The Murder Code Read online

  Five to ten.

  He eyes the clock as the remaining minutes pass.

  With one minute to spare, Levchenko clicks off the heat and wraps a towel round the bare metal handle of the pan in order to lift it safely from the hob. Lost in his work, he sniffs loudly, up through one nostril, then pours the melted blue wax into the dish around the white candle. It stands, now, like a miniature lighthouse in the middle of a still sea.

  The second hand ticks slowly round.

  At ten o’clock precisely, he picks up the dish and plunges it down into the bowl of cold water, all the way to the bottom.

  Liquid meets liquid. The wax splays upwards from the dish into the water around it—but cools so quickly that it solidifies almost as it escapes. It is too swift for the naked eye to catch, resembling a frozen explosion rather than a bloom. In less than half a second it is already done, but Levchenko leaves the candle underwater for seconds longer before lifting it back out and placing the dish down on the bench.

  Is it satisfactory?

  It is.

  The original white candle still stands upright—thick and firm. But the pool of blue wax has leapt up in unpredictable swirls around it. The colours are paled and mottled; the wax is as thin and delicate as petals. And yes, it does look a little like a flower. But it reminds Levchenko more of the sky, the perfect blue slightly hazy now and the pure white centre the colour of childhood clouds.

  The sky—he always think there is something fitting about that. After all, the weather appears random and chaotic, with small initial changes producing unpredictable and complex patterns, so much so that weather reports are only vaguely reliable for a few days at best. We cannot predict them, and yet it is only the laws of physics in action. It is all set. The world simply unfolds: a carpet that nobody has ever seen but which is already entirely made. Clouds are only one pattern upon its surface.

  The same is true of his flowered candle. If you knew the exact starting conditions of every atom in the workshop—in the wax and the water; in his arms and his brain—if you could track their movements and make the impossibly numerous calculations, you could know in advance where the wax would move, how it would cool. Where each brittle pale blue tip would finish.

  Levchenko leans on either side of the candle and peers down at it.

  The truth is that you can know none of those things. God, perhaps, can know them, but no man. Even the act of observing the atoms and particles, it is said, can alter their course. So this candle, with its beautiful spread of wax petals, is as close to random as possible. Each one is totally unique, cast in and of its moment. A second later, and it would have been different. That is what makes them special.

  Beyond the randomness, there is also the practical matter of construction. Levchenko knows from experience that customers often look at these special candles and wonder how exactly they were made. They are puzzled because, in their own experiences of the world, candles must be formed with moulds rather than by the eddies of chance.

  That is the appeal of these, after all.

  DAY TWO

  Eight

  ‘EXTRAORDINARY,’ I SAID.

  Laura just grunted in reply, but I knew she agreed with me.

  We were both in early, working through the vast swathes of witness reports that had been collected by the door team yesterday. Anything out of the ordinary was usually flagged up for immediate attention, but Laura and I were both of a mind that details could easily be missed and preferred to scan as much as possible ourselves.

  So we’d been sitting in relative silence in the small office we share, heads bowed over documents. The only sounds were the whirring ceiling fan, the occasional sniff from one of us, and the constant turning-over of pages. The coffees in front of us trailed steam into the air.

  ‘Nothing,’ I said.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘You said that already.’

  ‘Did I? Perhaps I can’t believe my eyes.’

  There are a number of ways to proceed with an investigation like this. One of them is forensics. The post-mortems would be performed first thing; in the meantime, everything else was either being analysed or waiting to be. In reality, forensic results tend to be of most use when you have a suspect to test them against. Unless someone with a criminal record sticks their fingerprint on a victim’s forehead, forensics leaves you with a shadow but no body to cast it. A good clear outline, for sure, but only really useful when you have someone to compare with the shape.

  Another way is by looking at the victim’s past. Leaving aside our as-yet-unidentified second victim, how had Vicki Gibson found herself in her killer’s sights? She hadn’t been robbed. She hadn’t been sexually assaulted. Perhaps someone hated her for some reason we’d yet to ascertain. The clearest candidate for that position—still kicking his heels in a cell downstairs—looked to be in the clear.

  The third way—as old-fashioned as it gets—is witness statements. It’s actually very hard to commit a crime in public without being caught somehow. CCTV is rare in the grids, but it is a highly populated area and Vicki Gibson had been murdered in plain sight of several windows.

  All the people who might have been looking out of those windows had been interviewed, and yet, according to the reports in front of us, nobody had seen anything.

  Laura picked up her coffee and took a sip.

  ‘It’s not so unusual,’ she said. ‘It’s the nature of the area. People often turn a blind eye in the grids. We both know that from bitter bloody experience.’

  ‘Not so much on the outskirts.’ The central areas were full of illegal people, illegal trades, and people who were notoriously reluctant to talk to the police. ‘And that’s almost always drug-related. I don’t see this as that sort of attack, do you?’

  Laura shrugged. ‘Not on the surface. But you never know.’

  ‘She had two decent jobs under her belt.’

  ‘Exactly. We know she needed the money. So it could be drug- or debt-related.’

  I thought about that. It was a possibility. Take a loan from the wrong people and it wasn’t unlikely you’d meet with reprisals if you failed to repay. Anyone who saw the murder would probably decide there were far better things to do than get involved by talking to us about it, like absolutely anything at all.

  A boardroom crime.

  ‘Okay,’ I said. ‘We can look into that. Who are the street merchants in that area? I don’t know off the top of my head.’

  ‘Me neither.’

  ‘I don’t know if I buy it though.’

  Laura sighed. ‘Me neither.’

  ‘And it wouldn’t explain our second victim, would it?’

  ‘No. Unless he wandered past, drunk, and the killer followed him to make sure he hadn’t seen anything.’

  ‘That’s a theory?’

  ‘Sort of.’

  ‘It’s weak as a kitten, that one.’

  She sighed again. ‘I know.’

  I picked up my own coffee, and we sat in silence again for a few moments. Nobody looking out of their windows. Apparently nobody around on the street at the time. I didn’t buy the debt idea, but there had to be some explanation for it.

  There was a rap at the door. An officer opened it immediately without waiting to be invited.

  ‘Do not disturb!’ I shouted.

  ‘Sorry, sir.’

  ‘We were deep in conversation there. Deep.’

  Laura gave me a withering look.

  ‘Shut up, Hicks,’ she said. ‘What is it?’

  ‘Simon Duncan’s downstairs. He wants to know whether either of you is attending the post-mortems?’

  Laura looked at me. I held my palm out.

  ‘Not me,’ I said.

  ‘All right, I’ll go.’ She stood up. ‘What are your plans in my absence, then? Going to sit there and pout?’

  ‘Nope,’ I said. ‘Troll East. Try to identify our homeless victim.’

  ‘Lovely.’

  ‘It’s a di
rty job but someone’s got to do it.’

  Laura gave me a half-smile as she headed to the door. Compared to Troll East, the autopsy was the easy option.

  ‘Might as well be you, then, eh?’ she said.

  Nine

  OUR CITY HAS AN underground system with six stops. It runs for several miles below the southern half of the city, under the picturesque old town and business sectors, basically tracing the curl of the river, and is used primarily by tourists and professional sorts. You can travel the entire juddering, clacking line in about twenty minutes. The trains move fast enough between stations that you wouldn’t notice the open pipes and passageways you’re passing. Tunnels under the earth that aren’t entirely as abandoned as you might imagine.

  The underground was originally planned to have eight stations, but due to budget miscalculations—or, more cynically, budget misappropriations—only six were ever completed. So there are two unfinished stations, one at either end, and they aren’t abandoned either. They’re the first official stops on the city below the city: one to the east and one to the west.

  Because our second victim had been found much closer to the east, that was where I was heading.

  The rush hour slowed me down, but I reached the dead station before nine. All that remained of the original building was a black door with a rusted chain hanging across the centre and a red circle daubed on at head height. A much grander entrance had been absorbed by the shops to either side, which were typical of the area: shuttered off-licences, bookies, a drab post office. Bin bags clustered against the walls, huddled together for warmth. There were more pigeons around right now than people, most of them pecking inexplicably at dirty stretches of pavement.

  I drove a little further on, then parked up on a road close to the river and walked down to the water. From here, I could see all the way across to the northern bank, to the empty bays where we’d found the second victim. There were no boats in sight today, just the white crosses of gulls turning lazily over the river. I doubled back on myself to find the large circular tunnel leading down under the road above and into the depths of the earth. It was half grilled over, the fractured side ending in hundreds of tiny rusted fingers.

  I kept my gun clipped in its holster, but took out a Maglite torch, clicking it on as I eased around the broken grille and stepped into the tunnel.

  It wasn’t silent inside, but there was an immediate and profound change to the quality of sound. The world felt compacted; existence had shrunk its parameters to the seven-foot-diameter pipe I began walking down, feeling as much as hearing the insistent hiss of pressure in the air. The pipe was built from enormous arching stone blocks, all thick with green lichen and damp. The torch cast meagre light, only ever revealing a few metres ahead, and I kept it mostly on my footing. Beneath my feet, the dank stone ground was strewn with a thatch of twigs and branches that had blown down here from the river. As I walked, the heavy hush of underground air was complemented by the steady drip of water, and the air grew colder.

  After a time, the tunnel reached a larger space: a square room with pipes curling from one wall and then disappearing into the ground, as though they’d poked their heads out and immediately burrowed down out of sight. In another corner, the water was dripping down more profusely, landing on a slumped pile of pale, congealed slime. Puddles of stagnant water sat in pits in the stone floor. The room smelled of mulch and rotting vegetation, like a breeze drifting through an abandoned vegetable stall.

  At the far end, a doorway led into something that more approximated a normal corridor: perhaps it had once connected maintenance areas around the station. That was the way to go—I’d been here before.

  Barely a minute later, my torch caught movement up ahead and then a torch belonging to someone else was shining in my face.

  I held my forearm over my eyes.

  ‘Ow.’

  A voice boomed out, jovial and theatrical: ‘Who goes there?’

  ‘Police,’ I said. ‘Get that light out of my eyes. I’m not looking for trouble.’

  ‘Okey-dokey.’

  The torch beam immediately dropped down to the ground, and a figure up ahead approached.

  The splay of light revealed a large man, with a barrel of a body that seemed to be made primarily from rags. He was bearded, with wild black hair and a red face, and smiling like a loon.

  ‘What can I do for you, Officer?’

  ‘I’m looking for someone,’ I said.

  ‘I can possibly help you with that.’

  The possibly was to be expected, of course. The people down here had nothing to gain by annoying the police, but that didn’t mean they’d openly co-operate if it meant selling out one of their own.

  ‘This particular person is not alive any more,’ I said.

  ‘That doesn’t mean they’re not here!’ His voice echoed in the enclosed space. ‘We’re full of ghosts, Officer. You know that. That’s all some people down here ever talk to.’

  ‘He may be one of yours,’ I said. ‘We found him upside and need to identify him.’

  ‘Description?’

  ‘Not so much. But I’ve got these.’

  I took out some photographs of the clothes and items we’d found on the second victim. A lot of them were generic, but I held out some hope for a necklace we’d found, wrapped away beneath his clothes. There was an old wedding ring on it.

  The man took them one by one with gnarled fingers wrapped in wool gloves, shining his torch over each of them before passing them back. He paused at the ring.

  ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘He’s passed by, on and off, for years. Jesus nut. That’s all I know. Don’t know his name, but someone will.’

  ‘All right. Can I …?’

  ‘Go in?’ He moved to one side and shouted: ‘Be my guest!’

  I walked a little way on, him following behind, muttering to himself. After a minute, he stepped into an alcove where a three-seater settee had been lodged, next to a packing crate with a candle burning. A battered old paperback was lying splayed out on the settee, and a sleeping bag was rolled up neatly at one end.

  A little further on, I reached what had once been intended to become Foxton underground station. It was an echoing hexagonal space, every surface tiled, every wall filled with empty poster grids. Where the ticket machines should have been, there were racks of bunk beds. Graffiti covered the walls. There were a handful of rusted metal barrels that in winter would be full of burning wood, but now they were dark and dead. Everything was bathed in amber light from the countless candles.

  People everywhere: hunched shadows, either slumped in place or meandering around erratically. There were also a number of corridors running off the central area. Doors that might once have been labelled ‘No Entry’ were now propped open with large chunks of rock. Every conceivable space down here had been colonised. Along all the corridors, I knew, there were fenced-off sleeping areas. Televisions flickered in the darkness, powered by the electrics that had been developed down here: snaking rubber cables that connected junction boxes and ended, occasionally, in rubber plugs in archaic boxes in the walls. There were toilets and shower stalls.

  I worked my way through, showing my photos here and there to people whose faces I couldn’t see. Despite what the watchman had said, all I got was shakes of the head and shrugs.

  I was beginning to despair slightly until I wandered down a stationary escalator and found a small church. It had been built in a storage area below one of the railway arches. Two metal bins were burning brightly on either side of the entrance, the flames crackling, the metal as thin and fragile as charred paper.

  I peered inside. A number of benches had been arranged roughly in lines, and hooded figures were dotted here and there, elbows on knees, heads bowed, facing a wooden table at the far end. The stone wall above it was daubed with various religious symbols. The air was hot in here, and perhaps because of the silence of its small congregation, the room felt as though it was waiting for something—some boom or clank
from the bowels of the surrounding tunnels.

  A Jesus nut, the guard had said.

  If anyone would know our John Doe, it was someone here.

  I approached a man at the back of the room. He was dressed in jeans and an old black hoodie, but it was easy to tell he was fat and saggy beneath it.

  ‘Police,’ I said. ‘I’m trying to identify someone. You recognise any of these belongings?’

  I was already holding out the photographs when he looked up at me, revealing a bearded face mottled with red veins, and eyeballs as yellow as butter. Greasy flecks of black hair poked out from beneath the hood like spider legs. I recoiled slightly. He stared up at me, and his bleary eyes seemed to focus.

  ‘Do I know you?’ he said.

  ‘No.’

  The man shook his head, confused. ‘You put me away once?’

  ‘Not that I remember,’ I said.

  He stared at me for a few seconds longer, still trying to work out whether I was a real figure from his past or just a stranger overlaid with a ghost. Then he looked down at the photograph I was holding, which showed the wedding ring on the necklace.

  He nodded slowly to himself.

  ‘Yeah, I know him.’

  ‘Okay,’ I said.

  I waited some more, but he didn’t volunteer anything.

  ‘And?’ I said. ‘What about a name?’

  ‘Fifty.’

  ‘That’s a weird name. Parents are cruel, right?’

  ‘I meant—’

  ‘I know what you meant.’

  I looked around. Just outside the entrance, the flames were crackling louder than before. I had that same impression that something was waiting down here in the shadows. The pressure felt like it had gone up a notch. I wanted out of here; my forehead was suddenly damp. But instead, I reached into my back pocket for my wallet, and tried to smile.

  ‘You do receipts?’

  Ten

  ‘DEREK EVANS,’ I SAID.

  Laura glanced up as I walked triumphantly back into the office. I didn’t know how long she’d been back from the postmortems, but she still looked a little pale. Still managed to whip out the sarcasm, though.