Tom Knox: The Babylon rite

‘Found ’em on the kitchen floor. Gone to Path.’

Ibsen walked through the hallway into the white-and-steel kitchen. At the far end a set of French windows gave on to the lawn. The doors were open to the cold and the drizzle. Bleak, leafless trees bent over the vast lawns; a tennis court, padlocked shut for the winter, lay at the far end of the grounds.

The streaks of blood stretched from the sitting room through the hallway into the kitchen to a larger pool of blood where the butchery must have been committed.

Larkham came alongside.

‘Prints?’ asked Ibsen. ‘In the mud, the garden?’

‘Nothing yet, sir, but we have found… this. Incredibly.’

Larkham was holding a clear plastic bag, inside which was a very large, viciously serrated Sabatier kitchen knife, smeared and gummed with blood. The murder weapon, without question.

The DCI gazed at it in astonishment. ‘The killer just left this?’

‘Lying on the kitchen floor. By the fridge, sir. And look-’ With a pencil Larkham pointed to the black resin handle of the knife. Perfectly visible was a large red thumb print: a patent print. The lottery win of evidential police work.

For the briefest moment, Ibsen felt like celebrating: this was so easy, a patent print, on the murder weapon, an open door to solving the case. But another second told him this was too easy. Way too easy. The door closed, revealing a darker truth. He regarded the puzzle, gazing at the fridge and the blood and the knife. What did he have? Something. Definitely something. He considered the missing right hand. The cut to the right of the neck. The left — hand thumb print on the handle. The strange oblique angle of the amputations themselves.

Ibsen took out his own pen and pointed at the knife. ‘That’s not the killer’s print. I bet that’s the victim’s print.’

Larkham’s face expressed wide and sincere puzzlement.

‘Don’t you see? The murderer has, so far as we can tell, left no other clues, no boot prints, no blatant trace evidence. A truly professional job, then, despite the torture… despite the butchery.’

‘So?’

The French windows creaked in the cold wet wind, and blustered old dead leaves into the kitchen.

‘Would he just leave behind a murder weapon with a big fat print on it? No. So he discarded or ignored the knife for a reason. Because he must have known the print on the blade belonged to someone else. So it would provide no evidence against him.’

‘Ah…’

‘Now think about the corpse,’ Ibsen continued. ‘The slice to the neck was on the right, like someone left-handed, reaching around, trying to cut his own neck. This is a left-handed thumb print on the knife. Likewise, the cuts to the leg are distinctively angled, as if the severing blade was wielded in a particular direction. By someone crouching, doing it to himself. ’

‘Sir?’

‘The kid was living here alone, right?’

‘Uh, yes, sir.’

‘Remember the desk. The notepad and the phone were to the left of the laptop. He’s left-handed. He did the amputations himself. Therefore my guess is… the thumb print is from the victim’s own hand.’

Larkham stared moodily at the garden, at the grey enormous lawn. ‘That means, it means…’

‘Yes. That means the killer forced the victim. To cut off his own feet. And his own hand. And even to slice into his own neck. He kindly left the victim with one hand intact, his best left hand, so he could do this to himself. Check the corpse for prints: I wager the thumb print will match.’

For the faintest second, the coolly ambitious Detective Sergeant Peter Larkham of New Scotland Yard looked as if he was going to be sick.

Morningside, Edinburgh

Nina McLintock and Adam Blackwood halted at the corner of Springvalley Terrace. The night had cleared and it was now piercingly cold, with a keening wind off the Firth of Forth, and the street was wholly deserted. Glittery with silent frost.

‘It’s in that block there,’ Nina said. ‘Stepmother’s flat. He moved in with her a coupla years ago.’

Adam followed her anxious steps, looking up at the severe windows as he went. The terrace comprised one of those sandstone tenements which in England would have been considered lower class, if they existed at all; in Scotland these large, sombre blocks of Victorian apartments had a posh ambience, especially here in Morningside, the upmarket inner suburb of Edinburgh.

A burst of noise behind them — drinkers falling out of a shutting pub — hurried the two of them around the curving pavement to the front door of the tenement block.

‘How are we going to-’

‘I know where he kept his spare key. He was a bit of a lush. If you get home drunk a lot, you learn to hide a spare key.’

Adam nodded. He could empathize with that, all right. He remembered his own days of drinking: the fights and the forgetfulness. Locked out of his home in Sydney. After Alicia.

‘Here.’ Nina thrust a hand through some railings, and scrabbled in the soil of a small front garden. ‘Just here, under the rosebush. Second rosebush on the right.’

She rummaged under the dead roseless plant while Adam glanced up and down the street, increasingly fretful. This didn’t look good. Two people loitering on an empty street at one in the morning, digging in a stranger’s garden.

He strove to repress his greater anxiety: the unnerving two-way logic of what he was doing. Either Nina was deluded and he was painfully wasting his time because he was so pathetically desperate for a story; or she was right, and Archie McLintock had been murdered. Which meant a murderer.

‘Quick!’ He could hear footsteps, somewhere. Round the curving corner, coming their way.

‘Got it.’ Nina stood, brandishing two very muddied keys.

The footsteps were louder now, right behind them. It was one of the drinkers from the pub. Tall, shaven-headed, wearing a dark coat. The man abruptly paused, under a streetlamp, to light a cigarette, scratching a match into flame. Adam stared, even as he tried not to stare. There was something odd about the man’s hands, cupped around the cigarette: they were decorated with large tattoos. Tattoos of skulls. Was he really just a drinker? Or a murderer?

The secret that can get you killed.

This was nonsense; Adam calmed himself. Just a drinker…

Flicking the match, exhaling smoke, the man continued, passing by. He gave them a fraction of a glance, and a trace of a boozy smile, as he loped on down the road.

Adam and Nina stared at each other in the cold and frosted lamplight. She shook her head. ‘Come on.’

Wiping the mud from the keys with the sleeve of her big anorak, Nina turned and paced to the front door. The first key slotted in; they stepped inside. The hall was dark and hushed with tragic silence, it felt like the shrouded hallway of someone who had recently died. Adam’s hand reflexively moved to the wall, but Nina shook her head and whispered, ‘ No light switch.’ Instead she used the light on her mobile phone to guide them, warily, up four steep flights of stairs.

Faint noises echoed. A soft Edinburgh voice floated up from somewhere; he heard a TV turned off. The muffled noises of posh tenement life.

‘37D.’ The effete beam of her mobile phone just picked out the number on the doorway and she lifted the second key to the Yale lock.

Then a shrill voice from below sent a rush of schoolboy fear through Adam. As if he had been caught, in the most flagrant way, by a headmistress.

‘What is it? Who is it? I’ll call the police!’

Light flooded the stairwell.

‘Crap,’ Nina said, very quietly. ‘It’s the landlady. Sophie Walker. Say nothing.’ She stepped to the banister and stared down. ‘Oh, God. Sophie, hello, I’m so sorry to scare you — we didn’t want to wake anyone — it’s just… you know…’