. As I watched my favourite suit jacket being stuffed into an evidence bag I realised I’d never bothered to find out whether you ever got things like that back. And if they did give it back to me, would they dry-clean it first? They took swabs of the blood on our faces and hands and then were nice enough to hand us some wipes so we could get the rest off.

We ended up back in the transit van for lunch, which was a couple of shop sandwiches, but this being Hampstead they were pretty high-quality. I found myself surprisingly hungry, and I was thinking of asking for a second round when DCI Seawoll climbed into the van with us. His weight caused the van to sink down on one side, and his presence caused Lesley and me to push ourselves unconsciously into our seat backs.

‘How are you two bearing up?’ he asked.

We told him that we were fine and ready, in fact dead keen, to get back up on that horse and go to work.

‘That’s a load of wank,’ he said, ‘but at least it’s convincing wank. In a couple of minutes we’re going to take you down Hampstead nick, where a very nice lady from Scotland Yard is going to take your statements – separately. And while I’m a believer in veracity in all things, I want to make it clear that there isn’t going to be any fucking mumbo-jumbo voodoo X-Files shit in any fucking statement. Is that understood?’

We indicated that he had indeed adequately communicated his position.

‘As far as anyone else is concerned, normal fucking policing got us into this mess, and normal fucking policing will get us out of it.’ And with a creaking of the van’s suspension, he left.

‘Did he just ask us to lie to a senior officer?’ I asked.

‘Yep,’ said Lesley.

‘Just checking,’ I said.

So we spent the rest of the afternoon bearing false witness in separate interview rooms. We were careful to make sure that while our accounts broadly agreed, there were lots of authentic-looking discrepancies. No one can fake a statement the way a policeman can.

After lying, we borrowed some section-house castoffs to wear and headed back to Downshire Hill. A serious crime in an area like Hampstead was always going to be big news, and the media was out in force not least because half the presenters could have walked to work that afternoon.