“Why won’t they go?”
“These are people who’ve been here for years. Since it was built. It’s their home. They like it.”
“But just look at the place,” I said, scanning the acres of stained concrete and smashed glass.
“They think there wasn’t a problem with the buildings,” she said. “The problem was with the people. The ones who chose to use the walkways for muggings or selling drugs. To piss in the stairwells. Or to set fire to the lifts, just for fun.”
“I can see how that wouldn’t add to the sense of community,” I said, thinking about the friends who’d died, alone and away from home, protecting people who did things like this. “Maybe we could have a nose around, later. I wouldn’t mind meeting some of these muggers and drug dealers and incontinents. I could pass on the regards from some of my absent friends.”
“Don’t start with that, again,” she said. “Let’s see what we need to see, then just get out of here.”
I followed her through a kind of rectangular courtyard, boxed in on all sides by the decaying husks of square, soulless excuses for buildings. We passed through a gap in the far corner where the whole sidewall of one of the blocks was missing, and found ourselves at the entrance to another, identical courtyard.
“How many of these are there?” I said.
“I don’t know,” she said. “Thirty? Forty?”
“Heaven help us. We’ll be here all night.”
“No, we won’t. Look, back there.”
Melissa had turned round, and was pointing to the empty space where a window had been, ten floors above us. It was glowing with harsh, white light while all the others around it were dark and derelict.
We made our way to the nearest entrance and pulled aside the remnants of the twisted metal screen that was supposed to have kept the place secure.
“Take a deep breath,” Melissa said, and disappeared inside.
I followed her, and we started up the filthy concrete stairs. Even with both hands clamped over my mouth and nose, it was impossible to escape the stench. We climbed steadily, and after seven flights I began to make out the sound of voices above us.
“Oy!” a male voice said, after we’d reached the ninth landing and started on the final set of steps. “Where do you think you’re going?”
We kept on climbing, and in another moment I saw a nineteen or twenty-year-old in a police constable’s uniform blocking our path. Melissa and didn’t say anything, but she showed him her ID and he stepped back without question.
The landing stretched away into the darkness. One side was open to the elements. The other was harsh, textured concrete, interrupted by random panels of black tiles which extended up from the floor, and a regular series of doorways. Only now, the openings were covered by more metal grills. All of them, except for the one closest to us. I took a reluctant step towards it.
“You might not want to go in there, sir,” the young constable said.
I stepped past him, looked inside, and saw a large rectangular space. It would probably have been the living room, when the flat was habitable. It was a decent size, and it looked like the wide window would have made the place pleasantly bright to live in. But it was far from pleasant now. Strips of garish, almost psychedelic wallpaper were hanging from the walls. Clods of paint were dangling from the ceiling. The floor was covered with broken glass and mouse droppings. It stank even worse than the stairwell, and the two men who were already in the room had breathing masks over their faces. They were police technicians. Both were wearing white overalls. One was standing between a pair of tripod-mounted floodlights, and the other was crouching down, fiddling with the portable generator that powered them.
“Evening,” the standing technician said. “You took your time. We need to get wrapped up. Where’s your stuff?”
“What stuff?” Melissa said. “Oh, I see. No. We’re not with the coroner. It looks like you’ll have to hang on a little longer, for them. Have you been here for a while? Can you tell us what happened?”
Two bodies were lying in the middle of the floor. A man - presumably Stewart Sole - and Amany Shakran. Both were naked. Both had their wrists and ankles bound with plastic ties. Sole’s hands were behind his back. Amany’s were in front of her abdomen, which was grossly swollen and distended. It hadn’t been that way, earlier when we’d spoken to her. A double ring of continuous, deep, jagged, cuts ran round her belly, like a dark belt. Blood had seeped out from the wounds and stained the floor on either side of her, stranding a swarm of wriggling insects in a slowly congealing slick. They looked like some kind of huge ants, and more were caught in the bigger, darker puddles that surrounded the victims’ heads.
Both of them had been shot, twice. I could see where the bullets had entered, but there were no visible exit wounds. It looked like someone who knew what they were doing had been to work with a .22. There was no sign of any shell casings, either. But four other items were on the floor, lined up tidily next to Amany’s body. Two pale-blue twenty-litre NATO jerrycans. A galvanised steel funnel. And a length of red, sticky barbed wire, about five feet long.
“I think it’s pretty obvious, don’t you?” he said. “An interrogation? A punishment? An execution? Take your pick.”
“What makes someone do this?” Melissa said.
The technician just shrugged.
“I mean, what makes a person capable of doing this?” Melissa said. “Are they uniquely twisted? Or is it something in their blood?”
Chapter Twenty-Seven
When Melissa told me another progress meeting had been scheduled for the following morning, I started to worry. I could see an abyss opening up at our feet, and another fruitless NATO exercise – No Action Talk Only, as one of my old instructors used to say – lying in wait for us in its rocky depths. But when I reached Thames House and made my way upstairs to our usual meeting room, I found my concern was premature. Only Melissa and Jones were there. The others were spread out across London, following through with their various actions from our previous session. The meeting was being replaced with a conference call, apparently. Which would have been doubly fine if they’d thought to tell us before we’d done battle with the morning’s traffic.
Melissa reached across and pulled the spider phone to our side of the table so she wouldn’t have to raise her voice when she spoke, but for the first twenty minutes she needn’t have bothered. The others had been busy, and had plenty to say about the gaps they’d found in the security arrangements at the Houses of Parliament. The revised precautions they were implementing. The discussions they were having with the Queen’s protection detail, and the difficulty of persuading her bodyguards to change their existing procedures.
The only area where limited progress had been made was in investigating the group that Leckie’s informer had penetrated. None of the existing network of informers could throw any light on them, and GCHQ had been unable to uncover anything on any phone networks, email, or internet interactions that Melissa hadn’t already found out. So when she did finally get the chance to report, the satisfaction of having uncovered how the caesium was stolen was outweighed by the disappointment that the only two people definitely known to be involved had been killed.
“This is very worrying,” Hardwicke said when Melissa had relayed the last of her information, speaking for the first time and nearly deafening everyone with a blast of background traffic noise as he took his phone off mute. “The fact that another batch of caesium is in the wrong hands is extremely serious. But panic will serve no one’s interests - other than the wrongdoers. Chaston?”