Rivers of London (Rivers of London #1)(33)
Molly, still dressed in her maid’s outfit, was perched on the edge of the scarred oak table that dominated one side of the kitchen. Beside her on the table was a beige ceramic mixing bowl and sitting, some three metres in front of her, was Toby. Since the door was behind her shoulder Molly didn’t see me watching as she dipped her hand into the mixing bowl and lifted out a cube of chopped meat – raw enough to be dripping.
Toby barked with excitement as Molly teased him with the meat for a moment before sending it flying towards him with an expert flick of her wrist. Toby did an impressive jump from a sitting position and caught the meat in mid-air. At the sight of Toby chewing industriously while turning tight little circles, Molly began to laugh – the rhythmic hissing sound I’d heard earlier.
Molly picked up another cube of meat and waved it at Toby, who did a little dance of doggy anticipation. This time Molly faked him out, hissing at his confused twirling and then, when she was sure he was watching, popping the bloody piece of meat in her own mouth. Toby barked crossly but Molly stuck out an unnaturally long and prehensile tongue at him.
I must have gasped or shifted my weight because Molly leaped off the table and spun to face me. Eyes wide, mouth open to reveal sharp pointed teeth and blood, bright red against her pale skin, dribbling down her chin. Then she clamped her hand over her mouth and with a look of startled shame ran silently from the kitchen. Toby gave me an irritated growl.
‘It’s not my fault,’ I told him. ‘I just wanted a snack.’
I don’t know what he was complaining about; he got the rest of the bowl of meat – I got a glass of water.
Action at a Distance
A part from the cramp and a definite improvement in the strength of my grip, my efforts to create my own werelight were frustrating. Every other morning Nightingale would demonstrate the spell, and I’d spend up to four hours a day opening my hand in a meaningful manner. Fortunately I got a break three weeks into February, when Lesley May and I were due to give evidence against Celia Munroe, the perpetrator of the Leicester Square cinema assault.
That morning we both dutifully turned up in our uniforms – magistrates like their constables to be in uniform – at the requisite time of ten o’clock, in the firm and certain knowledge that the case would be delayed at least until two. As forward-thinking and ambitious constables, we’d brought our own reading material; Lesley had the latest Blackstone’s Police Investigator’s Manual and I had Horace Pitman’s Legends of the Thames Valley, published in 1897.
City of Westminster Magistrates Court is around the back of Victoria Station on the Horseferry Road. It’s a bland box of a building built in the 1970s; it was considered to be so lacking in architectural merit that there was talk of listing it so that it could be preserved for posterity as an awful warning. Inside, the waiting areas maintained the unique combination of cramped busyness and barren inhumanity that was the glory of British architecture in the second half of the twentieth century.
There were two benches outside the court. We sat on one while the accused, Celia Munroe, her lawyer and a friend she’d brought along for moral support shared the other with Mr Ranatunga and Mr Ranatunga’s brother. None of them wanted to be there, and all of them blamed us.
‘Any word from Los Angeles?’ I asked.
‘Brandon Coopertown was a man on the edge,’ said Lesley. ‘Apparently all of his American deals had fallen through and his production company was about to fold.’
‘And that house?’ I asked.
‘About to go the way of all flesh,’ said Lesley. I looked blank. ‘Mortgage was six months in arrears,’ she said. ‘And his income this year barely scraped thirty-five thousand.’
That was a good ten grand more than I was getting as a full constable – my sympathy was limited.
‘It’s starting to look like a classic family annihilation,’ said Lesley, who’d been reading up on her forensic psychology. ‘Father faces a catastrophic loss of status, he can’t live with the shame and decides that without him his wife’s and kid’s lives are meaningless. He snaps, tops a fellow media professional, tops his family and tops himself.’
‘By making his face fall off?’ I asked.
‘No theory is ever perfect,’ said Lesley. ‘Particularly since we can’t even find a reason for William Skirmish being in the West End that night.’
‘Maybe he was on the pull,’ I said.
‘He wasn’t on the pull,’ said Lesley. ‘And I should know.’
Because William Skirmish’s ‘victim timeline’ had become barely relevant to the case, the job of completing it had been handed to the Murder Team’s most junior member, i.e. Lesley. Since she’d spent such a lot of time and effort reconstructing William Skirmish’s last hours she was perfectly willing, in fact overjoyed, to share it with me in excruciating detail. She’d checked out William Skirmish’s romantic leanings and found no history of trawling the West End for sex – serially monogamous, that was our William – all of them guys he’d met through work or mutual friends. She’d also traced every single CCTV that he’d passed that night, and as far as Lesley could tell he’d walked from his house to Tufnell Park Station and caught the tube to Tottenham Court Road – from there, he’d walked straight to Covent garden, via Mercer Street, and his fatal encounter with Coopertown. No deviation or hesitation – as if he had an appointment.