Ben Aaronovitch - Broken Homes

‘That we know of,’ I said. ‘Anyway, still a bit of a waste of time for us.’

‘We had to be sure,’ said Nightingale. ‘And it does you good to get out into the countryside.’

‘Oh yeah,’ I said. ‘Nothing like a day trip to a crime scene. This can’t be the first time you’ve investigated a serial killer.’

‘If that’s what he is,’ said Nightingale.

‘If he is then he can’t have been your first,’ I said.

‘Unfortunately true,’ said Nightingale. ‘Although I’ve never been the one in charge.’

‘Were any of the famous ones supernatural?’ I asked, thinking it would explain a great deal.

‘Had they been supernatural,’ said Nightingale, ‘we’d have ensured that they were not famous.’

‘What about Jack the Ripper?’ I asked.

‘No,’ said Nightingale. ‘And believe me there would have been relief if he had turned out to be a demon or some such. I knew a wizard who’d assisted the police investigation and he said that they’d all have slept far sounder knowing it wasn’t a man doing such terrible things.’

‘Peter Sutcliffe?’

‘I interviewed him myself,’ said Nightingale. ‘Nothing. And he certainly wasn’t a practitioner or under the influence of a malicious spirit.’ He held up a hand to stop me asking my next question. ‘Nor was Dennis Nilsen, as far as I could tell, or Fred West or Michael Lupo or any of the parade of dreadful individuals I’ve had to vet in the last fifty years. Perfectly human monsters every one of them.’

If he was our perfectly human monster, then Robert Weil was keeping schtum about it. I kept track of the interview transcripts via HOLMES and in the first round of interviews it’s about what you’d expect. He denies having a body in the back of his car, claims that he went out for a drive and a walk, doesn’t know how the blood got there, certainly has no knowledge of dead women with their faces shot off. As it becomes clear that the forensic evidence is overwhelming, what with blood on his clothes and mud under his fingernails, he stops answering questions. Once he was formally charged and remanded in custody he ceased talking to anyone — even his brief who then recommended that he be psychologically evaluated. Even just skimming the actions list I could feel the MCT’s frustration as they settled into a long hard slog, grinding down every lead into fine powder and then sifting it for clues. The victim stayed stubbornly unidentified and the autopsy revealed nothing more than to confirm that she was white, female, mid-thirties and hadn’t eaten for at least forty-eight hours before her death. Cause of death was most likely a shotgun blast to the face at a range close enough to leave powder burns. Dr Walid, gastroenterology’s answer to Cat Stevens and, as far as we knew, the only practising crypto-pathologist in the world, popped in on his way home with his own autopsy report.

So we had afternoon tea and pathology, sitting in the stuffed leather armchairs downstairs in the atrium. The Folly had last been refurbished in the 1930s when the British establishment firmly believed that central heating was the work, if not of the devil per se, then definitely evil foreigners bent on weakening the hardy British spirit. Bizarrely, despite its size and the glass dome, the atrium was often warmer than the small dining room or either of the libraries.

‘As you can see,’ said Dr Walid laying out pictures of thin slices of brain on the table, ‘there are no signs of hyperthaumaturgical degradation.’ The slices had been stained a variety of lurid colours to improve the contrast, but Dr Walid complained that they remained stubbornly normal — I took his word for it.

‘Nor was there any sign of chimeric modification to any of the tissue samples,’ he said and sipped his coffee. ‘But I have sent off a couple of them to be sequenced.’

Nightingale nodded politely, but I knew for a fact that he only had the vaguest idea of what DNA was, since he was old enough to have been Crick and Watson’s father.

‘I think we may as well consider this case closed,’ he said. ‘At any rate, from our perspective.’

‘I’d like to keep monitoring it,’ I said. ‘At least until we have an ID for the victim.’

Nightingale drummed the table with his fingertips. ‘Are you sure you have the time for that?’ he asked.

‘Sussex and Surrey MCT will produce a weekly summary while the case is ongoing,’ I said. ‘It’ll take me ten minutes.’

‘I don’t think he takes me as seriously as he should,’ Nightingale told Dr Walid. ‘He still slopes off to conduct illicit experiments whenever he thinks I’m not looking.’ He looked at me. ‘What is your latest interest?’

‘I’ve been looking at how long various materials retain vestigia ,’ I said.

‘How do you measure the intensity of the vestigia ?’ asked Dr Walid.

‘He uses the dog,’ said Nightingale.

‘I put Toby in a box along with the material and then I measure the loudness and frequency of his barking,’ I said. ‘It’s no different from using a sniffer dog.’

‘How can you be sure of consistency of results?’ asked Dr Walid.

‘I ran a series of control experiments to eliminate variables,’ I said. Toby on his own in a box at nine a.m. and then at hourly intervals for the volume baseline. And then Toby in a box with various guaranteed inert materials for a baseline on that. The third day Toby hid under the table in Molly’s kitchen and had to be lured out with sausages.

Dr Walid leaned forward as I talked — he at least appreciated a bit of empiricism. I explained that I’d exposed each material sample to identical amounts of magic, by conjuring a werelight — the simplest and most controllable spell I knew — and then put it in the box with Toby to see what happened.

‘Were there any significant findings?’ he asked.

‘Toby’s not very discriminating, so we’re talking a wide margin for error,’ I said. ‘But it was about what I expected. And in line with my reading. Stone retains vestigia the best, followed by concrete. The metals were all too similar to differentiate. Wood was next and the worst was flesh.’ In the form of a leg of pork which Toby subsequently ate before I could stop him.

‘The only surprise,’ I said, ‘were some of the plastics, which scored almost as high on the yap-o-meter as stone.’

‘Plastic?’ asked Nightingale. ‘That’s most unexpected. I’d always assumed that it was natural things that retained the uncanny.’

‘Can you email me the results?’ asked Dr Walid.

‘Sure.’

‘Have you considered testing other dogs?’ asked Dr Walid. ‘Perhaps different breeds would have different sensitivities.’

‘Abdul, please,’ said Nightingale. ‘Don’t give him any ideas.’

‘He is making progress in the art,’ said Dr Walid.

‘Barely,’ said Nightingale. ‘And I believe he’s replicating work that’s already been done.’

‘By who?’ I asked.

Nightingale sipped his tea and smiled.

‘I’ll make a bargain with you, Peter,’ he said. ‘If you make better progress in your formal studies I shall tell you where to find the notes of the last brain-box who filled the lab with. . Actually it was mostly rats, but I seem to remember a couple of dogs in his menagerie.’

‘How much better progress?’ I asked.

‘Better than you’re doing now,’ he said.

‘I wouldn’t mind seeing that data,’ said Dr Walid.

‘Then you should encourage Peter to study harder,’ said Nightingale.

‘He’s an evil man,’ I said.

‘And cunning,’ said Dr Walid.

Nightingale eyed us placidly over the rim of his tea cup.