“Yes, ma’am.” He cleared his throat. “If you’d care to stand back…”
Eve stepped away from the door as the Gammon undid the button on his suit jacket, shrugged to loosen his shoulders, then pivoted and slammed a size thirteen boot into the lock.
The door crashed open and rebounded. The Gammon caught it before it slammed shut and held it for her: “Ma’am.”
Eve stepped past him without comment. This one’s an improvement, she noted. Maybe he’s a keeper.
She took the stairs to the flat at a measured pace, not hurrying—it wouldn’t do to arrive out of breath—but not dawdling, either. Something was clearly wrong. Bernard never forgot to switch on the answering machine on the rare occasions when he went out.
Eve paused on the top-floor landing. The Gammon arrived behind her, not even huffing. “Ma’am?”
“One moment.” Eve reached towards the door handle, then paused. “Hmm.”
“Want me to open it, ma’am?”
Preoccupied, Eve forgot to bite his head off. (He was, in any case, trailing her own line of thought, albeit a few steps behind.) “Not yet.”
She clasped her hands behind her back as she reached for the door handle again, this time by force of will alone. Mind over matter, she chanted to herself, quivering with effort. A prickly perspiration broke out across her forehead. Eve had a knack for telekinesis, but to her total disgust, she could bench-press greater weights using her arm muscles alone. Her other abilities were all so risibly feeble that a less determined woman would have given up on them. But Eve had persisted, exploring her limits and learning how to use her powers in combination and to best effect. Precision and perception could, if deployed correctly, compensate for a lack of raw power. So although her mind could barely hold a twenty-kilogram weight against gravity, she could reach behind a keyhole and feel for hidden tumblers. And it took much less than twenty kilos of force to spring a Yale lock.
There was a click: then the doorknob rotated, and the door swung softly inwards.
“Ma’am?”
She pointed: “That’s a steel door frame, and the door’s reinforced. You’d have broken your ankle.” And a broken front door and an unlocked inner door will tell a misleading story if the police come calling. “You go first.”
The Gammon had already snapped on a pair of blue surgical gloves. He bulled through the door and swept along Bernard’s narrow hallway, one hand concealed under his jacket. He cast left, covering the hall closet and the bathroom, then right, checking out the living room. “Clear,” he called softly. On into the rear of the flat: the compact kitchen, the bedroom. “Clear, clear—” At the end of the hall, the office door stood shut. The Gammon froze beside it, drew his pistol, then looked to Eve for direction.
“Allow me.” Eve stepped into the bedroom doorway, then reached out with her mind. The door handle turned and the Gammon crouched as he followed the door in, covering the room.
“Clear,” he said, then paused. “Ma’am, you’re not going to like this.”
“How long has he been dead?” she asked, stepping out from behind her cover.
The Gammon knelt beside Bernard’s body. His death had not been dignified. The sleazy book spiv lay face down on the office floor, his head half-covered by a wool cardigan that had fallen on top of him. The feet splayed out behind him were shod in bedroom slippers, their leather soles worn to a high gloss. He was, she observed, still wearing his pajama bottoms. There was a significant amount of blood, but blood loss wasn’t what had killed him.
“No rigor, ma’am.” The Gammon touched the back of the victim’s neck. “He hasn’t been dead long enough to go cold. I’d say less than six hours, maybe less than four.”
Eve glanced around the room. The computer’s monitor stared darkly back at her. Its usual hum was absent, and there was a gaping rectangular hole in the front of the system unit where a hard drive would normally be. The desk drawers were open, their contents disturbed.
“Well.” She composed herself, took a deep breath, and mustered up a smile: “Well! This is a setback.” Stop babbling in front of the help, she admonished herself sternly. Stiff upper lip. “Obviously somebody was extremely eager to preempt the auction.” She toed the corpse distastefully with the tip of one Manolo Blahnik. “Turn him over.”
“Ma’am? Preserving the crime scene—”
“Is not our concern,” she said crisply.
“Yes, ma’am.” He gripped the body by one shoulder and heaved.
Eve pulled on a pair of gloves and crouched beside him. “Right. Right.” She touched the back of Bernard’s head, through the matted, bloody hair. Bone grated mushily under her fingertips. “A blow to the occipital bone, showing signs of extreme force. Probably sent splinters into the foramen magnum, tearing the medulla oblongata. The hemorrhaging is from the posterior spinal artery: there isn’t much because cardiac arrest was nearly instantaneous.” She stood and contemplated Bernard’s mortal remains for almost a minute. Her hands itched for a scalpel.
“Ma’am? What should I do?”
“Go and close the front door, then stand guard. If anyone you don’t know tries to enter, kill them.”
“Very good, ma’am.” For such a large man he could move surprisingly quietly.
Once he was gone, Evelyn closed the office door, then pulled out her phone and dialed. “Julian, this is Eve,” she said without preamble. “I want a cleanup team round at Bernard Harris’s flat. Crash priority, open checkbook. Prime the pig farm to expect a consignment for disposal. I need the contents of the office here bagging and tagging, and a full forensic teardown of Mr. Harris’s PC, although it looks like the hard drive’s been removed. He’s old school, so you’ll need to search for paper records, notebooks, diaries, that sort of thing. Oh, and there’s an old-fashioned printer—not an inkjet or laser, the kind with a ribbon. I want
