“You can’t go off your grub and get all moody on me. Tell me you don’t fancy a sausage sandwich smothered in brown sauce.”
“Strangely enough, I don’t.”
Renfield headed off to the shops. Longbright watched from the window as he strutted along the wet street with nothing more than food on his mind.
“Ah, there you are,” said Bryant, ambling into the room, “I was going to stroll back with you from Mecklenburgh Square but you’d vaporised. Those students may dress like Gap advertisements but you should have seen the inside of their fridge. Oswald Finch used to keep his cadaver drawers in a better state. Having said that, I did once leave a beetroot salad in with one of his corpses, and he mistook it for – ”
“Arthur, I’m not in the mood,” said Longbright. “I’m sorry.”
“No, I’m the one who should be sorry.” He removed his hat and dropped into the battered armchair Longbright had installed for his visits. “In my usual clumsy way I was just trying to cheer you up. Unfortunately most of my conversation involves death, ancient history or mad people. No wonder I’ve never been very popular with the ladies. What did you think of our students?”
Longbright rose and blew a newly dyed blond curl from her eye. “A pretty ordinary bunch: a health-freak, a geek, a jock, a wide boy and a nerd.”
“I love the way you categorise; it’s all so simple for you. Think they have any secrets they’re hiding from us?”
“Of course. They wouldn’t be human if they didn’t. I just think their secrets will turn out to be pretty mundane.”
“What do you mean?”
“Oh, crushes, alliances, jealousies, money worries.”
“Hatreds?”
“Strong word. Dislikes, perhaps. Toby Brooke isn’t too keen on Theo Fontvieille.”
“Theo needles him constantly about his background. According to John, the rich boy dated the girl from the Karma Bar, then dumped her, but he’s so thick-skinned that he takes other girls to the bar without realising that he’s upsetting her. Dear Lord, I’m sounding like a gossip columnist.”
The idea made Longbright smile. “That’s okay, they’re just like any dysfunctional alternative family.”
“I don’t believe it’s a conspiracy. These students wouldn’t be able to organise a tea party without getting on each other’s nerves, let alone kill someone and hide the evidence. If this was something they’d planned, they would never have left Matthew Hillingdon’s travel card in the house, where it could be found.”
“Right now that and the partial print are the only pieces of incriminating evidence we have,” Longbright reminded him glumly.
“I’m convinced that the murderer is operating alone, without the knowledge of the others. That damned sticker links Taylor to the Karma Bar and Toby Brooke. I wonder how John’s getting on with him.” Bryant watched Longbright wince as she lifted a box from the desk. “How’s your shoulder?”
“Not so bad. It didn’t even need a stitch.”
“Let Colin take over from you when he gets back. He and Dan are going to go through the impounded evidence.”
“I’m fine,” Longbright promised. “I’m much happier working.”
“Okay, then you can carry on following the Indian chap all over town, if you wouldn’t mind. I don’t like the cut of his jib. I want all five housemates tailed over the weekend. We shouldn’t let any of them out of our sight. I’m counting down the hours until the Unit is pulled from service. I can’t see us making an arrest in time, but let’s keep watching them.” Bryant tapped his fingers beneath his beady eyes. “All five, all weekend, everywhere they go.”
¦
Bimsley and Banbury arrived back at the warehouse, and spent the next three hours searching the hard drives of the five housemates’ laptops. They turned up little of interest. Only Ruby Cates kept her financial details on record, along with an online diary that confirmed her obsession with ‘The Rat’, who was easily identified by his customised Porsche. Theo had a few dodgy gambling sites bookmarked, Sangeeta had too many photographs of Ruby in his photo library, Nikos had similar photos of Cassie in the bar and an awful lot of porn, Cates had posted some cryptic remarks on Facebook and Toby had worked hard at erasing details of the sites he visited. Their computer tracks seemed unusually guarded and cautious. To Dan’s suspicious mind it was proof that the students knew they were being watched, but Colin thought they were merely being security-conscious.
All five were running extensive music libraries of bands made popular over the last few years. All five had infringed copyright laws by file-sharing movies, but that seemed to be the extent of their illegal activities.
The iPhoto files from Matt Hillingdon’s laptop yielded some odd photographs that looked like colourful knitted versions of radio interference, so Bimsley forwarded them to Bryant’s phone, hoping that he might be able to figure out what they were – once he had managed to open them.
At six P.M. John May returned to the Unit with bad news. He and Meera had just finished interviewing Toby Brooke. Unprompted, the student had shown them a sheet of altered stickers that had been left lying about the house, and had admitted to handling them. Their evidence was compromised.
It was now Friday evening, and the case had once more stuttered to a halt. Bryant was forced to admit that it was by far the most infuriating investigation he had ever undertaken.
It was time, he decided, to take more drastic steps, starting with a visit to North London’s resident white witch.
? Off the Rails ?
37
Bad Air
“What more can I do?” asked Bryant. “We’re back to one piece of evidence and five less- than-ideal suspects. John has banned me from using any of my more
The Grade IV White Witch and leader of North London’s Coven of St James the Elder was spattered in pink paint, not a nice pink, either, but a shade that could best be described as Tired Marshmallow. “I was preparing a philtre for Deirdre,” she explained, “because her sex life has taken a turn for the worse again. She met a Polish bus driver with a habit of calling round at three A.M., and the trouble is he’s on nights, so he’d park a bus full of passengers outside her house while he came in.”
“That must have been inconvenient.”
“Not really. His route goes past her house.”
“I meant for her.”
“Oh, yes, that was the problem. She’d wanted to meet a man with his own transport, but technically of course he doesn’t.”
“Doesn’t what?”
“Own it. So I needed fennel for the potion. And cheese-and-onion crisps.”
“You put crisps in a love potion?”
“No, I was just hungry. So I put some bacon into the eye-level grill and went to the shops.”
“Why did you do that?”
“Well, you layer crisps on either side of the bacon and it makes a wonderful sandwich.”
“No, I mean why did you leave the grill unattended?”
“You know how my concentration has been since I fell off my bike.”
“No, how?”
“It wasn’t a question. Anyway, when I came back, the kitchen was on fire. Luckily I’d left a plastic washing- up bowl full of water on the rack above the grill, and when it melted it put out the flames.”
