I Believe You

Rachel Dacre knew the tablet had worked because she remembered putting down the book. That was usually the last thing she got: one moment a page under the bedside lamp, some detective in a country she had never visited discovering a body in weather that sounded expensive, and then morning. No clock-watching, no bargaining over whether five hours counted as enough, no lying awake at three deciding whether she was tired enough to sleep. Her watch said she had been asleep for seven hours and eighteen minutes. Her body disagreed. Rachel stayed where she was for a few seconds, looking at the pale rectangle of ceiling above the bed while she took stock. Her calves had the used feeling they sometimes acquired after a long shift on foot, and there was a dull tenderness along the outside of her left forearm. She pressed it with two fingers and found nothing more interesting than a bruise waiting to come through. The counsellor had asked her three times now whether the tablets were helping. Rachel had said, They get me to sleep. When the woman pointed out that this was not quite the same thing as sleeping well, Rachel had replied that getting to sleep was the bit she had been having trouble with. At the time it had seemed funny enough to end the conversation. Her phone began vibrating on the chest of drawers before the alarm went off. It stopped, then started again almost immediately. Rachel rolled across the empty half of the bed, reached for it and caught it before it worked itself onto the floor. TOM ARMITAGE filled the screen. “If this is about coffee,” she said, answering with her eyes still half shut, “I’m not driving across London for it.” “Good morning to you too. And I am already dressed, before you ask.” Rachel opened one eye. “That’s troubling.” “There’s been a murder.” That opened the other one. Tom gave her the address first: a serviced executive apartment in Clerkenwell, one of those new developments where the lobby smelled faintly of cedar and nobody appeared to own enough possessions to live there. Uniform had attended after a cleaner found a man dead shortly after six. The man was Nathan Carrow. Rachel pushed herself upright and put both feet on the floor. “Carrow as in Carrow?” “As in the contractor, yes. Commander Ellis kicked it straight upstairs. Apparently Carrow touches enough police systems that nobody wants local CID finding out what he did for a living from Google.” “Cause?” “Knife, by the look of it. One wound. Pathologist’s on the way.” When Rachel asked about family, Tom said they had not been informed yet. Rachel checked the time and stood, her knees clicking once in complaint. “Give me thirty minutes.” Tom suggested forty from her place, which earned him an accusation of driving like somebody’s grandfather. “I am somebody’s grandfather,” he reminded her. “You have a grandchild by administrative error. It doesn’t count.” He laughed and ended the call. At six foot one, Rachel had learned years ago to put the bedside lamp where she would not knock it over with an elbow and to ignore the way people sometimes recalculated her after she rose from a chair. Her height had been a nuisance at school, useful in the first years of policing and mostly irrelevant since. People who mistook physical presence for aggression tended to correct themselves quickly once she spoke to them. The bathroom mirror was less forgiving than she was. There was no headache, dry mouth or chemical heaviness of the kind the occupational-health doctor had warned her about when the prescription began. She simply looked tired, as though the seven hours recorded by her watch belonged to somebody else. Under the shower she found the bruise beginning to colour along the outside of her left forearm and decided she must have walked into something. Doorframes had been designed around an average she had never represented. By the time she left the flat, coat over one arm and coffee still absent from her system, she had forgotten about it. Tom was waiting outside the Clerkenwell building with two paper cups and the expression he wore when he had already seen enough of a scene to dislike it. He handed Rachel the larger one as she approached. “No sugar. I considered six, but I remembered we’re supposed to be professionals.” “You remembered wrong.” Rachel took the cup and looked past him at the glass doors. “What have we got?” “Cleaner found him in the kitchen. Building manager says Carrow used the place two or three nights a week when he was working late in town. Main home’s in Richmond. Company leases this one; nobody else is registered as resident.” Tom Armitage was forty-seven, compact where Rachel was long, and had worked with her for enough years that neither of them bothered with the small courtesies people sometimes mistook for friendship. Their partnership ran on a simpler arrangement: the other person would turn up, tell the truth and know when to stop talking. Most days that was enough. The uniform at the entrance recognised Rachel, stepped aside and logged them through. She pulled on overshoes and gloves in the hall while Tom filled in the remaining basics. Nathan Carrow, fifty-one, chief executive of the private company holding a substantial part of the national police neural-verification infrastructure contract: hardware maintenance, calibration systems, clinical interfaces, data assurance. It was the kind of arrangement politicians described as a partnership and police officers described according to whether the system had worked that week. Rachel had never met him. She had seen him give evidence to a parliamentary committee and once watched half a conference address because somebody had sent her the clip asking whether his explanation of BELIEVED TRUE was technically honest. It had been. Boring, but honest. The apartment opened from a narrow hall into a large living space arranged by someone who believed three expensive objects were more tasteful than ten ordinary ones. A grey sofa faced a low walnut table. A framed abstract print used colours suspiciously close to those in the rug. One whisky glass sat on the end of the table with two fingers left in it; another glass, containing water, stood on the kitchen island. Rachel stopped at the scene tape and looked before she moved closer. Nathan Carrow lay on his right side between the island and the sink, one arm folded under him, the other stretched towards the base unit as though he had tried to catch himself. He wore dark trousers and a white shirt open at the throat. Blood had spread beneath him in an irregular fan and dried darker at the edges. There was less of it than television trained people to expect. “Knife still here?” she asked. Tom indicated a forensic marker close to the fridge. Beside it lay an ordinary kitchen knife, black handled, perhaps eight inches of blade. “Looks as though it came from the block by the hob. Nothing yet to suggest anyone brought a weapon.” Rachel let the room settle into sequence rather than spectacle. One dining chair had been pulled away from the table. A sofa cushion was on the floor. No drawers stood open. Nathan’s wallet and watch remained, and his phone sat on the island near the second glass. “Robbery seems ambitious.” “That was my first dazzling insight.” Tom drank from his coffee behind his mask. “Cleaner says the place was normally immaculate.” “She cleans it. I’ll allow her expert-witness status.” Rachel moved around the perimeter, careful where she put her feet. There was no obvious forced entry. The front door used electronic access, and the building kept lobby and corridor footage. Whoever had come here had either been admitted or had access of their own. Dr Leila Mahmood arrived while Rachel was studying the kitchen. She acknowledged them with a lift of two gloved fingers, crouched beside the body and began the quiet first exchange with the forensic photographer. Rachel knew better than to crowd her and went back to the second glass instead. “Uniform spoke to the night concierge,” Tom said from near the hall. “Carrow arrived at nine forty-seven, apparently alone. Concierge didn’t notice anybody joining him, which tells us he was busy, asleep or telling the truth. Building manager is pulling footage now.” The water glass carried no lipstick, only a faint cloudy crescent where somebody had drunk from it. Beside it sat a small ceramic dish containing two lemon wedges, one squeezed almost flat. There was nothing dramatic in that, but Rachel found the ordinariness interesting. Whoever had been there had not burst in, done something violent and run. At some point they had stood in Nathan Carrow’s kitchen and helped themselves to water. Mahmood rose with an audible complaint from both knees. “Single penetrating wound, left upper abdomen, angled slightly upward. I’ll give you something more responsible once he’s on my table.” “Defensive injuries?” Rachel asked. “Possible bruising and abrasions on both forearms. There’s material under the fingernails that I want swabbed before anybody gets imaginative. Nothing about this suggests he was asleep when it happened.” Rachel asked for time of death and got midnight, give or take two hours. She grimaced. Mahmood told her that if she wanted greater precision from a body on a kitchen floor she was welcome to invent a new branch of medicine, which was why Rachel liked her. Tom’s phone buzzed while the forensic team moved in. “Building footage is ready downstairs.” “Good. And before you decide the second glass means lover, remember that colleagues also drink water.” “I had managed to get as far as ‘company’ without marrying them off.” “Progress.” They took the lift to the management office, where a nervous man in a quarter-zip looked as though murder had personally breached his service agreement. He had already opened the access system on a wall monitor. Nathan, he explained, had used his phone credential at 21:46 and taken the lift to the seventh floor. Visitors could be buzzed through from an apartment or released by the concierge after verification. “Show us the lobby from half nine,” Rachel said. Nathan appeared at 21:47 carrying a slim leather bag, head bent over his phone. He crossed without greeting the concierge and disappeared towards the lifts. The manager advanced the recording in bursts. People came home; a couple left with gym bags; a delivery rider had a brief argument at the desk and departed. At 22:18, a woman entered through the main doors. She wore a dark coat and a cap low enough to obscure most of her face. Tall, athletic, no visible bag. She did not approach the desk. The inner gate released before she reached it, apparently buzzed from above, and she crossed with the unhurried certainty of somebody who knew exactly where she was going. Tom leaned closer to the screen when another camera picked her up. “Can you hold that?” Rachel had been about to ask the same thing. The manager froze the image just as the woman turned her head towards something outside frame. Compression had softened the face and the cap did the rest, but height could be measured, gait analysed, clothing traced if they were lucky. “Follow her to the lift.” The next feed showed the woman enter alone and select the seventh floor. They found her leaving at 00:41. By then the cap was gone and the coat collar was raised. She moved faster, though not enough to draw the attention of anyone who was not looking for it, and kept her face angled away from the camera as she pushed through the outer doors. “That’s useful,” Tom said. “It’s a start.” Rachel finished the last of her now-cold coffee and kept watching the frozen frame. The building had given them a person-shaped hole to fill. “Preserve every camera in and out of the area. Roads, shops, buses, anything facing the pavement. Get Carrow’s calls for the last forty-eight hours as soon as authority clears.” The manager stared at the woman on-screen. “Was she the one who killed him?” “We don’t know what she did,” Rachel said, and meant it. There were too many ways to arrive at a murder scene and too many bad investigations built by choosing one before the evidence did. Outside, London had started without them. Vans blocked half the street; somebody was shouting at a cyclist; a woman in running clothes went past with a spaniel that stopped to examine a traffic cone as though it had been placed there for him. Tom tucked his phone away and said, “Family next.” Rachel looked up at the seventh-floor windows. From the pavement the apartment was indistinguishable from every other expensive box in the building. “Yeah. Let’s go tell his wife there was someone with him.”