The Hallmarked Man полностью

‘Yeah, she’s a right old bitch,’ said the teenager, to mutters of agreement and laughs from his friends.

‘Seen her lately?’

The boy shook his head.

‘Any of you?’ said Strike, looking around the group.

‘I seen her,’ said the second white boy, who was wearing a Millwall football strip. ‘Wiv a fat bloke.’

‘Younger than herself?’

The boy shrugged. Strike remembered being that age himself; everyone over forty looked decrepit.

‘All right,’ he said, ‘I have reason to believe Nancy might’ve done herself an injury and is unable to open the front door.’

It was a flimsy excuse, but as the youths would be witnesses to what he was doing in any case, Strike thought he might as well lay the foundation of a defence now. He returned to his car and extracted his bunch of skeleton keys from the glove compartment.

‘You gonna break in?’ said the bearded youth, in interest.

‘It’s not breaking in,’ lied Strike.

‘Can we come?’ said the youth in the Millwall top.

‘Worried about Nancy too, are you?’ said Strike.

‘Yeah,’ said the second of the South Asian boys, who alone was wearing a coat, and whose acne looked painful. ‘We’ve been dead worried.’

‘And you think I ought to get in there and check on her, do you?’ said Strike, still thinking of what he might have to tell a lawyer.

The boy with acne laughed.

‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘Def’nitely.’

Strike supposed it was the skeleton keys that interested them, or perhaps they wanted to witness the old woman’s drunken outrage at a stranger entering her flat. He doubted there was much else to do in Magdalen Court on a Sunday night in February.

‘I need at least one of you to keep an eye on my car,’ he said.

‘Does the one minding the car get the whole twenny-five quid?’ asked the black youth.

‘No, but he gets an extra fiver,’ said Strike.

‘Awright then, I’ll stay,’ said the boy.

So Strike traipsed back upstairs, the two white boys and the two South Asian boys following in his wake.

‘That was Baggy,’ he heard one of the boys saying to another, pointing at the curry or vomit splattered at the foot of the stairs, and they all chuckled.

Strike knocked a fourth time on Nancy’s flat door without result, so he inserted the key in the lock and turned it. No inside chain had been put up, so he wasn’t obliged to shoulder the door or break any part of it.

‘What’s that fucking smell?’ said the bearded youth, pushing forwards, but finding himself impeded by the arm Strike had just thrown up.

‘Stay here,’ said the detective firmly. ‘Do not come in.’

The unmistakeable, sickly sweet smell of decaying flesh had just assaulted his nostrils. He could hear the buzzing of flies.

‘Stay,’ he said firmly to the youths, and he proceeded down the narrow hall to look through the open door to his right, where the lamp was still switched on and where an incredibly emaciated cat let out a piteous miaow, trotted past him and escaped onto the balcony.

The bodies of Jim Todd and a woman Strike assumed to be his mother, Nancy, were lying on the dirty carpet in a foul miasma encouraged by the gas fire that continued to blaze. Todd, who was fully dressed, had been stabbed multiple times. His now black blood had soaked his shirt and the floor beneath him. There was evidence that the starving cat had chewed off part of his face. Nancy, a small, slight woman in a nightdress, had been killed with a single knife wound to the chest. The tache noire, a horizontal stripe, was visible in her dull, staring eyes, in one of which a maggot was wriggling.

‘FUCK!’

Strike turned: the youths had, of course, disregarded his instruction to stay put. The boy with acne had clapped a hand over his mouth.

‘Out,’ said Strike. ‘Out!’

Three of the youths blundered backwards but the bearded boy remained, apparently unable to move. Strike took him roughly by the shoulder of his jacket and marched him out onto the balcony, too late to stop the boy in the Millwall strip yelling down to his mate, who was watching Strike’s car,

‘They’ve been fucking murdered!’

‘Shut up,’ snarled Strike. ‘This isn’t a fucking game.’

The door of flat 38 now opened and a woman with a heavily lined face, dyed red hair and a tattooed throat came outside in dressing gown and slippers.

‘Woss going on?’ she demanded angrily.

‘With you in a minute,’ said Strike.

He turned to the boy with acne, who looked very sick and seemed less excited than the others, which Strike felt indicated a level of maturity.

‘Call the police. Tell them—’

‘I said, what’s going on?’

‘Just a moment, madam—’ Strike lowered his voice. ‘Tell them two people have been murdered and give them the add—’

‘I ain’t stayin’ if the police are comin’,’ said the boy in the WACKEN hoodie, and he set off at a jog, pushing the neighbour aside as he went.

‘Oi!’ she said, glaring after him. ‘What’s that smell?’ she added, striding closer.