“Okay, here we go,” Lethe said in his ear, breaking his macabre chain of thought. “Last call in was from a cell phone registered to one Miles Devere. You recognize the name?”
“Doesn’t ring any bells,” Frost said, running the name through his memory. “Check him out though, just to be on the safe side.”
“Will do. Right, so, last call out, now this is interesting..” Lethe broke off. Frost could hear the sound of his fingers rattling off the keys beneath them. “Last call out was to the Nicholls Tobacco Warehouse, a bonded warehouse down by the Canning Docks. And what’s interesting about that, I hear you ask? Well, that was abandoned in 1983 and condemned in 2006. It’s a ruin. They had a campaign in the ’90s to try and stop the decay of all these old buildings that were built during the Industrial Revolution. Stop the Rot it was called. They made a lot of noise about preserving our heritage, but I don’t think they had a lot of luck-certainly not in this case. Nicholls is due to be torn down and replaced by luxury apartments. The phone was reconnected twelve days ago. So riddle me this, boss: why would a derelict building suddenly need a working telephone?”
“Running a line into the site office as they get ready for the demolition,” Frost said.
“Oh, go on then, take all the fun out of it with a practical answer, why don’t you?”
Outside, Frost heard the doppler of a siren rising and falling as it raced through the night. It could have been more than four or five streets away, and it was getting closer all the time. He resisted the urge to run. They weren’t coming for him. Sirens were as common as takeouts in this part of the city. He could think of a dozen reasons off the top of his head why they were heading anywhere but here, to this two-up two-down terraced house with the dead woman lying in a whorish sprawl on her bloody sheets. But with each heartbeat the sirens grew louder, and he knew each of those dozen reasons was wrong.
“Okay, Jude. I think I’m in a bit of trouble here,” he said, walking over to the door. The sirens couldn’t have been more than a street away. “Tell me the plod aren’t on the way here. Lie to me if you have to.”
“You really want me to lie?” Frost could hear the humor in his voice. He was enjoying this far too much. “Well, then, three squad cars most definitely haven’t been scrambled to number 11 Halsey Road, the last known residence of one Tristan James, ex of this parish, and his wife Wilma and their eight-month-old son, Marcus. No police on their way whatsoever. You might as well put your feet up and watch TV. Nothing exciting is going to happen whatsoever.”
“You’re not a very convincing liar,” Frost said.
The door downstairs opened.
Frost backed into the room. Whichever way he looked at it, being found in the house with the dead girl wasn’t good. He moved slowly toward the window. “Can you see out there?”
“In two seconds I’ll be able to.”
Frost didn’t know how Lethe did what he did, probably hooking into a Defense satellite and or something equally illegal and frightening. The boy had a way with machines. All that really mattered to Frost right then was that Lethe was his eyes and ears. He wouldn’t be able to get out of the house without him.
“Give me their positions,” he whispered into the headset, barely daring to vocalize the words. He tried the window, but it had been painted shut. He pushed against the frame but there was no way it was going to give without making a god-awful racket. The last thing he wanted to do was let everyone in the house know exactly where he was.
He crept back to the bedroom door, doing his best to keep his weight distribution even so that the floorboards didn’t betray him. He could hear them moving about downstairs, working their way through the rooms. They sounded nervous, pumped up, ready for a fight. They were talking loudly, barking instructions at each other. He stood absolutely still. No way this was going to end well. They’d be listening for the slightest out of place sound. The way he figured, he had at best a minute before they came upstairs. The place wasn’t that big, and there weren’t that many places to hide. It would take no time to sweep through the downstairs, and given the all-pervasive reek, they all knew they were in a death house. They were expecting to find a corpse. They weren’t expecting him to be there. If he startled them, it could all go south very quickly. “Lethe,” he breathed, “please tell me they didn’t send a Tactical Response Unit.”
“No guns,” the voice in his ear assured him.
That was one less thing to worry about. He heard them clumping about beneath him-which meant he had less than half a minute to get out of the house. He couldn’t just run down the stairs and out the front door, no matter how much the simplicity of the idea appealed. They would be on to him before he was halfway down the stairs. He didn’t really want to have to explain what he was doing in the house. But, for that matter, he didn’t really want to shoot anyone either. So it was all about not being caught.
“Three cars in the street out front,” Lethe whispered in his ear. Frost almost laughed at the younger man’s theatrics. It wasn’t as though it was Lethe who was standing over a corpse, separated from half a dozen policemen by a few inches of wood and plasterboard. “Two men are still outside. One is heading around the side of the house, going for the backdoor. That means three are inside.”
Three wasn’t a good number.
“I’m getting too old for this shit,” Frost whispered, rubbing at his forehead. “Can you do something? Cause a distraction?”
Without waiting for an answer, Frost crept across the landing. He ignored the baby’s room; the window there looked out onto the front of the house. That left the bathroom which, as he had expected, had a tiny fly-window that was neither for use nor ornament. Frost started to reach around for his gun, ready to shoot his way out if he had to, when he saw the chair half across the bathroom doorway. Again he was struck by how out of place it was. He looked up. There was a small loft access hatch in the ceiling directly above it. The hatch was barely wide enough for him to squeeze through. He didn’t have a lot of choice. It was that or charge down the stairs guns blazing straight onto the evening news.
Frost heard the downstairs backdoor opening.
The cops had done the first sweep.
They were talking now. He could hear every muffled word they said.
“You check upstairs,” one of them said. Frost heard the crackle of a radio. They were sending in a situation report: downstairs all-clear.
Frost didn’t wait for the sound of the first footsteps on the stairs. He stood on the chair and reached up. Placing the flats of his palms on the wood he pushed slightly, lifting it less than an inch clear and eased it aside. Moving quickly, he gripped the sides of the loft hatch and pulled himself up, swinging his legs inide the hole as he heard the heavy sound of the policeman climbing the stairs. He didn’t have time to slide the hatch all the way back in place. All he could do was ease it across so that it covered most of the hole and hope no one looked up. Frost lay on his back in the dark, listening to the sound of the search beneath him. The chair was still directly under the hatch, but there was nothing he could do about it so it wasn’t worth worrying about. He lay on his back, his Browning cradled against his chest.
“Oh, sweet Lord,” he heard, followed by the hacking sound of a man heaving his guts up. More footsteps on the stairs, running this time. Frost risked rolling onto his side, and put his eye to the crack. He couldn’t see much through the narrow gap, the shoulder of one uniformed officer and part of the back of another. “Trust me, you really don’t want to go in there.”
“Damn,” another muttered, backing out of the room.
Frost didn’t dare breathe. All it would take was for one of them to realize the chair was out of place and to look up. And because he didn’t dare breathe, the smell clawed its way into his lungs, trying to force him to. He closed his eyes, willing them to go back downstairs. He couldn’t exactly hide in the loft space forever, and soon the place would be swarming with forensics and crime scene investigators. One of them would look up. They would see that the hatch was out of place, and there wasn’t a damned thing he could do about it. He tried to think. His prints were all over the house, but he hadn’t touched the woman or the bed. But he had touched the window, her phone, the door handle. Had he touched the balustrade? Had he touched anything downstairs? He cursed himself for being an idiot.