by Tony White
Rex told Lollo that he didn’t quite know what to think. Had business really taken a turn for the worse for Terry since that last sombre pint? He had tried calling his mate’s mobile as soon as they found out the incident was at the Royal Palace Theatre. And then again when it became clear that it was in the paint frame. But both calls had gone straight to message.
It wasn’t just Covent Garden that had been regenerated. The Lamb’s Conduit Street that Rex himself worked in now bore little resemblance to the one he’d got to know a couple of decades earlier. Holborn Police Station hadn’t changed, but apart from one or two other survivors in the area – the aforementioned Fryer’s Delight – there was barely a shopfront or an eatery that hadn’t undergone at least a couple of transformations. From tobacconist to copy shop to nail bar, say. Hairdressers and estate agents were the other current fads. Further out, of course, and it would be payday loan merchants and bookmakers. Stick around for long enough and you could see the process in action. Businesses that had closed during the financial ebb-tide of whichever recession would lie empty for a while, post piling up on their respective doormats. Then the premises would play host to a flicker of pop-ups and fly-by-nights, nothing sticking, until suddenly the machine stops, the money comes back for a while, and for a decade or so you’ve got an Argentinian steakhouse, a blow-dry bar or an upmarket greetings-card shop. King had the feeling that around here that process, whatever you’d call it – ‘boom and bust’ didn’t seem adequate – might have gone a bit too far, that they were heading for another high-water mark. The idea that a single street could sustain half a dozen near-identical upmarket men’s designer clothes and footwear shops, however good they might be, would have been unimaginable when he’d arrived here. Let alone shops that displayed little more than a single handmade leather bag and a scattering of kitsch cufflinks. Or the one that only sold retro-styled reproduction French crockery, of all things. It had gone way beyond any normal cycle of urban renewal.
The Conduit Coffee House, affectionately known as Sid’s, a better-than-average greasy spoon where Rex had enjoyed countless all-day breakfasts ‘plus two extra hash browns’, as well as his more recent ‘usual’, the rather healthier two poached egg on two brown toast, was now far outnumbered by artisan coffee shops with a sideline in organic this and wheatgrass that. Even the old clock-mender’s around the corner was now an upmarket tea-shop specialising in cupcakes. Rex had gone in there once looking for a decent coffee, and they’d asked him if he had a fucking reservation. What had used to be The Sun, a great real-ale pub on the corner, had gone through several changes of name and theme, and was currently, and without irony, called The Perseverance.
Over those same years, most of King’s colleagues had done the usual and drifted out of town to their various respective domestic idylls, commuting in from Essex or Hertfordshire, but King had lived in the same Holborn flat since 1989. All these years later he still got a kick out of the fact that, living where he did, almost everywhere in central London was within walking distance. Once upon a time, that boast would have meant nights out in the West End, strolling to Camden or Clerkenwell, meeting mates for pints in Bradley’s or Chinese food in Wong Kei. Then afterwards a coffee in Bar Italia before strolling home and walking in through his own front door at more or less the same moment when, for others, the hunt for night buses would only just be beginning. Now he probably hadn’t been to any of those pubs – The Pillars, The French House, The Blue Posts – for a decade or more, and walking anywhere was usually associated with the job. Like now. Given the chance, King would generally walk to all but the most serious of grade-A calls, and even those he could generally reach more quickly on foot than in a car. He had stopped asking, ‘What took you so long?’ years ago.
As he crossed at the lights, King checked his phone, but there was still no word from Tel. Seeing the blue-and-white incident tape that stretched across both ends of Russell Street, the police cars and the ambulance, he quickened his pace. A thin wisp of blue smoke hugged the ground, twisting and curling along the pavement from a discarded cigarette end on the kerb.
‘Alright?’ he said to the PCSO who was standing at the stage dock door. ‘Do they know who it is?’
‘Don’t know, skip,’ came the slightly rueful reply. ‘They don’t tell me nothing.’
You should be thankful for that, you doughnut, King thought to himself.
‘Who’s here?’ he asked. ‘Socks?’
‘Yeah, Socks and Fuck Me.’
‘Fuck Me?’
‘Yeah. Bit of a mess. I know that much.’
Oh shit. Taking a deep breath, Rex was aware that this could be the last lungful of fresh air he would enjoy for a while. He might also be about to see what was left of a good mate. Steeling himself for whatever was in there, and mentally preparing for a potential ID, he didn’t need anyone to show him the way to the paint frame.
‘What have we got?’ he asked the PC who met him on the inside and handed over a paper suit and slippers.
‘Alright, skip? Unidentified male, we think. It’s been here two or three days. Don’t know any more than that at the moment.’
Rex sighed. Good old Terry. It – he – wouldn’t be unidentified for long. ‘Where is he?’ Rex asked.
‘Down there,’ said the PC, leaning around the doorway and pointing towards one of the drops. Now scrim-free, the topmost black timbers of one of the painting frames were about waist high, which meant that most of the structure was down below. Two rubber-gloved and paper-suited Socks – Scenes of Crime Officers, to give them their full title – were shining handheld fluorescents down the shaft.
It would be easy enough to get pissed and fall down there, thought Rex. Tel could certainly put it away, but Rex had never seen him that drunk.
The next few hours went past in a blur of paper suits and flash photography. These were well-practised procedures that had evolved over the decades to secure any scene and to ensure everyone’s safety. The aim was to prevent the loss or contamination of any evidence, whether trace or forensic, that might help to build an information profile. A picture of where, when and how the death – in this case – might have occurred. Whether it even was a crime scene. All of this had to be done before you could determine whether any formal evaluation or investigative strategy needed to be developed. And all of this too, here and now, amid the utter mess and chaos and the teeming unfamiliarity, to most of those present at least, of an artist’s studio. ‘What a fucking mess,’ the photographer said. ‘I don’t fucking know where to start.’
Webster was over in the corner chatting to a Sock. Taller than Rex, with dark hair and a double chin, in his open-necked shirt and crumpled brown suit, Webbo’s substantial spare tyre spoke of a long commute in a comfy car and a fondness for social drinking, but what else was there to do out in the sticks?
Rex was glad not to be in charge. At any death scene, everyone knew their job and their level and got on with it. Training kicked in, whether that was basic work like note-taking and doing measurements or sketches, or more specialist functions such as photography, or collecting swabs and scrapings from whatever geyser of bodily fluids might have sprayed across floors or walls, to see if they might yield some DNA. All done by habit as much as anything, with individuals of whatever rank methodically following procedures and training. That was the theory, anyway, but there was always scope for a fuck-up. So all of this activity also had to be planned and co-ordinated by a qualified CSM, or Crime Scene Manager. Rex had worked his way up the PIPs training – the Professionalising Investigation Programme – hoovering up the National Occupational Standard qualifications, so he had done his share of CSM, and done it well. But when the call had come in and his personal connection with the possible victim became apparent, Lollo – Detective Chief Inspector Jethro Lawrence – had given CSM to DS Edward Webster, with the expectation that Webster would be well placed to take on Deputy Senior Investigating Officer, or DSIO, as well. Deputy, that is, to Lollo’s nominal role a
s SIO.
Detective Sergeants Webster and King had trained and come up through the ranks together, and they got on well enough despite a bit of form in their personal lives. Actually, that was ‘the understatement of the year’, as people had once been fond of saying, but, as Rex had told Lollo, he wasn’t about to let any past differences get in the way of finding out what had happened to poor old Terry Hobbs.
‘Right,’ said DS Webster, several hours later, when a lull in activity suggested that the initial response phase was coming to an end. ‘Let’s get him up, shall we?’ He looked around, as if searching for something. ‘How does this thing work? Got to be a handle or something somewhere. Anyone know? Rex? With respect, he’s your mate.’
‘No problem.’ Rex reached out to rest his hand on the upright, gripping the smooth, blackened wood of the frame before giving it a gentle upward shove. ‘It’s all counterweights, Eddie,’ he said, looking up at the pulleys with their S-shaped spokes turning high above their heads as the great wooden frame slowly rose to his touch. ‘Amazing bit of machinery, isn’t it?’
There was not much time for those assembled to admire the Georgian engineering. Looking down the drop they had seen rope, so they all had an idea of what to expect. Rex wondered aloud whether the weight of Terry’s body might have been enough to lower the frame a metre or two with the sudden jerk of its fall.
As the huge structure rolled up into the light, Rex saw the top of a familiar and nearly bald head. Then the rest of the body emerged, its head lolling to one side and from the waist down its clothes soiled with foul liquid putrefaction. It stank, and no wonder. With a nightly audience next door of – what? – three and a half thousand, perhaps, Rex couldn’t believe it had taken this long for anyone to complain about the smell.
In his quarter-century on the force, Rex had seen plenty of dead bodies. He was used to the various transformations that betrayed the dead’s steady march through the inevitable stages of decay. But the features of this body – because Rex knew that, whatever this was, it wasn’t his pal any longer – were far more grotesquely disfigured by bloating and the other processes of decomposition than Rex might have expected. More discoloured too. What with the mottled greenish tinge and the fact that the nose appeared to be missing, his former mate’s features were rendered almost unrecognisable.
‘Ouch,’ said Rex, reaching protectively for his own nose. ‘Scraped off in the drop, do you think?’
‘Male deceased,’ Webster was dictating. ‘IC1. Height: five-eleven or six? Age?’ He turned to Rex.
‘Terry? Oh, I don’t know. Maybe my age; bit older? Fifty-five-ish? Not sure,’ was the best Rex could do.
‘Suicide?’ asked DS Webster.
‘Hard to say,’ said Dr Sue Stanza.
‘Shit!’ said Rex, pointing at the shoes: light-tan slip-ons with a rounded and highly polished toe. ‘That’s not Terry Hobbs, Eddie. The bald fucker had me going for a minute there. Similar build, but I don’t think Tel ever polished a shoe in his life.’ He stepped forward to look at one of the hands.
‘You’re kidding,’ said Webster.
‘No. It’s not him. One hundred per cent. Tel’s got artist’s hands, from all the chemicals or whatever. There’d be paint under his fingernails. These are clean.’
‘Well, who the fuck is it, then?’
‘Christ knows,’ said Rex.
But they all knew what this meant.
If that wasn’t Terry Hobbs’s body in the frame, as it were, then Terry could be in another kind of frame for killing whoever the fuck it really was.
Webster turned to the duty Forensic Medical Examiner – a.k.a. the FME, or Fuck Me for short – with a wink: ‘What do you reckon, Dr Stanza? Is he dead?’
‘Well, if he’s not,’ Sue Stanza played along, ‘I’m not doing CPR.’
She went in for a closer look at the gaping wound on his face. ‘No sign of scraping there,’ she said. ‘Even with the bloating and the decomposition, it looks like a clean incision.’
‘What does that mean?’ Eddie Webster asked.
‘That it might well be a hanging,’ said Stanza, ‘but it’s not your open-and-shut suicide.’
When they had been in training, King and Webster had been close, like a double act. Testing each other on the manual and each acting as a sounding board for the other. You had to. There was a lot to take in; you couldn’t just absorb these tactical and strategic processes overnight.
Back then, faced with a crime scene, they would have had to verbally go through the checklist just to work out what type of homicide this was. ‘Domestic?’ Rex might have asked.
‘Current or former spouse?’ Webster would continue, listing off the subcategories. ‘Sexual rival? Parent–child or child–parent? Nope, doesn’t look like it.’
Starting out, there was a reason you had to actually enumerate the options. You had to say it out loud so that it would sink in: Homicide in the course of other crime? Robbery or burglary gone wrong? Sexual attack? Gang-related killing? Racially motivated? Unspecified and unrelated? Serial murder, mass homicide or terrorism? HAC – homicide among children? Now they just sort of knew the list, and made a decision without even thinking about it. They didn’t actually have to cross all the options off any more. This one was easy to categorise: Context and motive unknown. Which is to say that it was the most difficult kind of investigation.
Once the photographer was done, DS Webster began appointing roles for the wider trawl. Some of this was obvious stuff. Putting a few bodies on house-to-house enquiries and community reassurance, getting hold of all the CCTV, checking the description against missing persons on CATCHEM, obtaining statements from the staff who’d reported it, checking the signing-in sheets on the stage door.
It wasn’t just the muffin man who lived on Drury Lane. Dozens of windows overlooked the stage house on the corner with Russell Street. There were mansion blocks, Peabody flats, a school. There was no saying whether anyone in those various windows would have seen anything, but you could never tell what a house-to-house might turn up.
Following up with everyone else at the scene might be a bit more challenging when there were tens of thousands of people – the population of a small town – passing through a big theatre like this every week.
There was a long way to go before anyone would be making any kind of hypothesis about what had happened here, but given the split between front of house and backstage, and anxious to get his foot on the ball and control the play as quickly as possible, Webster decided to reduce the size of the pitch, as it were. They were to obtain what ticketing records they could, but to do nothing with that data beyond a preliminary search for known offenders. The more complicated aspect of the job was making sure the paperwork was not only in order, but also auditable. Everyone from detective upwards knew that was the key to a conviction, and that the better a case was documented, the more chance it would have of standing up in court.
With all of this, DS Eddie Webster was following the Murder Investigation Manual to the letter, but in one respect he decided to do something different. Given Rex King’s prior relationship with Hobbs, a man who in the space of a few seconds had been transformed from potential victim to main suspect, Webster had checked with Lollo and they’d asked King to stay on as Second Deputy SIO ‘at large’. This was unorthodox, but the looser attachment was designed to give the investigation, and Webster, access to King’s background knowledge and expertise, but without overcommitting him or taking him off other current or impending investigations.
At midnight, Rex King was still at his desk in Holborn Police Station. He could have gone home hours ago but hadn’t been able to face it, he’d said – not with his friend missing and now possibly wanted for murder. He’d given up trying to think through the conversations they’d had the last few times they had met up. Instead he had been scrolling through the hundreds of crime-scene photographs of Hobbs’s studio that had already gone up on to the investigation’s shared drive. He didn’t exac
tly know what he was looking for. Perhaps he was just waiting for something to jump out at him. That was a hard enough job at the best of times, but ten times more difficult when you were looking at such a visually busy space. Rex had seen it all before, of course, on his many visits over the years. So he could see through much of what, to most people, might look like generalised chaos – and yet the paint frame suddenly looked strange and unfamiliar. Right now, no single detail was more important than anything else. It was as if the photographer’s gaze and the very act of taking these photographs, functional images devoid of any of the usual aesthetic impulses, had broken everything down to the same level. As if only then, by looking at the scene and its constituent parts afresh, but without the usual hierarchies and imperatives of subject or theme, could some new order be constructed from it. In this case, hopefully, the gradual assembly of a persuasive story about how and why someone had been murdered. But the lack of visual artistry, the absence of an imposed vision, always made crime-scene pictures hard to look at. And Christ knows, thought Rex, it was difficult enough already, given what had gone on in there. One obvious thing, as he scrolled through the images, was that – apart from the body – the actual frames themselves were empty. There were no works in progress, no jobs on the go.
