What She Saw (11 page)

Agitated, Rosen walked from the MIR to the epicentre of the crime scene.

A lone figure emerged from Claude House. Rosen saw it from the corner of his eye as a manifestation of speed, confidence and athleticism, and turned to see more.

It was Stevie Jensen, jogging powerfully in black Adidas jogging bottoms with three parallel silver stripes running from hip down to the ankle. He wore a royal blue Nike top with a black flash from the collar to the base of the arm and, on his feet, a pair of red Nike running shoes with an intricate silver pattern of parallel lines. But the thing that struck Rosen most was the manner in which Stevie ran; a young man with his life in front of him, striding the pavement as if he owned every paving stone, running as if towards his future life itself.

Their eyes met as Stevie hotfooted across Bannerman Square.

‘Hello, Stevie!' said Rosen, his agitation relieved for a moment.

‘Hello, Mr Rosen!' the boy responded, not breaking his step, running hard past Rosen and on his way out of Bannerman Square.
Keep running, Stevie
, thought Rosen.
Keep running as fast as you can
from here. Don't stop for anything or anyone
.

As Stevie turned the corner away from Bannerman Square, Rosen heard a young child crying. For a moment, it sounded like his son.

As the crying came closer, he turned and saw a woman in her early twenties pushing a toddler in a buggy with one hand, a phone pressed to her ear with the other.

An attractive brunette, she walked very slowly, her mouth moving as she spoke into the phone. Across the bare space, her eyes connected with Rosen and then she looked away.

What do you want?
thought Rosen.
And who are you talking to?

She was heading towards him. Slowly.

Coldness crept through Rosen as he wondered if this young mother was a cult member, a scout sent out to tell the others when he was alone. He turned to see if there were people advancing silently towards him, but Bannerman Square was empty save for him and the mother, whose child raised his arms and yawned.

‘Well, I never. . .' Rosen said to himself as she came closer.

It was the young mother from the Bannerman Square CCTV footage. He contained his excitement, stayed right where he was, did and said nothing.

She glanced at Rosen and said, ‘Listen!' and looked away.

She carried on walking, directing her attention into the phone and then said, ‘I want to talk to you, Mr Rosen, but I'm not walking into your Portakabin, know what I mean? I live at 4E, fourth floor, Claude House.'

She was past him now, heading home. Rosen looked at his watch. Six twenty-three.

‘Leave it an hour at least, Mr Rosen.'

With mounting excitement, he headed back to the MIR, hurrying the last ten metres as the phone on his desk was ringing loudly.

‘David.' It was Bellwood. ‘Good news. Meryl Southall's with me at Isaac Street. She's got news on Thomas Glass's SIM card.'

24

6.25 P.M.

H
e walked towards the railway arches with the confidence of a man wearing the perfect disguise.

He looked ahead, saw a cluster of women advancing towards him and drank in their blank faces. It was as if he was invisible to them. Except to the small blonde nearest to him.

The briefest moment.

Her shoulder had brushed against his arm.

He didn't like being touched.

Her eyes met his and she said, ‘Sorry.' His arm still at her shoulder, he breathed softly in the direction of her ear, and in that breath he encoded an ancient curse upon her.

Off she went, laughing, while above an aeroplane left a vapour trail, two blood-red scratches in the sky.

The black bag containing his tools weighed heavy on his left shoulder and he held onto the strap with his right hand, turning his head forty-five degrees to the right to gaze into the harshly lit interior of a double-decker London bus, its packed lower deck full of commuters. They may as well have all been blind, deaf and dumb.

The gathering momentum of a train, on an overhead bridge in the near distance.

In the bag on his back, the slosh of petrol in a can and the head of a hammer pressing into his flesh.

His thoughts turned to Mother and a smile broke out on his face.

Mother. He asked her silently, respectfully and lovingly, to inform his Other that if he wasn't already in the meeting place then to hurry there and not be late, because their sacrifice was soon and had to be as brief as it was bold. He had no need to communicate by phone or text or any of the other detritus of the modern world. His means of communication was ancient and perfect and never failed to reach the ears of his partner in holy worship. For Mother spoke directly to those who heard her.

Nearly there now. The arches. A garage door shuttered over for the end of the day, a mechanic with his back turned to him as he entered the shadow of the arches.

He turned left and walked directly towards the alleyway, around the corner and out of sight.

He pictured the face of Detective Chief Inspector Rosen, in the near future, when he saw the remains of their sacrifice, the fruit of their labour of love for Mother.
Rosen?
It was an insult that the best the London Metropolitan Police could put up against them was Rosen.
Rosen?
That tired and ever-sorrowful specimen had no chance.

Behind his back, he sensed the arrival of his partner and raised his hand in greeting as he turned the corner into the hidden alley, only metres from the broad and busy pavement, towards which the next sacrifice was heading at speed.

He paused to savour the squealing of brakes on the nearby street and the screams that followed it. His senses were alert, his ears keen enough to hear the wing beat of a fly.

Who was Rosen?

He slipped the bag from his back, opened it and took out the petrol can and the hammer. He rattled a box of matches in his hand and breathed in the holy aroma of petrol, the fuel created from the bones of prehistoric beasts, Mother's handiwork.

He heard his partner's voice inside his head. ‘
The small blonde bitch who touched you
. . .'

‘. . .
Yes
. . .'

Their voices harmonized. ‘
Crushed. Car. Mounted. Pavement
.
Dead
.'

Who was Rosen against such power?
Who
was Rosen?

After tonight, Rosen was the next sacrifice. That's who Rosen was.

25

6.40 P.M.

I
n the incident room at Isaac Street Police Station, Bellwood noticed freelance telecommunications expert Meryl Southall eyeing up Gold and Feldman as they stared at CCTV footage.

‘Not exactly spoiled for choice, are you?' said Southall.

‘I'd never mix work with relationships,' replied Bellwood, agreeing with Southall, but not wishing to be disloyal or dismissive of her colleagues. She liked both men too much for that, and they always treated her with courtesy and respect.

Rosen hurried through the door, weighed the room up and said, ‘Come on!' to Gold and Feldman. Immediately, they followed him to his desk as Rosen waved to Corrigan across the room.

Bellwood was especially pleased to see Rosen because Southall had been annoyingly reticent about ‘the big deal' she'd picked up from Thomas's phone.

Meryl Southall had worked for fourteen hours on the SIM. She looked jaded and sorely out of patience. Rosen wondered for a moment if she was going to attack him with her vividly painted fingernails.

She handed Rosen a small plastic bag. Inside was a dark and fire-damaged SIM card. Next, she placed a blown-up photograph on his desk.

‘This is an optical micrograph of that SIM card, the card in Thomas's phone.' It was an enlarged image, showing a metallic surface with double-digit numbers running parallel down the surface and linked by little lines, much like a ruler. On the surface of the image there were unblown metallic blisters.

Looking at the SIM card in the bag and the optical micrograph, the hope Rosen had incubated between Bannerman Square and Isaac Street withered.

He went for neutral: ‘So, what did you find, Meryl?'

‘When a phone's been subject to fire, data can be maintained in a SIM card's memory up to temperatures of 450 degrees Celsius. The temperature graph in a car fire such as this will curve off into four figures, so we're looking at 1000 degrees-plus Celsius at the hottest points in the fire where the fire burns most fiercely. Which part of the Renault was the least torched?'

‘Back seat,' said Rosen.

‘Left-hand side,' Bellwood recalled.

‘Well, the phone in which this SIM was the brains either slipped or was pushed down the back seat, left-hand side, where the damage amounted to approximately 400–440 degrees Celsius; unlike the front seats of the car, the wheel and the engine, where the damage registered around 1100 degrees at the top of its curve. So, the data on the EEPROM wasn't necessarily affected.'

‘The EEPROM?' Rosen asked.

‘Erasable electrically programmable read-only memory. It's stored on the floating gate at the dead centre of the SIM.'

‘What information was retained?' Rosen wondered how long or short the straw would be.

‘The mobile phone was purchased directly from Virgin Media,' said Meryl Southall. ‘The last active call made on it was from Thomas's home to a public phone box on Croydon Road on the day he disappeared. The last call received was last night at approximately ten past nine. The
call lasted three minutes and came from an iPhone. I've already checked the number with DS Corrigan.'

She nodded at him and Corrigan said, ‘It's the iPhone Thomas walked out of his house with.'

‘The last call to Thomas's phone was made from the Bannerman Square area. I can tell when calls are made, not what was said though. Sorry.'

Meryl Southall reached in her bag and took out a pen drive, which she placed on Rosen's desk.

‘It's all in my report and all the technical detail the Crown Prosecution Service will need is in there, too. I'm shattered. I've been awake since three o'clock this morning. Like I say, Rosen, this has been a king-sized pain in the arse.'

‘And you, Meryl, are my brand-new friend.'

‘No. No. . .' Swinging her bag over her shoulder, she handed Bellwood an envelope. ‘There's the bill. It's not at all friendly. Not a bit of it.'

After she had gone, Rosen wondered if it was one man or two who'd driven Thomas to Bannerman Square. He gazed into space and imagined the confinement in the back of the car.

‘David?' He looked up at Bellwood's voice. ‘He had his phone with him. Why didn't Thomas call for help?'

Rosen remembered the case of a teenage boy, surrounded by a gang. The gang member wielding the knife had dropped the weapon. The teenager had picked it up and handed it back. Within a minute, the boy had bled to death on the pavement.

‘They had him in a complete state of terror,' said Rosen. ‘It's possible they ordered him by phone to set the car on fire, to set himself alight. That last phone call, ten past nine from Bannerman Square, it could have been the death sentence. It's possible that Thomas Glass set himself on fire.'

There was a hideous silence as the theory sank in. Bellwood looked at Feldman, who shook his head. Gold stared at the floor. Rosen leaned
his weight against his desk, clutching the edges as his knuckles turned white.

‘Jesus,' said Corrigan, softly, looking up but not looking directly at anyone.

‘He must've thought' – Rosen found it hard to come to terms with the idea, but pressed on – ‘that setting himself on fire was better than another option.'

‘But what about the two men Macy Conner saw?' asked Gold, his round face red, a film of sweat forming on his forehead.

‘The order came by mobile phone,' said Rosen, the logic of it unravelling in his head and making him feel sick. ‘They came out of the shadows and descended on the car. They were the physical menace that ensured the order of the voice was carried out. They were the enforcers.'

The long, ugly silence was broken when Feldman said, ‘CCTV.' And went back to his desk. He turned and spoke to Gold with an irritation in his voice that none had heard before: ‘So am I going to do this by myself, Gold?'

Rosen gave Gold a subtle nod of the head and he followed.

‘Christ,' said Corrigan. Rosen suspected he wasn't blaspheming but instead was praying beneath his breath.

‘What did they do to his head during his captivity?' asked Bellwood.

‘Stuck a head worm into his ear, let it gnaw into the centre of his brain. They made him believe burning to death was the lesser of two punishments.'

Rosen headed for the door at speed.

‘Where are you going, David?'

‘Bannerman Square!'

26

7.30 P.M.

T
he door of 4E Claude House was ajar, the opening music of
EastEnders
leaking into the corridor outside. Rosen knocked slowly, firmly, three times and the theme music died as the TV was turned off.

‘OK.' The woman's voice came from inside the flat. He closed the door behind him and followed the sound of her voice.

The living room was immaculately decorated, tastefully laid out with a black leather three-piece suite and a print on the wall that Rosen recognized as a Monet. A toddler sat in a high chair as the young woman cut up food for him on his plate. On the floor, a large protective sheet covered the carpet.

In the hour since they'd spoken on Bannerman Square, the young woman had put on far too much make-up: her pleasant features had become a caricature. Rosen wondered,
Why? Where are you going tonight?

Without looking up, she said, ‘He won't eat in any other room, will you, Luke?'

The baby picked up a forkful of meat and shovelled it into his mouth, assured in his action and approving with, ‘Mmmnnn. . .' Rosen noticed the peas and broccoli on the boy's plate. She was bringing her child up with a good attitude towards healthy eating.