Extremity, page 2
We pulled up outside the Shard. It must have been well after 11 p.m. at this point and the building was dark. There was a police cordon around the lifts in the lobby and I flashed the officer my badge before lifting it, allowing Mark and Julia through.
The lift took us up to the twenty-fifth floor.
“I’ve been up to the top of this building,” Mark said, trying to break the silence. “They’ve got this viewing platform on the eighty-seventh floor, you can see all of London. Never really know what goes on below that.”
“It’s mostly office space,” I told him. “There’s the Shangri-La hotel above and then some residential apartments for the mega-rich, but that’s about it. Nothing crazy.”
“I thought the apartments were mostly unsold and empty?” he replied.
Julia snorted. I threw her a look, but she didn’t care to elaborate.
DC Mark Cochrane: When the lift doors open, I don’t expect to see so many people. I mean—of course I know there’s going to be some coppers up here at the crime scene, keeping things safe and keeping evidence untampered, but there’s more than that.
The floor is a wide-open office space with a group of bullpen-like desks in the centre. On the walls, there are about eight clocks with different time zones: Shanghai, New Delhi, Moscow, New York—all the big cities.
At the corner office, there’s another cordon, but instead of police officers standing around it, there’s men in suits.
I think Julia sees the surprise on my face, because she mutters, “Buckle up, kiddo,” before stepping in front of me.
A man in a black suit with a sharp, angular face like it’s been carved with a knife stands in her way.
“Julia,” he says. His accent is American, with a Southern drawl. “So good to see you again.”
“Pleasantries make you look creepy, Horner.”
“I didn’t know you were with the force again,” he says, an undercurrent of threat in his voice.
“She’s not,” John says. “She’s with me, as a consultant.”
He raises his eyebrows and pulls a phone out of his pocket. He taps away at a note or a message or something, and doesn’t even look at Grossman as he replies. “I didn’t know we invited old friends to a crime scene, Mr. Grossman.”
“Who is this?” I say, frowning.
The man turns, as if I’ve literally just entered his attention for the first time, and his gaze lands on me and, I mean fuck. You know those nature shows when you see a lion or a cheetah eyeing up a deer, looking for the weakest one to kill? He looks at me exactly like that, and he says, “I was about to ask the same question.”
“Don’t give him your name,” Julia cuts in. “This is Norman Horner. He’s a snake. Don’t step on him. He bites.”
“I’m a lawyer,” the man says, with a click of annoyance.
“Yeah, yeah,” she replies, pushing past him. She stops and looks back at me. “Let’s just say if Satan himself showed up on earth and needed representation, you can bet he’d be first in line.” She pauses for a moment, looking at me as if she’s waiting for something. “Well? Are you coming?”
“Oh,” I say, shuffling after her to the corner office while Horner stops and talks to Grossman.
The office is large and plush—there’s a big sofa and bar in the corner, and a wide mahogany desk. The floor-to-ceiling windows look out onto the streets of London, but there’s a big spiderweb crack in the middle, emanating out from a bullet hole.
On the floor, in front of the desk, is the body of Bruno Donaldson in a pool of blood. I recognise him from TV immediately. I saw him last, I think, on some news bit about electric and self-driving cars.
There’s an officer in the corner I don’t recognise and two people in suits standing around on phones—a young-looking Asian man and a blond lady in a black trouser suit.
“Time of death?” Julia asks.
“Between four and five this afternoon,” the officer replies. I take the little notebook Kate got me when I passed the CID exams out and jot that down. It’s small enough to slip into my inside jacket pocket and has a useful little pencil holder on the side. Back when I was in training, my old mentor used to say, “Write everything down, you never know what you might forget” and I’ve found it’s really helped.
Julia doesn’t look at the body—she goes to the big window and puts her back against it, looking through the door to the main bullpen, shifting her head this way and that. She takes two steps to the right, then back to the left.
“Wait,” I say. “Surely there were other people here at that time.”
“Oh yeah. Office full of people. Got about sixteen people who heard the gunshot. Got about three people who saw the blood explode out of his back.”
“And no one saw the shooter?” I reply.
He shrugs. I lean forward and look at the body a little more closely. There is a single bullet wound in his chest right where his heart is. The shot went right fucking through him and into the window. And the thing is: the window isn’t broken, not really. Windows in highrises like this are built super durable—they’re basically bulletproof—and the crack on this one is on the inside. Whoever shot him was inside the building.
“Ballistics?” Julia asks. She walks ten paces to the door, stops, turns around, and walks back to the window again. The suits haven’t looked up from their phones.
“Bullet is a nine millimetre, so looks like a pistol of some kind. But it’s a little weird. We’ve sent it to the station for analysis.”
I look up from my notebook, staring at him. “You’re saying someone walked in here with a pistol and shot Bruno Donaldson in the heart and nobody even saw them? Look at where the door is, the angle of the shot.” I point at the office desks outside. “They would need to have been standing right in the dead centre of the room.”
Julia walks over to the sofa and looks underneath it. She stands up and spins around in a full circle with her arms out. She’s still barely glanced at the body.
On the desk there’s a computer and a phone in a plastic bag. I take a step towards it.
“What was he working on at the time of murder?” I ask. “Have we checked his incoming calls?”
“That’s protected information,” one of the men says, without looking up from his phone. “Anything on the computer or on his phone is confidential.”
“What? This . . . this is a police matter.”
The woman in the black trouser suit looks up. “What’s your name?”
“Don’t give her your name,” Julia repeats. I stare at her, floundering. She walks over to me, grabs my arm, and pulls me out of the office and into the next room.
“What the fuck is going on?” I say, under my breath. “Who are all these people?”
“Lawyers. Personal assistants. Handlers. It doesn’t matter. Don’t give them your name if you want to keep your job. You’re lucky enough we’re in plainclothes and you don’t have a badge number on you.”
I shake my head, trying to process this new piece of information.
She sighs. “Do you have any idea how rich Bruno Donaldson was?”
“I . . . like fifty billion? Something absurd like that?”
“Sixty-two-point-eight billion. The rules have changed. Keep your mouth shut and try not to fuck it up.”
She turns around to leave, and I grab her arm because I can’t believe what I’m hearing. “Hey, wait. That’s not . . . it doesn’t matter how rich you are. The law is the law. They can’t block a criminal investigation because they’re billionaires.”
She takes ahold of my wrist and pries my hand off her arm. “Welcome to the brave new world, DC Cochrane. Try not to get lost.”
Julia Torgrimsen: I could feel Horner’s eyes all over me from the moment I walked into the room, his beady little brain filing lawsuits and affidavits and planning calls to the superintendent and the Justice Secretary even as he was speaking to me.
I figured dragging a new young face along would work well to distract the suits so I could do what I needed to, but now I was having to deal with this naive DC who was as out of his depth as a toddler in the middle of the Pacific.
Yes, he was baggage, but that didn’t mean I wanted his whole career to be ruined just for helping me out.
What bothered me was I still couldn’t work out why I was there.
Sure—Bruno Donaldson was dead. It didn’t bother me that much. I knew the man intimately from my years undercover and he was a horrific piece of shit. The invisible shooter was an interesting development, but not enough of a reason to drag out a pariah like me.
As soon as John managed to extricate himself from Horner’s slimy mandibles, I confronted him outright.
“Okay, I’m here. Now who’s the second body?”
John pulled out his phone and showed me a picture of another crime scene. This one was under a bridge somewhere, dark and dingy. The walls were spray-painted with shitty graffiti and rubbish lined the floor. On his back, in a pool of blood, was Bruno Donaldson.
“I don’t get it,” I said. “Someone moved the body here? Is that why there’s no gunman?”
“No,” John replied. “That photo was taken and sent to me by DI Lewis. He’s in Vauxhall, where that body is right now.”
“So it’s what? A look-alike? A fake?”
“No,” John said. “They’ve done fingerprint analysis. That’s when they asked me to call you in. They’re both Bruno, Julia. They’re the same person. And they’ve both been murdered.”
2
DC Mark Cochrane: For a little while, I watch Julia pace around the office like some kind of caged animal. I have no idea what she’s doing. First steps of criminology are pretty basic: establish motive, means, and opportunity. As for opportunity, I’m as baffled as anyone. A shot from a gun in the middle of a full office that everybody heard, but nobody saw? It’s like a riddle, or a magic trick.
Motive means going through records: looking at their relationships, their financials, but apparently we’re not allowed to do any of that. At least for means we already have a lead—a 9mm pistol. I would have thought the next step would be to whittle down the specifics there, track down where one might have been sold or procured. Get in touch with legitimate and black market contacts.
But Julia’s not asking any of those questions. She’s got her back against one of the walls and she’s shuffling along it, counting steps. I’m wondering if she’s gone mad.
That’s when Grossman appears behind me, thick hand gripping my shoulder. “What did Julia say to you?”
“What?”
He turns me round to look at him. “When she took you into the other room? What did she say?”
I blink back at him. “Erm. Not to tell anyone my name. To stay out of the way, basically.”
He nods. “Good. Yes. Stay out of the way. In fact, maybe you should go back to the station and—”
“John.” His head snaps round at the sound of Julia’s voice. “I need to test out something on the ground floor. A theory, and I need a second pair of eyes.”
“I’ll see what I can—”
“Don’t be stupid, John. I don’t mean you.” She cocks her head at me. “Get in the lift.”
Julia Torgrimsen: Mark and I got to the ground floor before John had a chance to really second-guess what I was doing. In any other situation he’d have grilled me further, but Horner was making him understandably nervous. This was not a normal case and I could use that to my advantage.
Mark was staring at me. I don’t think he knew he was doing it. He was standing next to me in the lift and I could feel his eyes on the side of my face. I turned and stared right back at him, my eyes locked onto his. He shuffled uncomfortably, muttering something like “sorry,” and looked away.
I felt for him a little, then. He didn’t ask to be caught up in this, but he wasn’t getting out of it easily now. I needed him.
When we stepped out of the lift and into the sprawling lobby, Mark started looking around the room as though we were playing a game of Cluedo and he was going to find an iron pipe under the reception desk. I watched him flounder for a short minute before he turned to me and said, “So, what is it? Why are we down here on the ground floor?”
I shrugged. “Because that’s where your car is.”
He blinked at me, confused. “What? I thought you were testing out a theory about the murder?”
“I don’t need to. I already know how Bruno was killed. The question is who killed him—and for that, I have a lead. So, go get your car.”
He was staring again. “Shouldn’t we tell DCI Grossman?”
“I already cleared it with him. He told me to take you. Did you miss that? Where were you?”
“I was . . .” He frowned, shaking his head. “No, sure. Let’s go. Where are we going?”
I walked past him and towards the doors, as he kept up pace behind me. “I’ll tell you on the way.”
DCI John Grossman: I didn’t know why it took so long for it to hit, but when it did, I was pissed off. I mean—it had been four years since I last worked with her. You forget what people are like.
“Nazir,” I shouted at the nearest officer. “Call down to ground—are Julia and that child there?” I didn’t need to wait for the answer to come. “And find out how long ago they left!”
I reached for my phone to find Mark’s number. I didn’t think that he was intentionally running off with her. She’d probably told him some tale to convince him they needed to go. She’s clever like that. I really didn’t want to call the control room to have them put out an APB on his car if I didn’t have to. It would be a colossal waste of resources. If I could call Mark directly and order him to turn the car right around, this could be fixed before it even got broken.
“They left about seven minutes ago, sir,” Nazir said, appearing next to me. “Officer on the ground floor saw them leave.”
“Fine,” I said, “I’ll just—”
I was still tapping my pockets—checking my front pocket, my back pocket, my jacket—when the realisation hit me. “Oh for Christ’s sake. She’s stolen my bloody phone.”
DC Mark Cochrane: Now, I’m not a complete idiot. I know Julia hadn’t cleared a damn thing with Grossman, but what was I supposed to do? There I am, in the midst of a complete madhouse of a murder scene, and Julia Torgrimsen is telling me she has a lead, and she wants me to come with her. What? I’m supposed to say no? Yeah, right.
She’s staring intently at her phone—at a picture on it—but she’s leant the seat back all the way so even if I glance left I can’t see what’s on it. Occasionally, she gives me directions.
“Left here,” she says, barely looking up from the phone. “Then straight until the next roundabout.”
“You said you knew how Bruno Donaldson was killed,” I said. “Have you worked out how a gunman managed to make themselves invisible?”
She pursed her lips. “That’s not the important question.”
“Oh?”
“The shooter wasn’t invisible. That’s impossible. He was in the lift.”
I frown, glancing at her. She’s still staring at the phone, turning it upside down, using her fingers to zoom in. “The lift? How do you figure that?”
“Only way it could have happened. Lift opens. Shooter sets up round the corner, out of view. As the lift doors are just about to close, shooter lines up the shot and fires. If it’s timed perfectly, by the time anyone looks, the door will be closed. Would take a lot of skill and training to get timing that good.”
“That lift is almost thirty metres away,” I reply. “Too far for a pistol, surely.”
“Makes sense that it wasn’t a pistol, then.”
“What?” I frown. “But ballistics said that . . .”
“Ballistics are idiots. A nine millimetre from that distance means a rifle, which means it’s Russian. That kind of calibre bullet is impossible to get outside of former Soviet countries, which tells us something.”
“But . . .” I squeeze the wheel, shaking my head. “No. But there was no line of sight between the lift and the body, and there’s the bullet in the glass. Unless the shooter can curve bullets round corners, I don’t see how it could have happened.”
“You’re right.”
I blink, a buzz of excitement running through me. “I am?”
“Completely. If Bruno can’t have died where he did, he must have died somewhere else. Did you notice the floor underneath the sofa?”
“I . . .” I shake my head. “No.”
“It had been cleaned more recently than the rest of the room. Far more recently. The wood was pristine in an almost perfect semicircle around the front. There was also slightly less blood around the body than there should have been for a man his size and an equivalent wound.”
“How on earth do you know that?”
She brings the phone close to her face and zooms in with her fingers. “Experience.”
“Wait,” I say, wanting to look at her in the eyes, even though I’m driving. “You’re saying he was shot on the sofa.”
“Or next to it. There’s a clean line of sight between the lift, the sofa, and the bullet in the window.”
She puts the phone away in her pocket, and takes out another one. I remember wondering why on earth she needed two phones. “So,” I say, the pieces falling into place. “Whoever was on the scene first took pains to move the body about three metres to the left, reset the scene as if it happened there, and clean up the original spot. But . . . why?”
“That,” she says, sitting forward, “is the important question.”
“So who’s your lead?”
“Paul Merkaton.”
“What?” And yes, you’re absolutely right. That Paul Merkaton—the guy behind Merkaton Towers, Merkaton Hotels, Merkaton Resorts. “How many rich people do you know?”
She sighs. “Too many. He lives in Kensington.”
“And why is he a lead?”
“Bruno’s phone. Take a right at this roundabout and continue on.”
