Rivers of London (Rivers of London #1)(35)
‘Good man,’ said Nightingale. ‘We should be done in about half an hour.’
We got back in the Jag and Nightingale directed me across the station bridge and down a couple of identical streets until he said, ‘This one here.’
We found a parking spot round the corner and walked the rest of the way.
Grasmere Road ran parallel to the railway and looked utterly normal, a string of detached and semi-detached houses built in the 1920s with mock-Tudor fa?ades and bay windows. There was nobody about, the kids were all at school and their parents were at work and we kept the pace casual, at least as casual as I could manage with a pair of grenades banging against my hip. Anyone watching would have taken us for a pair of feral estate agents out marking their territory.
Nightingale made a sudden left turn through the gate of a particular house and headed for the wooden door-sized gate that blocked access to the side passage. Without slowing down he thrust his right arm, palm forward, at the gate and with a tiny sound the lock popped out of the wood and clattered onto the pathway beyond.
We stepped through the open gate and stopped in the blind spot. Nightingale nodded at the gate, and I propped it closed with a big terracotta flowerpot. There was still soil in the flowerpot with a shrivelled black stalk poking out. I checked similar pots lined up on the sunny side of the path; they were all dead too. Nightingale stooped down, grabbed a handful of soil and crumbled it beneath his nose. I followed his lead, but the soil smelled of nothing, sterile, as if it had been left on a windowsill for too long.
‘They’ve been here a while,’ said Nightingale.
‘Who has?’ I asked, but he didn’t answer.
The house backed onto the railway tracks so we only had to worry about neighbours on two sides. The garden wasn’t a jungle, but the lawn looked like it hadn’t been mown for months and sections of once neat flowerbeds were as dead as the flowerpots. The French doors that led onto the garden patio were locked and the curtains firmly drawn. We worked our way round to the kitchen. The blinds were down across the windows and the door was bolted from the inside. I watched closely, expecting Nightingale to do the lock-popping thing again but instead he just smashed the window with his cane. He reached through the pane, pulled the bolt and opened the door. I followed him inside.
Apart from the dim light it was a perfectly normal suburban kitchen. Swedish counter tops, gas hob and oven, microwave, faux stoneware jars marked sugar, tea and coffee. The fridge-freezer was switched off, notes and bills stuck to the doors with magnets. The newest bill was six months old. Next to it a note read, Grandad? Below that was a schedule that included nursery collection times.
‘There are kids living here,’ I said.
Nightingale looked grim. ‘Not any more,’ he said. ‘That was one of the things that alerted us.’
‘This isn’t going to turn out well, is it?’ I asked.
‘Not for the family that was living here,’ he said.
We crept into the hallway. Nightingale indicated that I check upstairs. I extended my baton and kept it ready as I climbed the steps. The window over the stairs had had sheets of black crayon paper crudely sellotaped over to block out the sunlight. One of the sheets had a child’s drawing of a house, square windows, a pig’s tail of smoke from a misshapen chimney and Mummy and Daddy stick figures standing proudly off to one side.
As I stepped onto the gloomy landing a word formed in my mind: two syllables, starts with a V and rhymes with dire. I froze in place. Nightingale said that everything was true, after a fashion, and that had to include vampires, didn’t it? I doubted they were anything like they were in books and on TV, and one thing was for certain – they absolutely weren’t going to sparkle in the sunlight.
There was a door on my left. I forced myself to go through it. A child’s bedroom, a boy young enough still to have Lego and action figures scattered on the floor. The bed was neatly made with no-nonsense blue and purple matching pillow cases and duvet cover. The boy had liked Ben 10 and Chelsea FC enough to put their posters on his walls. There was a smell of dust, but none of the mildew and damp that I would associate with a long-abandoned house. The master bedroom was the same, the bed neatly made up, an air of dry dustiness but no cobwebs in the corners of the ceiling. The digital alarm clock by the bed had stopped despite being plugged into the mains. When I picked it up, white sand trickled out from a bottom seam. I replaced it carefully and made a mental note to check it later.
The main room at the back of the house was the nursery. Beatrix Potter wallpaper, a cot, playpen. A hypoallergenic wooden mobile from Galt’s Educational Toys shivered in the draft from the open door. As with the other rooms, there was no sign of a struggle or even a rapid departure; everything was neatly squared away. Unnatural in a child’s bedroom. Equally unnatural was the lack of shower mould in the bathroom, or the dusty non-smell of the water in the cistern.
The last room on the top floor was what an estate agent would call a ‘half-bedroom’ suitable for small children or midgets with agoraphobia. This had been converted into a mini-office with a two-year-old Dell PC and, unsurprisingly, an IKEA filing cabinet and desk lamp. When I touched the computer I got a flash of dust and ozone, a vestigium that I recognised from the master bedroom. I popped open the side of the case and found the same white sand inside. I rubbed it between my fingers. It was very fine, powdery even but definitely granular and flecked with gold. I was about to pull the motherboard when Nightingale arrived in the doorway.