Tom Knox - The Babylon rite

It was a ghastly childhood dream — of being stifled at night, feeling cold hands that throttled; it was a dream of being her father in his last moments, in hospital, misting the oxygen mask, drowning in pain, staring hapless and terrified at the nurse and the kids and the oncoming darkness — until his own seven-year-old daughter had wanted to thrust a pillow right over his face and end it for him And then the scarlet dust filled her mouth, and she could scream no more.

The Bishops Avenue, London

There were murders and there were… murders. That was the unspoken agreement between Detective Chief Inspector Ibsen and his detective sergeant, Larkham. A plain old murder was just that: a murder. A robbery gone nasty, or a domestic gone awry.

But a… murder was different. It required a microsecond of hesitation before the word was enunciated, or a subtle drop in voice tone, barely half a note, a third of a note. ‘Sir, we have a… murder.’

This one was, by all accounts, very much a… murder. Ibsen could tell from his DS’s demeanour. DS Larkham had already seen the corpse, which had been discovered six hours previously: his already-pale English face was paler than ever, his voice subdued, his normal cheeriness quite dispelled.

Their large police car was slowly rolling down The Bishops Avenue, one of the richest streets in London. Ibsen gazed out at the enormous houses, the fake Grecian villas looking faintly surreal in the drizzle. One resembled a vast temple from Luxor, inexplicably transported to the wintry north of the capital and fitted with six burglar alarms. The next house appeared to have sentries.

‘Who the fuck lives in houses like this?’ said the driver, giving voice to all their thoughts.

‘Kuwaiti emirs,’ said Ibsen. ‘Billionaire Thai politicians. Nobody in winter.’

‘Sorry, sir?’

‘Look — hardly any cars. A lot of these people have houses all over the world. They come here in summer, it’s dead in December. Makes it a good place to commit a crime. In winter.’

‘Well, our murder victim lived here.’ Larkham grimaced. ‘Even in winter.’

‘What do we know about him?’

‘Nephew of the Russian ambassador.’

‘Ouch.’ Ibsen winced at the complications. ‘This is an official residence?’

‘No, sir. Just a rich family. Father’s into oil and diamonds. Oligarch.’

‘Has someone told the Foreign Office?’

‘Already did it, sir.’

DCI Ibsen gazed, with a brief sense of pleasure, at Larkham’s keen face. Here was an ambitious policeman, a bright young man who had skipped university to go straight into the force, already a DS in his mid-twenties, with a very young family. He’d been Ibsen’s junior for just six months, and he was obviously itching for Ibsen’s job, but in a good way, just so he could move on up. Ibsen preferred to have someone nakedly and brazenly ambitious than a schemer who subtly politicked.

Larkham yawned; Ibsen grinned. ‘Nappies at dawn?’

‘And feeding at four a.m. Feel like I’ve done a shift already.’ He stifled his sleepiness and asked, ‘Does it get better?’

‘It gets better. When they reach the age of reason. About five or so.’

Larkham groaned; Ibsen chuckled. ‘OK. Tell me again. We’ve got statements?’

‘Yes, sir.’

Larkham repeated what information they had gathered so far. The first statement came from a passer-by, who had heard two raised male voices as he walked past the house at eleven p.m., though they didn’t sound violent…’

‘And the other statement?’

‘From a neighbour, an au pair in the house next door, at one a.m., approximately the time of death, according to Pathology’s very rough initial guess, sir. She also heard the raised voices of two men. She says these voices were shouting, aggressive, possibly violent, possibly drunk.’

‘But she did nothing?’

‘Very young lady, sir, Just nineteen. Croatian.’

‘Ah.’ Ibsen understood this. Bishops Avenue was the kind of place where rich important people went to be seriously undisturbed in big houses. A teenage au pair living in a strange big house in a strange new country would be reluctant to cause any bother.

‘Here we go, sir.’

The car parked outside a large building fronted by two-storey-high white Doric pillars. A big car in the driveway was covered with some kind of tailored sheet. Ibsen stared: he had never had a car expensive enough to require special protection from the English winter.

‘The body?’

‘This way.’

They were greeted at the door by the Scene of Crime Officer, wearing a paper suit which zipped up at the front. Other forensic and attending officers came out of the building, carrying evidence bags, and walked to a large steel van, parked behind the sheet-covered car.

‘There’s a lot of blood,’ said the SOCO through his paper mask, with the air of a host at a house party greeting his latest guests.

‘Can we see?’

‘You need to nonce up first, sir.’

Stalling at the doorway, Ibsen and Larkham slipped on their plastic gloves and paper masks and translucent overshoes, like politicians visiting a fish factory. Then they stepped through the enormous pillared hall into an enormous pillared sitting room. Ibsen resisted the urge to swear, as he surveyed the crime scene. Then his resistance crumbled.

‘Fucking hell.’

The victim was young, blond, and handsome: maybe twenty-five or thirty at most. He was lying supine on the floor near a large antique desk. A phone and a notepad sat on the desk, to the left of a laptop, which was lightly smeared with blood.

Opposite the desk stood some speakers, and a vast black television: ultra-expensive kit.

The face of the young Russian was slightly turned towards the desk, as if in his last moments he had tried, but failed, to make a desperate call. He was dressed in a neat blue shirt, probably bespoke, from Jermyn Street; and fashionable jeans — perhaps Armani. The new collection. The jeans were loosened at the top, half-unbuttoned.

Ibsen, who cultivated a sincere interest in clothes, would have liked to give an opinion of the kid’s footwear, but that was impossible, as the cadaver had no feet.

Someone had sliced off his feet. The raw stumps were an obscenity: the victim resembled a casualty of some industrial scythe. The body was also missing his right hand: blood had spurted from the severed wrist all over the rich Turkish carpet, making the rich red of the wool richer and purpler. The angle of the brutal amputations was unusual. Ibsen stopped to have a closer look, squinting, clutching his face mask to his mouth, and found there was even a deep grinning cut mark to the right side of the neck, as if the murderer had tried to slice off the head as well, but had given up. Perhaps the killer had got bored, or maybe the victim died of blood loss before the decapitation could be completed, rendering it pointless.

Crouching by the body, Ibsen went through the PMI calculations. How long had the body been here? Forensics would strip the corpse, and check for livor mortis — pooling of the blood at the bottom of the body — and for rigor mortis, and algor mortis, and get a scientific answer; but Ibsen’s instinct told him Pathology’s first guess was good: this body was pretty fresh. You could smell the new blood. Twelve hours at most. That made the overheard violence, at one a.m., very likely the time of death.

‘He dragged himself in here?’ Ibsen gestured at the long, lurid smears of blood along the parquet floor.

‘Yes,’ said the SOC officer, Jonson. ‘Seems he was chopped up in the kitchen, then the killer dragged the body in here, or he dragged himself, trying to reach the phone.’

‘The feet and hand?’