1
MONDAY MORNING. SEVEN THIRTY.
Celia Barnes unlocks the door to the Miller house for what will be her last time.
She does not know, as she fits the stubby security key into the lock, that in a few short hours it will be bagged and logged along with several other items from the house as pieces of evidence in a murder investigation.
But he knows.
He watches her in his rearview mirror, watches her turn the key, watches her lean against the heavy door to open it. He is parked down the hill, as close as he can get without parking illegally but far enough away to avoid the steady gaze of the two security cameras fixed high on the front of the house.
The Miller house lies hidden behind a double-height section of brick that blends in with the soot-blackened wall running the length of Swain’s Lane and separating it from Highgate Cemetery beyond. The only indication that anything other than trees, and tombs, and dead Londoners lies on the other side of this higher section of brick is a large square of opaque glass set into the top left corner, and the solid door fitted flush to the wall and painted dark gray to match the sooty brickwork.
Celia Barnes steps through the door now, disappearing into the wall like it’s a trick, and she’s part of a performance, which—in a sense—she is.
He watches the door close behind her, slow and heavy on its automatic closers, like the door to an old-fashioned bank vault where treasures and secrets are kept.
He checks the time, then slips a surgical mask over his face. It was not so long ago that anyone wearing a mask in public, especially a medical one, would have drawn attention. Now they are commonplace, a fact that has been extremely useful over the last few months.
He steps out of the car, fastening his coat against the morning damp as he heads away from the Miller house and down the hill toward one of the gates leading into the cemetery. Official opening hours are ten to four, but he picked the lock earlier and will lock it again when he leaves—the gate that leads to the cemetery, the cemetery that leads to the back of the Miller house.
His heart beats faster as he walks along, but he forces himself to go slowly, to take his time. Afterward, when blue-and-white police tape ribbons the house, questions will be asked and someone might remember a man in a hurry. And he has plenty of time. He knows Celia’s routine, knows which rooms she will clean first and how long she will spend in each. At this moment he knows as much about Celia Barnes as she does herself, more even, because he can also see her future—he knows what will happen to her next, though this knowledge brings him no pleasure.
Celia Barnes is an innocent in all of this, and yet what she is about to experience will be horrifying and cruel. But it is also necessary.
Inside the Miller house a soft beeping sound echoes across the dark, polished wood that lines the empty hallway and up the steel-and-teak staircase that rises through the center of the building like the spine of the house.
Celia Barnes glances up at the security camera pointing down at the door, waits a second for the face-recognition software to verify who she is, then opens a small teak hatch set into the concrete wall by the door. A keypad lights up inside next to a square sensor and she squints at the sequence she wrote on her hand. The code is long and complex, a mixture of symbols, numbers, and letters that gets changed regularly and texted to her by Mike, the owner of the house. She only has thirty seconds before the alarm goes off, so always writes the code on her hand in big letters so she doesn’t have to fumble for her phone or her glasses and waste precious time. On her second day cleaning for the Millers she had gotten the code wrong, or possibly taken too long, or maybe both, and had set the damn thing off. The noise was unbelievable, an ear-splitting siren shriek that ripped through the house and brought the police hammering on the door in under two minutes. Two minutes!
When her own flat had been burgled just before Christmas it had taken more than two hours for anyone to show up, and even then it had only been a PCSO, one of those police community support officers her Derek called “plastic coppers.” But then she lived in a two-bedroom, ex–council flat in Archway, not some architect-designed Highgate mansion worth three or four million or whatever it was.
When she first got the job here Celia had tried to find out. She does it with all the houses she cleans, takes a guess at how much the house is worth, then pops the address into Rightmove to check the sold prices on the street. She’s actually gotten pretty good at it, so much so that her Derek says she should jack in the cleaning and go work for one of those upmarket estate agents doing valuations and driving around in one of those fancy little electric BMW jobs. Celia loves that he thinks she could do a job like that, loves what it reveals about the way he sees her, but she knows she could never do it. They’d never hire her for a job like that, she’s not enough—not young enough, confident enough, or posh enough. She’s also only good at guessing the prices of houses that are similar to others, she never has a clue how much the quirky one-offs are worth, the modern mansions that look more like offices than homes. There is no record of how much the Miller house sold for, not on Rightmove, or Zoopla, or any of the property sites she regularly uses. There is no other house like the Miller house on this street, or in the whole of Highgate, come to that, so she has no idea how much it’s worth other than “a lot,” and that’s not going to get her a job with a swanky estate agent, now is it?
Celia’s hand trembles slightly as she taps in the last few digits of the code, her anxiety levels closer to those of someone deactivating a bomb than switching off a house alarm. This is another reason she could never work for a posh estate agent, all those different alarms to deal with, all the different codes, all the people, all the stress. Give her a good audiobook, an empty house, a vacuum, and a bucket of bleach any day of the week, she’s perfectly happy with her little lot. Her Derek’s got his bit of disability pension from the railways, they paid their mortgage off on the flat last year, and her cleaning brings in enough each week to keep them nice and comfy. She’s more than happy.
She enters the code, then presses her thumb to the square sensor. The beeping falls mercifully silent.
Celia Barnes lets out a long breath she didn’t know she’d been holding and shrugs off her coat as she makes her way across the white resin floor to the twisted staircase, listening for any signs of life. Just because the alarm was on doesn’t mean there’s no one at home, she’d found this out the hard way once when she’d burst in on Mike one morning, working out in the mini-gym off the master bedroom. He’d had his earphones in so hadn’t heard her, and was wearing gym shorts and nothing else and, my, but what a sight that had been. Celia had stood there, frozen to the spot, mesmerized by the way his muscles moved beneath his smooth, tanned skin as he lifted the weights and studied himself in the floor-to-ceiling mirror. He’d looked like one of those men in the celebrity magazines she flicked through at the hairdresser’s, those cartoonish men with perfect skin and knots of muscles in their stomachs that looked like they’d been painted on. Except Mike Miller was real, there he’d been, right in front of her, in the flesh.
She had traced the outline of him with her eyes, up his legs, over the firm curve of his bum and his back. That was when she’d realized he’d stopped lifting the weights and was now looking right back at her in the mirror. She’d blushed and felt flustered and faint, but Mike had just smiled and then he had apologized to her, and wasn’t that just like Mike? So laid back, so confident that even an awkward moment like that could be smiled away as if it were nothing at all.
It is unfair really how some people seem to have everything—money, health, beauty, charm. Kate Miller is the same. The Millers are a different breed, a golden couple, like an evolutionary step-up has given them all the gifts and lifted them above the level of ordinary folk. It would be the easiest thing in the world to hate them—if only they weren’t so nice.
Celia reaches the stairwell and pauses, looking through the wall of glass across the overgrown cemetery to the distant marvel of London. A few of the other houses she cleans have views over the city too, but nothing like this. Because the Miller house backs onto the cemetery there are no other buildings to block the view, and even the security fence has been specially designed so that what you can see when you look out through the floor-to-ceiling windows are the trees, their green leaves fading now to autumn amber, and London shimmering in the far distance.
He watches her from the shadow of a sycamore tree.
He is standing a few meters off the main pathway and tucked out of sight behind the tomb of some long-forgotten Victorian milliner. Celia Barnes does not look his way. She does not look down at the cemetery at all. She looks at the distant view, like she always does.
Almost the entire back wall of the Miller house is glass, three floors of perfectly aligned, highly polished panels that mirror the sky and make the house appear almost invisible. Celia Barnes is framed in the dead center of it, a tiny, semi-transparent figure, floating among gray, reflected clouds. He watches her in her stillness, a moment of calm before the coming storm, then she turns and heads downstairs to the utility room where the cleaning equipment is kept.
She walks slowly, placing each foot deliberately and softly on the hardwood steps as she descends, keeping her footfalls soft so as not to wake anyone who may still be sleeping somewhere in the vast house. It is thoughtful of her, but there is no need. She could make as much noise as she likes and no one would hear, not in the house, and not out here in the cemetery. The wall of sky-reflecting glass—triple glazed and imported from Norway, where it was designed to keep out the worst of the Norwegian winter—also blocks out sound. The people inside the house are insulated from the constant hum of the city. No sound gets in. And no sound gets out either.
He watches until she slips from sight, then moves forward, keeping to the shadows as he moves through rows of crooked tombstones and laurel bushes, heading closer to the cleverly designed security fence and the house that lies beyond.
Celia hangs her coat on the hook behind the utility room door, takes a mop bucket from beneath the stainless steel sink, and starts filling it. She fits her earbuds into place and restarts the audiobook on her phone, the latest Donna Leon. She may spend the next few hours cleaning someone else’s toilets and floors in a house in Highgate, but in her head she will be in Venice with Commissario Brunetti, zipping around the canals on a vaporetto, eating deliciously described Venetian food, and grumbling about the tourists as he tracks down another devious killer.
She tips bleach into the bucket and watches the water rise and froth until it is half-full, then turns off the tap and heads into the house.
The first room she cleans is the downstairs toilet, because it hardly gets used and is an easy one to tick off her list. It is also farthest from the master bedroom, so any noise she makes here is less likely to disturb the Millers—if they’re in. Celia opens the garage door as she passes by to check. Neon lights flicker on, revealing that both Kate and Mike’s cars are there, so she closes the door softly and continues to the downstairs toilet, closing the door behind her before starting to clean. If Kate and Mike are sleeping, let them sleep a little longer.
It takes Celia less than five minutes to wipe down the already spotless marble surfaces and sweep and mop the floor, an American-accented voice describing Brunetti inspecting a body in the Campo Santo Stefano as she works. Then she refills her bucket in the utility room and heads upstairs to the ground floor, pausing her audiobook at the top of the stairs to listen again for any sign that the Millers are stirring. She hears nothing, restarts her audiobook, and returns to Venice in her head as she steps into the living room.
The Millers’ living room, like the rest of the house, is white: white walls, white floors, white furniture, the only visible color the orangey-green of the autumn graveyard seen through the wall of glass on her left.
But now there is another color.
Now there is also red, vivid stripes of red that slash across the walls and ceiling, across the white leather sofa and the large photograph of Kate and Mike Miller that hangs above the white marble fireplace. In the picture they are wearing matching white shirts, hugging and smiling, their teeth as white and perfect as the house. Only Kate’s smile is now broken by something black, and green, and ugly sticking into the center of her face.
Celia takes a step forward, trying to process what she’s seeing. It looks like a pot of red nail polish has been thrown around the room, and she automatically starts thinking about how she might clean it up and get the stains out. Then she takes another step, sees something on the floor, something hidden by the sofa when she first came in, and realizes what the red is.
He watches the bucket fall from Celia’s hands, the distance and thickness of the glass rendering the action silent. Her hands fly to her mouth and she staggers backward, eyes wide and fixed on the floor.
From where he is standing he cannot see what Celia is looking at, but he can see the horror of it reflected in her face, and it saddens him. Her anguish was not his desire, but it was unavoidable, and he had to be here to make sure her strong and natural instinct to clean would not compel her to disturb the careful scene he has left behind.
Up in the Miller house Celia Barnes continues to stagger away from the horror in the center of the room until her back hits the wall and she dislodges another photograph showing the whiter-than-white Millers, smiling in their happy perfection. The jolt seems to break Celia from her trance and her hands fall from her mouth and she fumbles her phone from her pocket, breaking her gaze for a moment to stab a number into it before resuming her wide-eyed stare at the floor as she lifts the phone to her ear.
He takes a small handheld radio from his pocket, his eyes flicking away from Celia Barnes just long enough to activate it before looking back at her. She continues to stare down, eyes wide, hand visibly shaking as it holds the phone to her ear. She starts to talk, her free hand fluttering as she speaks, gesturing at the floor as if the person on the other end of the line can see what she is describing. After a few moments she stops talking and starts nodding instead.
His radio cannot intercept mobile phone signals, but it can pick up the radio traffic of the emergency services that should follow. The police dispatcher on the other end of the line will be calming her now, reassuring her, telling her to hold on for a moment while they call for assistance. He listens to the whisper of the wind through the branches above his head, then a soft digital squawk pops in his ear.
“Urgent assistant required,” a female voice says. “Report of a serious knife assault at . . . number three Swain’s Lane, NW8.”
There is a pause, then a different voice answers, a police squad car, acknowledging the call and confirming it is inbound.
Up in the Miller house Celia Barnes continues to nod and stare at the floor. The dispatcher will now be telling her that people are coming, that she should stay where she is and—most important of all—that she should not touch anything.
He watches for a few moments more, making sure that Celia Barnes does what she is told and does not move closer to the body or disturb any of the things he has so carefully left to be found.
Somewhere in the distance the dim wail of a siren starts up, rising and falling, and getting louder. He waits until there is no doubt where it’s heading, then walks slowly backward, his eyes locked on Celia Barnes for as long as he can still see her, framed in the center of the wall of glass, floating in the reflected sky like a ghost above the graveyard.
2
TANNAHILL KHAN, HALFWAY DOWN FOUR flights of stairs with three heavy boxes pulling his arms from his sockets, feels the phone buzz in his pocket.
“Shit,” he mutters, knowing what a call to that phone means.
He traps the stack of boxes against the wall with his body, pulls the phone from his jacket, and checks the caller ID—Special Ops Dispatch.
“Shit,” he murmurs again before answering. “DCI Khan.”
“We have a report of a serious assault,” the dispatcher says. “Knife attack.” She lists the details—home intrusion, female victim, private address in Highgate.
Tannahill does a rough calculation in his head of how much extra pain this is going to add to his already painful day. “OK,” he says. “Could you tell the other DCs to pick me up out front of the NoLMS offices.”
“Roger.” The dispatcher hangs up.
“NoLMS”—North London Murder Squad—Tannahill had stressed the “N” and the “L” but everyone who wasn’t in the unit pronounced it “gnomes,” largely to take the piss out of anyone who was in it.
Tannahill tucks the phone back in his pocket, adjusts his grip on the stack of boxes, and continues his journey down.
His plan had been to spend the morning going over the data gleaned from the documents in these boxes before the lunchtime press conference where the latest crime stats are due to be released. A few weeks back his boss had given him the heads-up on how bad they were and told him to try and find something in previous figures that made the current ones seem less alarming, particularly in relation to his area of expertise, knife crime. You think these figures are bad, it’s nothing compared to 2004—that kind of thing. Spin, basically.
Unfortunately, the only thing Tannahill had found highlighted just how terrible the latest figures really were. He had planned to spend the morning massaging the historical data by lumping other crimes under the general heading of “street crime” to make the old figures seem higher, but now this new case has torpedoed his day. Maybe if people stopped stabbing each other for five minutes he might have a fighting chance of figuring out why people keep stabbing each other every five minutes.
He pushes through the front door of the building and spots a black Mercedes minivan parked across the road on double yellow lines, hazard lights blinking, a black-jacketed driver standing by the open front door smoking a cigarette. Tannahill hefts the boxes to secure his slipping grip and makes his way over. “You the courier?” he asks.
The driver blows smoke out with his reply. “Do I look like a facking courier, mate?”
He is clean-shaven, with short black hair, black T-shirt under a black jacket, wireless buds in his ears, probably Bluetoothed to the phone charging in the cradle visible through the open door of the Mercedes. “Yes,” Tannahill says.
The driver drops his cigarette and steps on it as he moves closer until his chest bumps against the stack of evidence boxes, knocking Tannahill back on his heels slightly. “You being funny, mate?” He is short and has to look up at Tannahill, though the height difference doesn’t seem to bother him.
Tannahill can smell the sour smoke-and-coffee fog of his breath. He is about to reply when another car appears down the street, a black Volkswagen people carrier, practically identical to the parked Mercedes. It moves slowly, the driver leaning forward in his seat as he checks the numbers of the buildings. The current offices of NoLMS are spread over a couple of rented floors of an ugly anonymous building in Holloway and are almost impossible to find, even with GPS.
“My mistake,” Tannahill says, stepping past the angry driver and into the road so the real courier can see him.
“Oi, ISIS, where you think you’re going?” the driver says, following him into the road. “What’s in them boxes anyway, a bomb?”
Tannahill feels a familiar anger rise inside him, but the duty phone buzzes in his pocket again, reminding him he has much bigger fish to fry as the Volkswagen pulls to a halt in front of him and the tailgate starts to rise. He moves to the back of the car, the boxes feeling ten times heavier now than when he started, and the courier gets out to help.
“Oi, ISIS, don’t you ignore me,” the other driver shouts.
The courier looks shocked. “Don’t worry about him,” Tannahill says, lowering the boxes gratefully into the back of the Volkswagen. “You got the transfer documents?”
“You two a couple of benders?” the driver continues, refusing to let it drop. “Them boxes full of dildos or summink?”
Tannahill flexes the stiffness from his hands, scribbles his signature on the paperwork, then pulls his buzzing phone from his pocket, silencing it with a jab of his finger.
“I’m on the street out front,” Tannahill says. “How close are you?” He nods at the answer, then hangs up. He waits for the courier to drive away, then finally turns to the angry driver. “What was that you said I looked like?”
The driver sneers. “A poof,” he says. “You look like a poof and a terrorist.”
Tannahill nods. “It’s the brown skin, isn’t it? Brown skin, must be a terrorist. When I was growing up I was called all sorts—Paki, camel jockey, raghead. My dad was Pakistani, you see, Irish mum but I got his skin and hair, so . . .”
A siren starts up somewhere nearby, the sound bouncing off the buildings, making it impossible to tell where it’s coming from.
“When I went to high school I pretended to be Italian for a while, thought it might silence the twats. Didn’t really think it through. Ended up being called a dago and a spic instead, at least I did until someone found out the truth and all the old names came flooding back, or they did until 9/11.”
The sound of the siren doubles as a dark gray Vauxhall Insignia appears round the corner, blue lights flashing behind the grill. Tannahill holds his hand up to the driver.
“Since 9/11 and 7/7 I mostly get called things like Osama, or Taliban, or what was the one you called me? ISIS.”
The car pulls to a halt, the ear-splitting siren shredding the air. Tannahill draws his hand across his throat in a cutting motion and the siren goes silent. He pulls a small leather wallet from his pocket, lets it fall open, and watches the driver’s expression change as he sees the warrant card and reads the words printed on it:
POLICE OFFICER
Tannahill Khan
Detective Chief Inspector
“So let me ask you again,” Tannahill says, slipping the wallet back in his pocket. “What do I look like?”
The driver swallows. “A copper,” he says, all the piss and vinegar now drained from his voice.
Tannahill nods slowly, then looks over at the parked Mercedes minivan. “This your vehicle, sir?”
The driver nods.
“Nice.” Tannahill moves round to the front and looks at the registration plate. “This year’s reg too. Let me ask you something, do you know what an ANPR camera is?”
The driver shakes his head.
“It stands for Automatic Number Plate Recognition. It’s everywhere now—traffic lights, junctions, roundabouts, car parks—we only have to tap in the registration of a car we’re interested in and the moment it drives by a camera on the network, it pings up on a central computer, which sends an alert to the nearest squad car, which then pulls it over faster than you can say ‘I didn’t do anything, officer, someone must’ve put my registration on the system because I was a bit racist.’” Tannahill takes a step closer and lowers his voice. “Look at me.” The driver looks up but his chin is down, like a dog who knows he’s chewed the wrong shoe.
“We all make mistakes. The most important thing is to own them and learn from them, do you understand what I’m saying?”
The driver nods. Swallows. “Sorry,” he murmurs.
“What was that?”
“Sorry,” he says, a little louder this time.
Tannahill pauses for just long enough for it to become uncomfortable, then smiles. “Good lad.” He steps away from him and gets into the passenger seat of the waiting squad car. “Oh, and just for the record,” he says, before closing the door, “you really do look like a courier.”
Then he slams the door and the car takes off down the street, lights flashing, siren screaming.
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