Rivers of London - Ben Aaronovitch [28]
‘This is yours,’ he said.
It was twice the size of my room at the section house, with good proportions and a high ceiling. A brass double bed was shoved into one corner, a Narnia wardrobe in the other and a writing desk was between them, where it could catch the light from one of the two sash windows. Bookshelves covered two entire walls, empty except for what turned out on later inspection to be a complete set of the eleventh edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica published in 1913, a battered first edition of Brave New World and a Bible. What had obviously once been an open fireplace had been replaced with a gas fire surrounded by green ceramic tiles. The reading lamp on the desk had a faux-Japanese print shade and beside it was a Bakelite phone that had to be older than my father. There was a smell of dust and freshly applied furniture polish, and I guessed that this room had dreamed the last fifty years away under the white dust sheets.
‘When you’re ready, meet me downstairs,’ said Nightingale. ‘And make sure you’re presentable.’
I knew what that was about so I tried to stretch it, but it didn’t take me long to unpack.
Strictly speaking, it wasn’t our job to pick up grieving parents from the airport. Leaving aside the fact that officially this was Westminster Murder Team’s case, it was extremely unlikely that August Coopertown’s parents had any information pertinent to the murder. It sounds callous, but detectives have better things to do than impromptu counselling for bereaved relatives; that’s what Family Liaison Officers are for. Nightingale didn’t see it that way, which was why he and I were standing at the arrivals barrier at Heathrow when Mr and Mrs Fischer cleared customs. I was the one holding the cardboard sign.
They weren’t what I expected. The dad was short and balding and the mum was mousy-haired and tubby. Nightingale introduced himself in what I assumed was Danish and told me to carry the bags back to the Jag, which I was glad to do.
Ask any police officer what the worst part of the job is and they will always say breaking bad news to relatives, but this is not the truth. The worst part is staying in the room after you’ve broken the news so that you’re forced to be there when someone’s life disintegrates around them. Some people say it doesn’t bother them – such people are not to be trusted.
The Fischers had obviously googled for the closest hotel to their daughter’s house, and had thus booked themselves into a brick-built combination prison block/ petrol station on Haverstock Hill whose lobby was shopworn, fussy and as welcoming as a job centre. I doubt the Fischers noticed, but I could see that Nightingale didn’t think it was good enough, and for a moment I thought he was going to offer to put them up at the Folly.
Then he sighed and told me to put the luggage down by the reception desk. ‘I’ll deal with things from here,’ he said and sent me home. I said goodbye to the Fischers and walked out of their lives as fast as I could go.
*
After that I really didn’t want to go out but Lesley persuaded me. ‘You can’t just come to a stop ’cause bad things happen,’ she said. ‘Besides, you owe me a night out.’
I didn’t argue, and after all, the good thing about the West End is that there’s always somewhere to see a film. We started at the Prince Charles but they were showing Twelve Monkeys downstairs and a Kurosawa double bill upstairs, so we went round the corner to the Leicester Square Voyage. The Voyage is a miniature village version of a multiplex with eight screens, of which at least two are larger than your average plasma-screen television. Normally I like a certain amount of gratuitous violence in my cinema, but I let Lesley persuade me that Sherbet Lemons, this month’s feel-good romcom with Allison Tyke and Dennis Carter was