Simon Beckett - The Scent of Death

The road I turned on to was tree-lined and quiet. Driving past the white Georgian houses set in wooded gardens, I headed for the jarringly modern apartments that rose above them. Built in the 1970s, Ballard Court was all angles and concrete, a ten-storey complex whose smoked-glass windows reflected a muted version of the evening sky. I’d been told it was an important example of brutalist architecture, and I could believe it. There was certainly something brutal about it.

I stopped at the gates and entered the passcode into the keypad. As we waited for the gates to open I stared unenthusiastically up at the tiered balconies until I realized Rachel was looking at me.

‘What?’

‘Nothing,’ she said, but her mouth was curved in a half-smile.

Once through the gates, I waited again for the electric door to the underground car park to open and pulled into my allotted space. I’d already received a terse letter from the management committee after inadvertently parking in the wrong spot, warning me that such infringements wouldn’t be tolerated.

Ballard Court had a lot of rules.

We took the lift up to the fifth floor. There was a reception desk and concierge on duty in the main entrance, but as only residents had passes for the car park the lifts bypassed that and went straight to the apartments. Its doors slid open to reveal a wide landing around which were set well-spaced, numbered teak doors. It reminded me of a hotel, an impression fostered by the faint scent of peppermint that always seemed to gather there.

Our footsteps rang on the marble floor as we crossed to the apartment. I pushed open the heavy door to let Rachel in first, leaving it to slowly swing shut behind us with a soft click . A carpeted hallway led to the vast kitchen, where an arched opening gave on to an open-plan dining room and lounge. The same sound-deadening carpet as in the hall ran through there as well, perfectly complementing the kitchen’s terracotta tiles. Abstract paintings hung on the walls, and the mocha-coloured leather sofa was deep enough to drown in. It was, by any standards, a beautiful apartment, and a far cry from the modest ground-floor flat where I’d been living before.

I hated it.

It had been Jason who’d set it up. Another consultant at his hospital was moving to Canada for six months and didn’t want to leave his home standing empty. He preferred not to let it out through an agent and since I was — grudgingly — looking to move out of my old place, Jason suggested we’d be doing each other a favour. The rent was ridiculously low, and although he denied it I suspected Jason might have something to do with that as well. Even then I’d been reluctant, until Rachel weighed in. It wasn’t safe to stay in my old flat, she’d argued, green eyes angry. I’d been attacked and almost died there once: was I really going to ignore police advice and risk my life out of some sort of stubborn pride?

She had a point.

A few years before, a woman called Grace Strachan had stabbed and left me for dead on my own doorstep. A violent psychotic who blamed me for the death of her brother, Grace had disappeared afterwards and not been seen since. It had taken a long time for the scars to heal — especially the psychological ones — but I’d gradually let myself believe the danger had passed. It was hard to imagine how someone so unstable could avoid capture for so long, not without help. I’d begun to think she must be dead, or at the very least out of the country. Somewhere she could no longer pose a threat.

Then, while I’d been working on a murder investigation in Essex earlier this year, the police had found her fingerprint after an attempted break-in at my flat. There was no way of knowing how long the print had been there, and it was possible it had simply been missed after her knife attack. But it was also possible that Grace had returned to finish what she’d started.

Even then I’d been reluctant to leave. I didn’t have any particular attachment to the flat itself — Grace’s attempt on my life and a failed past relationship were the two defining memories from my time there — but if I moved out I wanted it to be on my own terms. This felt too much like running away.

In the end, what persuaded me wasn’t any advice from the police, or even a belated sense of self-preservation. It was that Rachel often stayed at the flat as well.

It wasn’t just my life I was risking.

So I’d moved into Ballard Court, an address where I wasn’t listed, and whose security systems, electric gates and underground car parking met with the approval of Rachel and the police. If Grace Strachan was back, if she’d somehow got wind of my survival, she’d have a hard time even finding out where I was, let alone getting within arm’s reach.

Since that initial fingerprint, though, there had been no further sign of her. To begin with the police had kept surveillance on my empty flat: empty because I wasn’t about to sell it or let it out if there was a chance it was being targeted. But as the weeks went by the patrols had been scaled down. By now I’d become convinced the whole thing was a false alarm, and made up my mind to move back once my tenancy in the secure but soulless Ballard Court had ended. I’d yet to break the news to Rachel, reasoning that there’d be time for that later. I wasn’t going to spoil our last night together.

As it turned out, someone else did.

My phone rang as we were preparing dinner, both of us determinedly trying to act as though she weren’t leaving the next morning. The evening sun gilded the windows, casting long shadows and reminding us that the summer was over. I glanced at Rachel. I wasn’t expecting any calls, and couldn’t think of anyone who might be phoning on a Sunday evening. She raised an eyebrow but said nothing as I picked up. The name on the display was Sharon Ward .

I turned back to Rachel. ‘It’s work. I don’t have to answer it.’

Her smile crinkled the corners of her eyes, but as she turned away there was a look in them I couldn’t read.

‘Yes, you do,’ she said.

Most people would regard my profession as odd. Macabre, even. I spend as much time with the dead as with the living, exploring the transforming effect of decay and dissolution in order to identify human remains and to understand what might have brought them to that state.

It’s an often-dark calling but a necessary one, and when I saw Ward’s name on my phone I knew straight away what it meant. She’d been a DI when I’d first met her, after a body part had been left, quite literally, on my doorstep. But she’d recently been promoted to DCI, heading up one of the Met’s Murder Investigation Teams. If she was ringing on a Sunday evening, then it wasn’t a social call.

It was a sign of how blasé I’d become that I’d felt barely a flicker of concern. A few months ago it had been Ward who’d warned me that the fingerprint found at my flat belonged to Grace Strachan. Since then we’d been in occasional touch as she’d kept me up to date with developments to locate the woman who’d tried to kill me. Or lack of them, as it turned out. So much so, I never even considered that she might be phoning up now about anything other than work.

She wasn’t. A body had been found in the loft of an abandoned hospital in Blakenheath, in North London. The old infirmary had lain unused for years, the haunt mainly of substance abusers and the homeless. The unidentified remains looked to have been dead for some time, and their poor condition meant a forensic anthropologist was needed. Seeing as it was in my neck of the woods, could I pop over to take a look?

I said I could.

It wasn’t how I’d wanted to spend my last evening with Rachel for three months. But she’d told me it was better for me to work than have both of us moping around the apartment with last-night blues. Go on, she’d said, don’t keep them waiting.