Severin shakes his head. Delon is creased over with laughter. Delon’s laugh, Severin thinks, is just a little bit too hysterical. It is the kind of laugh you hear in pubs when people are pretending to have a good time.
Philliskirk leans forward and claps him jovially on the shoulder. ‘You all right, Sammy?’
‘Tiptop,’ Severin says.
‘Hello, hello,’ says Delon. ‘What have we here?’
The men in the car look to their right. A vehicle has just come up the ramp. It is a Porsche Cayenne, metallic black with sport alloys, worth in excess of £90,000. They watch it glide past, unable to see through the blacked-out windows. They watch it swing into a vacant bay and they wait for the driver to get out. They wait for him to flip the alarm system and then they watch him heading for the lifts.
The Bug House is the name Vos’s team have given to their room on the second floor of the West End police station, which is a singularly drab building overlooking Westgate Road in the Benwell district of the city. The room is officially known as 23E but gets its nickname from a long-dead, even-longer-forgotten city alderman called W James Buglass, whose bewhiskered countenance glowers over the detectives from an ornate gold frame fixed to the wall by the door. Apparently Buglass was instrumental in the formation of the Newcastle upon Tyne City Police, back in the days when the wharves were jammed with barges and collier brigs, and you couldn’t see from one side of the river to the other for masts and coal smoke. His portrait had pride of place in the old West End police headquarters at Arthur’s Hill until the building was demolished, whereupon an enterprising detective, thinking it might be worth a few quid, quietly ensured that it got lost in the move to Westgate Road. When he discovered it was worth very little indeed, he bequeathed it to West End CID, who in turn lost it to the Major Crime Unit in a game of poker. Now, scrawled onto Buglass’s luxuriant white mutton chops are the signatures of every detective who has ever worked on the squad.
Huggins and Fallow are in Vos’s office, spooling through CCTV footage from the four security cameras erected around Enrico Cabaljo’s house. The footage they are most interested in is from the camera positioned on the corner of the building, overlooking the rear patio, the koi carp pond and, hopefully, enough of the garden to see a man of Middle Eastern appearance plummeting to the ground at around 8.45 p.m. on Sunday night. This will at least confirm the theory that he was indeed hit by the train bound for Edinburgh.
The main problem is that it was pitch-black at 8.45 p.m.
Huggins and Fallow have commandeered the digital recordings from a company called Arctos SecuriVision, who have a lucrative contract to provide remote household security for all of Newcastle United’s millionaire superstars. The managing director is a former Special Branch detective who now drives an Aston Martin and lives in Darras Hall, where most of the millionaire footballers live.
‘Aren’t there any security lights at the back of the house?’ Huggins had asked the ex-detective.
‘Of course,’ he’d said. ‘But it’s all about sensor coverage. How far from the house did this bloke land?’
‘Fifty, sixty feet,’ said Fallow. ‘It’s a big garden.’
‘Well, you might be in luck. We fit all our properties with 150-watt Steinels with twelve-metre coverage. Then again, sometimes the agency turn them off to save electricity when the house is not being used. We warn them not to, but they’re fucking tight.’
In the Bug House, Huggins and Fallow are watching the TV screen. In their world it is now 8.35 p.m. on Sunday evening. All being well, ten minutes to touchdown.
‘Where were you at 8.35 p.m. on Sunday night, Johnny-boy?’ says Huggins, gazing blankly at the TV monitor in Vos’s office.
‘Having supper with Shirley, I expect.’
‘Finger food from M&S? Nice bottle of Pinot Grigio before you settled down for Downton Abbey?’
Fallow shrugs. ‘And I suppose you were jetting back from Monaco after your weekend on the yacht.’
‘Cap Ferrat, actually,’ says Huggins. He stretches his long frame and emits a roar. On the TV monitor the darkness suddenly explodes into light, and Fallow sits forward expectantly. A fox pauses for a moment, white-eyed in the full glare of the 150-watt Steinels, then pads insouciantly across the patio. A few moments later the light winks out again.
‘That’s what “Vos” means in Dutch, you know,’ Huggins says. ‘ “Fox”. Mayson told me.’
Fallow looks disbelieving. ‘The boss is Dutch?’
‘Obviously not. But we all have ancestors, Johnny-boy. “Fallow” is Norwegian for One Who Is Pussy-Whipped by His Wife, so make of that what you will.’
‘Fuck off,’ Fallow says.
They watch the darkened screen in silence for a while longer, then Huggins levers himself out of his chair and grabs a pain au chocolat from a bag on Vos’s coffee table.
‘Where the hell is everyone this morning?’ he says.
‘Bernice and the boss are down at the morgue,’ says Fallow.
‘And what about Mayson?’
‘Christ knows,’ says Fallow. ‘Probably discussing aerodynamics and terminal velocity with his pals at the university.’
Huggins goes to the glass window that makes up one wall of Vos’s office. ‘Who’s that with Una?’ he says through a mouthful of pastry.
Una Cattrall’s name is not on the portrait, but since she has run the squad’s outer office for as long as anyone can remember, she is therefore arguably its single most important component. She is a blowsy-looking woman with peroxide hair and a spray tan who is aged anywhere between forty and sixty. Huggins watches her walking across the deserted squad room with her familiar urgency, her brawny arms folded over her sizeable bosom. Behind her, having to half trot in order to keep up, is a slender, blonde-haired woman wearing a dark suit.
‘Una, my dear,’ says Huggins, holding open the door. ‘Top of the morning to you.’
‘I found this waif and stray wandering around outside,’ Una says in her forty-a-day rasp.
‘DC Kath Ptolemy,’ the blonde-haired woman says as Fallow’s eyes swivel towards her. ‘Are you DCI Vos?’
‘Do you have a name for him?’ asks Tunderman, the pathologist.
‘For the moment we’re sticking to Ahmed Doe,’ says Vos.
‘Very PC.’
‘Superintendent Anderson seems to think it’s got a ring to it. What have you got for me, Mr Tunderman?’
‘Well, the injuries are consistent with a substantial impact,’ Tunderman says. ‘However the damage to the skeletal structure and internal organs, while catastrophic, is not as severe as one might expect.’
Bernice Seagram is looking at the smashed body on the metal mortuary table. ‘What would you expect, Mr Tunderman?’
‘Almost total destruction,’ Tunderman says almost wistfully. ‘I’d guess our man was struck more of a glancing blow. You say he was suspended from a bridge?’
‘That’s right.’
‘Then it’s possible the air pressure from the approaching train moved him slightly. Or perhaps he wasn’t positioned centrally. Either way the bulk of the impact was down the left side. Hence the missing leg and the crush injuries to the ribcage and pelvis.’
‘But he would have died instantly,’ Seagram says.
‘Oh good Lord, yes. Although I can’t imagine his last moments alive were terribly pleasant.’
‘What’s to say it wasn’t suicide?’ Vos says.
Tunderman tugs at his top lip. ‘Nothing in theory. But I did find this.’
He grips the dead man’s head and moves it slightly to one side to expose two bluish marks on the right side of his neck, down near the shoulder.
‘Vampire bites?’ says Vos.
‘Taser marks,’ says Tunderman, who is not renowned for his sense of humour. ‘More specifically, stun-gun marks. The electrodes were applied directly to the skin rather than being attached to propelled darts.’