‘What’s her name, Ayala?’
‘Hang on,’ Ayala said. He fetched a clipboard from the side table and scanned down. ‘Sam Rudd. Gender NB.’
‘What on earth is NB?’
‘Non-binary, boss.’
‘Right,’ Morton said as if he understood. ‘Sam, would you move forward, please, and join the rest of the group?’
Sam looked aggrieved, but slowly meandered forward to take a seat a few rows from the front, as far from the others as possible. The clock chimed for nine o’clock.
‘Is that everyone? Right. Let’s go, then. Yesterday, I asked you all to plan how to murder Detective Inspector Ayala. Who wants to go first?’
Predictably, Babbage’s hand shot up straight away. Morton ignored him and looked for other volunteers. A few students averted their eyes as if hoping that, if they couldn’t see Morton, Morton couldn’t see them.
Morton picked his first victim at random. He was a man in his late twenties wearing a herringbone suit and an obnoxiously bright red tie that matched his hair. ‘You, there. Red. What’s your name, and how are you going to kill Inspector Ayala?’
‘Eric O’Shaughnessy,’ the man said without a trace of an accent.
‘Okay, O’Shaughnessy, how’re you killing Ayala?’ Morton asked again.
The young man looked around the room, searching for an ally. It was obvious he hadn’t prepared. ‘I’m going to shoot him.’
‘With what?’ Morton asked.
‘A gun?’ O’Shaughnessy said with a nervous chuckle.
‘What kind? Handgun? Shotgun? Sniper rifle?’ Morton reeled off the most common firearms at a rapid pace. ‘Where are you getting it? Even if you get a gun, there are plenty of forensic markers. Gunshot residue–’
O’Shaughnessy interrupted him. ‘I’ll wash my hands afterwards.’
‘Striae evidence,’ Morton continued as if he hadn’t interrupted. ‘Every gun is unique. We can recover serial numbers with acid etching, and we can match the bullet to the gun. If you shoot Ayala, we’ll find you by dinner time. Next.’
‘What if I don’t use real bullets?’ O’Shaughnessy said. ‘Can’t I use ice bullets so they melt and leave no bullet for you to find?’
Morton sighed. That old chestnut. ‘No, Mr O’Shaughnessy, you cannot fire a bullet made of ice. The friction from the inside of the barrel would melt the bullet before you hit your target.’
‘What if I shoot him at really close range?’
‘It won’t work,’ Morton said. ‘Metal is used for its high mass. It’s basic physics. Force equals mass multiplied by acceleration. Bullets travel two and a half thousand feet a second. If I could throw a beanbag at you at that speed, it still wouldn’t kill you because there isn’t enough weight behind it.’
Ayala tapped away at his laptop as Morton spoke. When Morton was done, Ayala stood up in anticipation. ‘And if you want to prove it, ice has a density of 0.9167 grams per cubic centimetre. Copper has a weight of 8.94 grams per cubic centimetre.’
O’Shaughnessy looked impressed. ‘What about a bullet made of meat, then?’
‘Plausible,’ Ayala conceded. ‘But you’d leave obvious trace evidence behind. It’s a gimmick, and one that gives you no advantages over a generic copper bullet. If anything, it would be easier to link back to you than something store-bought.’
O’Shaughnessy turned to the student next to him with a shrug. He’d survived the opening salvo.
The room fell silent. Who could follow the idea of a meat bullet?
Babbage’s hand shot up again. He waved it excitedly, like a small child who wanted permission to go to the bathroom. There were no other volunteers.
‘Yes, Mr Babbage?’ Morton said.
Babbage puffed up his chest proudly, as if he’d invented the most novel murder ever devised. ‘I’m going to use a police radio to listen out for when everyone is distracted, and then I’m going to strike. With no witnesses, you’ll never be able to prove it was me.’
‘Right. First off, you’ll need a radio, so chances are you’re one of us, and Professional Standards are pretty quick to spot a dirty cop. Secondly, that won’t tell you when Ayala is alone. Why would he be the only one not responding? Third, and finally, you’ve done nothing to prevent the forensic markers of whatever method you actually use. What you’ve devised is a way to isolate your victim. It isn’t a murder method at all. I’m very disappointed.’
Babbage’s lower lip trembled, and he blinked rapidly at the moisture forming droplets in the corners of his eyes. Morton almost felt guilty. Almost.
Morton turned his attention to the others. ‘Next. Give me your name and your method.’
‘I’m going to throw him out that window,’ a gravelly voice answered.
Morton looked around for it and found a hulk of a man with a weatherworn face. The big man nodded in the direction of a large window behind Ayala.
He looked as if he could do it easily enough. He had the build of an East End hard man who lived for the gym, but he was wearing the suit of a banker. He said, ‘And the name’s Danny Hulme-Whitmore.’
Danny was jammed between two other students, his gargantuan arms folded neatly across his chest. The others, Morton surmised from the register, were the last men on the list: Sulaiman Haadi al-Djani and Kane Villiers.
‘And Inspector Ayala is just going to let you, is he? One scratch, and your DNA is under his fingernails.’
‘Then, I’ll have to be quick, won’t I?’
‘Okay,’ Morton conceded. ‘Let’s say you get lucky with a blitz attack. It’s the same brick wall as the ice bullet. How’re you going to overcome basic physics?’
‘Physics?’ Danny said, his accent making it sound like he was saying ‘fizzicks’.
Morton held up three fingers and counted them off. ‘Jump, push, fall. Three scenarios, three different distances. If you fall out the window, you’d be right up against the side of the building. You’d probably grab out at window ledges, ivy, anything you could. By the time you hit the bottom, you’d already be scuffed up and bruised. If I push you out the window, you’ll be a bit farther away. If I throw you, you’ll be a lot farther away.’
‘Prove it.’
Ayala stood up. For a moment, Morton thought he might actually be about to jump. Ayala rolled an old blackboard in front of the class and began to scribble the outline of a building.
‘The horizontal distance away from the building to the point they hit the ground is determined by the take-off, flight, and landing distance. Imagine the centre of mass in someone’s body as the first measuring point, and then think about that window. There’s a small ledge just outside it, and if you were to jump, you’d swing your legs over, stand on the ledge and step off. We’re on the fifth floor, so we’re just over fifty feet up. That’s the vertical distance.’ Ayala drew a vertical line beside the building, going from the fifth floor to the ground.
‘Okay. We’re up high. So what?’ Danny said.
‘If you step off, you’re going to go maybe two feet from the building. That’s our horizontal travel distance, and it’s based on how far the victim can step off the ledge. He’s got no velocity, because he’s just falling straight down. The only force acting on him is gravity.’
‘But he could jump.’
‘He could. But with no run-up from the ledge, he isn’t going far. Ignoring wind resistance, which ought to be negligible, his flight path will look a bit like this.’ Ayala scribbled a soft curve arcing from the building down to the ground and labelled it ‘Fall’. He then drew a second arc showing the man’s jump such that the curve arced above the ledge and then fell down slightly farther away.
‘And now, if we throw the man from the window, he’ll be starting a few feet higher than the outside ledge, and he’ll have a lot more velocity behind him.’ Ayala began scribbling again, an equation this time. ‘Distance, which we’re calling D, is going to need us to calculate the launch speed multiplied by the sine of the launch angle divided by g
ravity, or G, which is then multiplied by one plus two g times the height over the square of the launch velocity times the sine of the launch angle, all divided by two.’
Even Morton was impressed. The entire class looked at Ayala with awe as he translated his theory to the graph with a curve that pushed much farther away from the building.
Ayala flashed Danny a smile. ‘Sorry, Mr Hulme-Whitmore, but you’ll have to kill me another way.’
He looked stunned. Emboldened, a couple more of the students put a hand up. As Ayala rolled the blackboard back out of the way, Morton picked another student to try their method out.
‘Sulaiman Haadi al-Djani,’ the man said. ‘But just call me Sully. Everybody else does.’
‘Very well, Sully. How’re you killing Ayala?’
‘I’m going to have somebody else do it. Detective Inspector Ayala is in the line of fire, and that means he sometimes has to wear body armour. Kevlar fails if it’s stressed too much, especially if you put it somewhere really hot. I wear out his body armour, and someone else gets him. No link back to me.’
Morton nodded appreciatively. ‘Very good, Mr al-Djani. I like the outside-of-the-box thinking, and you can set up an alibi for the time of death. But there are three flaws here. One, you need access to the body armour in question. Two you’re assuming Ayala doesn’t replace his Kevlar, and that he only uses one vest. He’s lazy, so I’ll give you that. Three, you’re assuming Ayala will eventually get shot while wearing that Kevlar, and that it will fail in a fatal way. That’s a big ask. As murder methods go, it might be hard to track, but it’s not likely to succeed, either.’
‘Fair enough,’ Sully said with a grin. ‘For the record, I’d never murder a man who brings me a free doughnut.’
‘Who’s next?’ Morton asked. ‘How about one of the ladies? You’re awfully quiet in the back, there.’
Two of the women, one blonde with pale skin and the other a raven-haired beauty, were hiding behind Danny, shielded by the big man’s bulk.
‘Maisie Pincent,’ the blonde said. She looked over at Ayala with a mischievous smirk. Ayala was sipping his drink and looking bored.
‘And how did you murder Ayala?’ Morton asked.
‘I poisoned his coffee.’
Ayala spluttered, the hand holding his coffee cup swinging away from his lips. His coffee erupted all over him and his laptop. He yelped as he jumped from his seat, brushing his thighs as the coffee – thankfully lukewarm by now – trickled down his legs.
‘I like your sense of timing, Ms Pincent,’ Morton said. ‘Poison is the most common method by which women commit murder. It is clean, simple, and often effective. You don’t have to watch your victim die, and you can be miles away when it happens. The big flaw is that it requires access both to a suitable poison and to the victim. You need to get physically close, and if you can do that, there are better options.’
As Morton spoke, Ayala’s laptop turned to a blue screen, casting a blue tinge over the entire lecture theatre.
‘We have time for one more before we break for poison-free coffee,’ Morton said. He pointed at the woman next to Ms Pincent. ‘How about you?’
‘Almira el-Mirza. I’m going to blow up the building he’s in. Nobody needs to know he was the target, so tracing his murder back to me would be impossible.’
Morton’s jaw dropped. The potential for collateral damage was enormous. But she wasn’t entirely wrong. It would be hard to track.
Similar expressions of horror spread throughout the room, and an awkward silence fell.
‘Okay,’ Morton said, trying to buy time to think of an appropriate response. ‘Can you be more specific about how you’d do it?’
Ms el-Mirza cocked her head to one side, watching Morton’s reaction. ‘I could fly a drone through the window with an explosive and kill everyone in this room. The evidence would go up in smoke with us.’
‘Very... violent. Three problems. Number one, you’d need the right expertise. Not many people know how to make a bomb and how to fly a drone. That would narrow it down. Number two, you’d need access to the right materials to make a bomb. Some household cleaners might give you a small bang, but if you really want to make a mess of all the evidence, you’d have to lay your hands on restricted materials. Number three, you’d need to get around the no-fly zone around this building. Any drone on approach would be shot down long before it got through the window.’
‘And,’ Ayala added as he continued to mop up coffee, ‘you’d have to be willing to go down with us. You’re in this room too.’
El-Mirza looked unperturbed.
‘Time for a break,’ Morton said. ‘I think Ms Pincent owes Inspector Ayala a fresh cup of coffee.’
Chapter 3: Shot
It was nearing nine-thirty, and the Dog House was already rammed. Leon hated Saturday nights behind the bar. The music was too loud, the clients were too drunk, and it was ten to one on that someone was going to puke before midnight.
The crowd was young, dumb, and desperate to spend their parents’ money. The Old Brompton Road was an alcoholic’s paradise with pubs, bars, and restaurants in every direction. For the rich and the soulless, it was home. At the centre of it all was the Dog House, the oldest bar in the road and the rowdiest.
Leon tapped the other bartender on the arm and yelled over the music blaring through a nearby speaker.
‘Missy, can you cover me? I need a smoke.’
She nodded, and Leon headed for the fire exit behind the bar. He briefly acknowledged the photographer circling the dance floor as he passed by, and then ignored the ‘Fire Exit Only: Do Not Open’ signs warning of a non-existent alarm, propped the door open with an old cinder block, and proceeded out into the alley.
The night air hit him immediately. It was cool, almost refreshing, as a light drizzle found its way between the buildings. Leon pulled out his vape and turned it on. A sweet cherry-flavoured nicotine mist hit him immediately. He inhaled deeply, pulling the mist into his lungs in a way he never could quite do with real cigarettes. Gone were the shallow, rapid breaths of the tar addiction of his youth.
As he smoked, he listened to the sounds of the night. The bar’s techno music thumping away inside had been reduced to a dull throb that assailed his temples. Cars buzzed by at the end of the alleyway as Leon smoked.
Then he heard it: a muffled bang. He wasn’t quite sure what it was at first. It was much too early in the year for fireworks, and seldom did anyone fire just one of those. Leon scanned the sky above him for a moment in case it was that simple. A less sober man might have dismissed the noise as part of the club music. It sounded almost like a gun, though not quite as loud as Leon had seen it portrayed in the movies. One shot.
He had to find out what it was, so he ran towards the source of the noise. It hadn’t sounded very far away, almost as if it were just to the south of the club, where a shortcut ran down to Drayton Gardens. Leon sprinted around the corner onto the road, ran down to the next alleyway over where the sound appeared to be coming from. He never stopped to think of his own safety, and that was when he saw her.
There was a woman slumped on the ground, limbs akimbo, as if she were a rag doll tossed aside by a giant. Her chest was stained crimson as blood spurted in time with her heartbeat. Leon knelt next to her and pressed two fingers against her neck. She was still alive. Barely.
Leon tore his shirt off, wadded up the fabric, and pressed it to the woman’s chest with one hand. He had to stop the bleeding, else she wouldn’t last long enough for an ambulance to arrive. He could see her heartbeat dropping as the interval between spurts of blood increased. He didn’t have long.
With his free hand, Leon dialled 999 and hoped he wasn’t too late.
***
Rafferty’s phone rumbled to indicate a text message a little after ten o’clock. This was it. Her first case as lead. Her hands trembled as she read the message summoning her to the Brompton Road, and the nerves hadn’t quite worn off by the time she reached the Old Do
g pub. She doubled-parked on the main road and stepped out into the drizzle.
The familiar blue-and-white crime scene tape signposted where the victim had been shot. It was an alleyway behind the pub that Rafferty knew all too well. The Old Dog had been a favourite of hers ever since she was old enough to drink.
Uniformed officers were guarding the perimeter. The nearest man saluted as she approached.
‘Detective Inspector Rafferty,’ she said. ‘Where’s the body?’
‘Body?’ the man echoed. ‘You’re getting ahead of yourself. The vic is down at the Royal Brompton Hospital. By all accounts, she’s in bad shape, but she ain’t dead yet.’
Rafferty’s stomach churned. Ten seconds in, and she was already making mistakes. She quickly checked her phone for the initial message. It read: ‘Shooting, Old Brompton Road. Victim: Angela King.’ It didn’t say she was dead.
‘Err, right,’ Rafferty stammered. ‘Then, where was our vic?’
‘Halfway down the alleyway, equidistant between the lampposts. One of your boys is waiting for you.’
Rafferty squeezed between the officers to find Mayberry loitering awkwardly with a digital SLR in his hands.
‘R-Rafferty! W-where’s Morton?’
‘He’s not coming,’ Rafferty said.
‘He’s n-not?’ Mayberry said, his tone dubious.
Rafferty looked around the crime scene. Techs were waiting nearby. It took a moment for her to realise that they were waiting for her to direct them. Morton seemed to get everyone working without any real effort.
She motioned for them to come closer. When everyone was in earshot, she raised her voice and called out, ‘I’m in charge tonight. Come on – our crime scene is getting wetter by the minute, and we need to get to work. I want fingerprints, DNA, anything and everything we can get. Mayberry, show me what you’ve found so far.’
Mayberry looked confused but complied nonetheless. There wasn’t much to see. The position of the victim had been marked both by the police and by her own blood loss. The rain was still pelting down, and much of the evidence had been washed away.
The DCI Morton Box Set Page 51
