Authors: Simon Toyne
Liv, Arkadian and Reis stood motionless.
Then Arkadian broke the spell. He glanced up into the corner of the room. ‘Out!’ he said, shepherding them into the relative warmth of the hallway before heading back towards the stairs. ‘Don’t let anyone go in there,’ he called back at Reis. ‘Check your office to see if anything’s missing – and don’t touch anything.’
Reis and Liv exchanged glances. A flicker of recognition showed in his eyes, then a look of uneasiness as he realized who she must be. Liv looked back up the corridor before it turned into pity. She saw Arkadian disappear through the doors leading to the stairwell and started after him, partly to find out what was going on and partly so she wouldn’t have to hear the pathologist telling her how sorry he was for her loss.
Arkadian took the stairs two at a time and burst back through the doors leading to reception. It was already full of people making their way back into the building. He pushed his way towards the security office.
‘Call central dispatch,’ he said to the forbidding-looking matriarch behind the desk. ‘Tell them there’s been a break-in at the morgue. Tell them to send a forensics team and stand by for a description of the suspects.’
The woman glared at him sternly over a pair of half-moon glasses, her face a picture of indignation.
‘Now!’ he bellowed, snapping everyone to attention. ‘And no one’s to go down to the sub-basement.’
The nerve centre of the morgue’s security operation was just about big enough to house a chair, a desk and several towers of computer memory recording the feeds from eighteen CCTVs. A couple of flat-screen monitors sat on the desktop, each split into three grids with an image from a different camera in every square. A uniformed man in his fifties looked up as Arkadian entered, the glow of the twin screens glinting on the Reactolite lenses of glasses still dark from the outside daylight.
Arkadian flashed his badge. ‘Can you punch up the feed covering the cold-storage chamber in the lower basement?’
Light flooded into the darkened room as the door beside him opened again. Arkadian turned and saw Liv squeeze in behind him. She stared resolutely at the monitors to avoid making eye contact. He thought about asking her to leave, but decided he’d prefer to keep her close.
He dug out his phone and scrolled through the caller log until he found the call Reis had made when the fire alarm had gone off. Nine-fourteen. One of the screens was now filled with the feed from the camera he’d spotted in the corner of the cold store. ‘Can you wind it back to o-nine-fourteen, and play it from there?’
The guard pulled down the menu and tapped in the time. The picture jumped and a man appeared in the middle of the previously empty room, manoeuvring an empty trolley towards one of the lockers.
‘Who’s that?’ Arkadian asked.
The security guard peered at the screen. The man stopped and looked around, registering the shrill sound of the alarm.
‘Don’t know his name, but he works here,’ the security guard said. ‘I think he’s one of the lab techs.’
The recording continued in three-second jerks until the man vanished, moving like a badly animated marionette.
‘Look at the sheet.’ Liv pointed at the screen. ‘Neatly folded on top of the trolley. When we got there it was all bunched up.’
‘Can you speed it up a little?’ Arkadian asked.
The guard hit a key a couple of times and the numbers jumped forward in five second units, then ten. When the clock flipped to o-nine-seventeen another figure stepped into the frame.
‘Hold it,’ Arkadian said.
The guard resumed its three-second default.
The newcomer was tall, black hair, black clothes. They couldn’t see his face. He kept his back to the camera the whole time. He moved past the trolley and stopped in front of the drawer Arkadian had opened. He reached for the handle with a gloved hand and pulled. Liv felt her heart pound against her ribcage. She saw the outline of a body-bag.
The man unzipped it. Despite the poor quality of the image, Liv recognized the bearded face immediately and felt tears pricking her eyes. A moment later the interloper shifted his position and obscured Samuel’s face with his body. He seemed to be searching for something in his jacket pocket. He struggled against the material for a few moments then removed the glove from his right hand and recommenced his search, quickly finding whatever it was he was looking for. He leaned across the open drawer with whatever he had retrieved from the pocket, then whipped his head round towards the door, clearly disturbed by something. He had kept his face tilted down, wary of the camera, but Liv still saw enough to recognize him.
‘Gabriel . . .’ she breathed. ‘He picked me up at the airport last night.’
Arkadian grabbed the desk phone, his eyes never leaving the screen as the man zipped up the body-bag, slid the drawer back into place, climbed on to the trolley and pulled up the plastic sheet.
‘This is Inspector Davud Arkadian. We’ve just had a break-in at the morgue; I want all units on the lookout for a suspect. A white male. Slender build. Maybe six-one, six-two. Black clothes –’
Two new figures dressed as paramedics appeared, pushing a trolley between them. The taller one glanced up at the camera but it was impossible to see his face. Both wore surgical masks, caps, lab coats and Nitrile gloves. Arkadian watched them move straight to Sam’s locker. They checked inside the body-bag, hoisted it on to the trolley, closed the drawer and wheeled the earthly remains of Samuel Newton out of frame. The whole operation had taken less than fifteen seconds.
Gabriel rose like something out of a horror film and followed them, leaving the plastic sheet how they had discovered it.
Arkadian covered the mouthpiece with his hand. ‘Is there a camera in the delivery bay?’
The cold-storage chamber was replaced by a raised concrete platform with an ambulance on one side and a set of overlapping plastic doors on the other. Liv thought it looked like the entrance to a meat-processing factory.
After a few seconds the doors buckled and a trolley crashed through them. The two paramedics practically threw it into the back of the ambulance.
Arkadian removed his hand from the mouthpiece. ‘We have a new priority. I want an urgent BOLO for an ambulance outbound from the city morgue, heading towards Hallelujah Crescent. Licence plate unknown. Suspects are two Caucasian males, medium-heavy build, one maybe six-three, the other around five-ten, both dressed as paramedics. Be advised the suspects are wanted for break-in and unlawful seizure and are fleeing the crime scene. A photo of the secondary suspect will be circulated immediately.’
He slammed down the phone. ‘Can you lift images of the suspects from the footage and email it to central dispatch?’ It wasn’t a request.
Arkadian didn’t wait for the guard’s reply. He needed to talk to Reis.
Gabriel slipped into the deserted dispatch room and ducked under the central counter, still covered with the morning’s post and packages, abandoned as soon as the alarm had sounded. He retrieved his bag and bike helmet from where he’d stashed them and grabbed a medium-sized padded envelope as he heard voices in the hallway.
‘You OK there?’ A middle-aged woman had appeared at the door, regarding him with flinty suspicion from behind thick designer frames.
‘Yeah . . . got a package here for . . .’ Gabriel glanced at the label. ‘A Dr . . . Makin?’ He treated her to a 500-watt smile.
After about a second in its beam her hand fluttered up to her chest and her eyes softened. ‘You mean Dr
Meachin
,’ she said. ‘Need me to sign for it?’
‘No, that’s OK,’ Gabriel said. ‘Guy who pointed me here already signed for it.’
He slipped back into the hallway. The place was filled with people. He heard someone shouting in the reception area behind him. He pressed on to the delivery bay. The back of the building was deserted. At the far end of the alley he saw an ambulance easing into the morning traffic on Hallelujah Crescent.
He jumped down from the concrete platform and sprinted to where he’d left his bike behind a large refuse bin. With two hard kicks on the starter pedal he gunned it up the alley then braked hard. Hallelujah Crescent was a one-way street, always crammed at this time of the morning. Gabriel looked left. He couldn’t see the ambulance. He began threading his way in and out of the cars, scanning the traffic ahead. The road uncoiled before him, bit by frustrating bit, until it reached the junction with the southern boulevard and split in two – right towards the outskirts and left towards the Citadel. His money was on left, but he eased the bike into the central line for the time being, ready to turn in either direction the moment he spotted his target.
He stamped his heel on the brake, locking the back wheel. A horn blared and a van steered around him, its driver shouting angrily from the safety of his cab. Gabriel didn’t even notice. He was looking up the boulevard, checking both ways, confirming that somewhere between the alley and this junction the ambulance had simply vanished.
Reis was scanning a sheet of paper when Arkadian walked into his office.
‘Anything missing?’
‘Nope.’ Reis remained at his desk. ‘I thought they may have taken this – the lab report I told you about – but I guess they didn’t know what it was. It’s . . . extraordinary.’
He glanced over the Inspector’s shoulder and his face registered surprise. Liv stood in the doorway behind him.
Arkadian sighed. ‘Reis, this is Liv Adamsen. She’s related to . . . She’s the monk’s sister.’
‘Yeah, I . . . er . . . Hi . . .’ A nervous smile tweaked the edges of Reis’s mouth. ‘Sorry about the, er . . .’ He trailed off as his mind tottered through a minefield of inappropriate responses to what had just happened.
‘Sorry about losing my brother’s body?’ Liv suggested.
‘Yeah . . . I guess . . .’ he said. ‘First time it’s ever happened.’
‘Well, that’s reassuring.’
Reis blushed, ruining his well-cultivated pallor, and dropped his gaze. ‘No, I suppose . . . er . . . no . . .’ He shut up before he could dig himself deeper.
Arkadian pinched the bridge of his nose. ‘Miss Adamsen . . .’ He fixed her with what he hoped was a look of suitable authority. ‘I know you’re angry, and you have a right to be, but I’ve got every uniform out there looking for that ambulance. We’ll get your brother back. I shouldn’t have let you down here in the first place, and now it’s a crime scene you can’t be here. I need you to go back up to reception and wait until we’ve secured this area.’
Liv held his gaze. ‘No.’
‘It wasn’t a request.’
Very deliberately, Liv stepped into the office and sat down opposite Reis. ‘Let me explain why I’m staying. In the last twenty-four hours I’ve discovered that my brother, who I thought was already dead,
has
died, for real. I’ve flown thousands of miles on uncomfortable planes to come and identify him. I’ve been kidnapped, shot at, and then – just when I thought I would finally be re-united with him –
you
lost him.’
She let the words sink in.
‘I know how to behave at a crime scene. I can’t contaminate this one further because I’ve already been in it. So you might as well keep me here and keep me happy. Because,’ she held up the crumpled newspaper, ‘if you try and pack me off, the first thing I’ll do is call my editor. Think he might hold the front page?’
Reis flicked between Arkadian and the girl as they stared each other out, until Arkadian finally blinked.
‘OK,’ he said. ‘Stay. But if anything does leak to the press, anything at all, I’m going to assume it came from you and charge you with obstruction of an ongoing investigation. Are we clear?’
‘Perfectly.’ She turned, the ice in her green eyes instantly thawing. ‘So – Reis, isn’t it . . .?’
The pathologist nodded. Feisty women frightened him at the best of times. He also found them incredibly attractive. This one was off the scale.
‘You were saying something about a lab report?’
Reis glanced at Arkadian, who just shrugged.
‘OK. Er . . . lab reports are a normal part of the clinical procedure . . . as you probably know. Here we always run a standard batch of tissue tests and tox routines to establish certain things and rule out others, such as whether the subject may have taken, or been given, something that could have contributed to their death. One of these measures the extent of necrosis in the liver, which often helps establish time of death. We didn’t really need to in this case because of all the witnesses, but procedure is procedure. These are the results –’ He gestured at a red note stapled to the top sheet.
‘It came back with a contamination query. They think the sample must have been incorrectly labelled. There was no sign of any necrosis; in fact, quite the opposite. The cells appear to be . . . regenerating. Liver cells do regenerate, of course, but only if the host is alive . . .’
Arkadian wondered – too late – if it had been the smartest move to let Liv hear this.
‘I checked it out thoroughly. The sample they got was definitely from the monk. So going purely on these results, and ignoring the fact that I performed the post-mortem myself . . .’ He hesitated. ‘I’d say he was on the mend . . .’
A third of the way along Hallelujah Crescent, in a tall, elegant building that had been hollowed out, reinforced and turned into an extortionately expensive car park, a metal screen rolled up and a plain white transit van edged its way into the traffic.
Gabriel watched from across the street, his face obscured by his visor. He glanced down at a handheld PDA device, like a motorcycle courier checking the details of a delivery. Towards the top of the screen a small white dot pulsed gently while a street map scrolled up around it. The movement of the dot corresponded exactly with that of the van, or, more precisely, the movement of Samuel’s body as the transponder he’d inserted in his throat transmitted his location.
He slipped the PDA into his jacket pocket and kick-started the bike. The van reached the end of the crescent and turned left towards the heart of the old town. Gabriel followed a few cars back.
Just short of the northern boulevard the van peeled off down a slip road past a large sign welcoming visitors to the Umbrasian Quarter.
For as long as Ruin had existed, the Umbrasian or Shadow Quarter had been the least popular and therefore least populated part of the city. Tucked below the northern side of the Citadel, the streets here remained permanently shrouded in the shadow of the mountain, even at the height of summer. In the modern era its cheap land prices made it the perfect location for the vast car parks needed to cater for the armies of tourists swarming to the city. It was into this valley of cold, grey concrete that the van now drove.
Once they left the anonymity of the ring road, Gabriel dropped further back and slid in behind a shuttle bus. The van turned sharp right, down a narrow alleyway between two huge multi-storey monstrosities.
Gabriel continued on past, pulled a fast U-turn, mounted the pavement, killed the engine and tilted the bike against its foot-rest. He slid off the detachable side-mirror and sprinted to the corner of the building, flipping up his visor as he went. He squatted against the wall, held the mirror low to the ground, angled down the alley, which ended at a sheer rock face that rose to the old town wall. He watched as the van came to a standstill. A man with long dark hair and a beard leaned out of the driver’s window and swiped a card through an entry machine then glanced back in his direction.
Gabriel froze.
With no sunlight to reflect off the mirror the only thing that would give him away was movement.
He studied the driver. The man looked more like a rock star or a movie actor than a hired thug. After a few moments the van eased forward and disappeared into the side of the building.
Gabriel pulled the PDA from his pocket. The pulsing white dot moved across the top of the screen, where the rear of the garage met the side of the mountain. He stuffed the mirror in his pocket and stood up. Hundreds of pairs of headlights peeped over a low wall that stretched away to his left, like convicts contemplating freedom. Gabriel vaulted the wall and hurried inside.
The place was cold and damp and smelt of oil and petrol fumes and urine. Aware that he was probably on CCTV he moved towards a distant Audi, made like he was about to get in it, then knelt as if for a fumbled key and stole another long look at the PDA.
The white dot was no longer within the confines of the car park, but passing through the bedrock beyond. He watched it cut across the streets and buildings of the old city, aiming straight for the Citadel. When it was two-thirds of the way there, it froze, blinked and disappeared.
Gabriel moved over to the cold concrete of the back wall and held the PDA directly against it to boost the signal. The dot flashed on again, closer still to the Citadel.
Almost at the boundary of the old moat, it flickered out completely.