mutilated skeletons. This was an important tomb, from the mysterious end of the Moche Empire, the desperate time of the Muchika. They were headed for the dark heart, the airless core of the pyramid.
Jay was muttering behind, in the depths of the gloom. His colleague joined in, giving voice to his concerns. ‘You know. The air is, ah, pretty bad down here, Dan.’
‘But what can we do? We haven’t got any oxygen tanks at the lab, have we?’
‘Nope. We finished the last on Monday.’
The frustrating debate continued, then Dan lifted a hand. ‘So, either we call a halt and wait a week for a new delivery, or we advance. Guys?’ His headtorch illuminated their white faces one by one.
In turn, everyone nodded. The decision was made.
‘Then let’s do it!’
Reaching up, Dan began tugging at the door. There was just room for his fingers to grasp an edge, and pull. He pulled once. Nothing. He pulled again. No movement.
Jess came up beside him, kneeling in the dust, to help. Still nothing.
‘Another go, come on.’
As one they tugged, and then the door seemed to shift, a few millimetres; then decisively, with a cloud of soil and choking dust. But something was wrong. This dust was red It was pouring from somewhere, from some hidden channel, some broken vessel above; draining like a tipped-up load of vermillion sand over Jessica’s face and hair and mouth. She was being smothered in thick red dust with a weird smell. She screamed out loud, in terror.
It was a ghastly childhood dream — of being stifled at night, feeling cold hands that throttled; it was a dream of being her father in his last moments, in hospital, misting the oxygen mask, drowning in pain, staring hapless and terrified at the nurse and the kids and the oncoming darkness — until his own seven-year-old daughter had wanted to thrust a pillow right over his face and end it for him And then the scarlet dust filled her mouth, and she could scream no more.
8
The Bishops Avenue, London
There were murders and there were… murders. That was the unspoken agreement between Detective Chief Inspector Ibsen and his detective sergeant, Larkham. A plain old murder was just that: a murder. A robbery gone nasty, or a domestic gone awry.
But a… murder was different. It required a microsecond of hesitation before the word was enunciated, or a subtle drop in voice tone, barely half a note, a third of a note. ‘Sir, we have a… murder.’
This one was, by all accounts, very much a… murder. Ibsen could tell from his DS’s demeanour. DS Larkham had already seen the corpse, which had been discovered six hours previously: his already-pale English face was paler than ever, his voice subdued, his normal cheeriness quite dispelled.
Their large police car was slowly rolling down The Bishops Avenue, one of the richest streets in London. Ibsen gazed out at the enormous houses, the fake Grecian villas looking faintly surreal in the drizzle. One resembled a vast temple from Luxor, inexplicably transported to the wintry north of the capital and fitted with six burglar alarms. The next house appeared to have sentries.
‘Who the fuck lives in houses like this?’ said the driver, giving voice to all their thoughts.
‘Kuwaiti emirs,’ said Ibsen. ‘Billionaire Thai politicians. Nobody in winter.’
‘Sorry, sir?’
‘Look — hardly any cars. A lot of these people have houses all over the world. They come here in summer, it’s dead in December. Makes it a good place to commit a crime. In winter.’
‘Well, our murder victim lived here.’ Larkham grimaced. ‘Even in winter.’
‘What do we know about him?’
‘Nephew of the Russian ambassador.’
‘Ouch.’ Ibsen winced at the complications. ‘This is an official residence?’
‘No, sir. Just a rich family. Father’s into oil and diamonds. Oligarch.’
‘Has someone told the Foreign Office?’
‘Already did it, sir.’
DCI Ibsen gazed, with a brief sense of pleasure, at Larkham’s keen face. Here was an ambitious policeman, a bright young man who had skipped university to go straight into the force, already a DS in his mid-twenties, with a very young family. He’d been Ibsen’s junior for just six months, and he was obviously itching for Ibsen’s job, but in a good way, just so he could move on up. Ibsen preferred to have someone nakedly and brazenly ambitious than a schemer who subtly politicked.
Larkham yawned; Ibsen grinned. ‘Nappies at dawn?’
‘And feeding at four a.m. Feel like I’ve done a shift already.’ He stifled his sleepiness and asked, ‘Does it get better?’
‘It gets better. When they reach the age of reason. About five or so.’
Larkham groaned; Ibsen chuckled. ‘OK. Tell me again. We’ve got statements?’
‘Yes, sir.’
Larkham repeated what information they had gathered so far. The first statement came from a passer-by, who had heard two raised male voices as he walked past the house at eleven p.m., though they didn’t sound violent…’
‘And the other statement?’
‘From a neighbour, an au pair in the house next door, at one a.m., approximately the time of death, according to Pathology’s very rough initial guess, sir. She also heard the raised voices of two men. She says these voices were shouting, aggressive, possibly violent, possibly drunk.’
‘But she did nothing?’
‘Very young lady, sir, Just nineteen. Croatian.’
‘Ah.’ Ibsen understood this. Bishops Avenue was the kind of place where rich important people went to be seriously undisturbed in big houses. A teenage au pair living in a strange big house in a strange new country would be reluctant to cause any bother.
‘Here we go, sir.’
The car parked outside a large building fronted by two-storey-high white Doric pillars. A big car in the driveway was covered with some kind of tailored sheet. Ibsen stared: he had never had a car expensive enough to require special protection from the English winter.
‘The body?’
‘This way.’
They were greeted at the door by the Scene of Crime Officer, wearing a paper suit which zipped up at the front. Other forensic and attending officers came out of the building, carrying evidence bags, and walked to a large steel van, parked behind the sheet-covered car.
‘There’s a lot of blood,’ said the SOCO through his paper mask, with the air of a host at a house party greeting his latest guests.
‘Can we see?’
‘You need to nonce up first, sir.’
Stalling at the doorway, Ibsen and Larkham slipped on their plastic gloves and paper masks and translucent overshoes, like politicians visiting a fish factory. Then they stepped through the enormous pillared hall into an enormous pillared sitting room. Ibsen resisted the urge to swear, as he surveyed the crime scene. Then his resistance crumbled.
‘Fucking hell.’
The victim was young, blond, and handsome: maybe twenty-five or thirty at most. He was lying supine on the floor near a large antique desk. A phone and a notepad sat on the desk, to the left of a laptop, which was lightly smeared with blood.
Opposite the desk stood some speakers, and a vast black television: ultra-expensive kit.
The face of the young Russian was slightly turned towards the desk, as if in his last moments he had tried,
