‘Keeps his nose clean, does he?’ asked Longbright. ‘Stays out of trouble?’
‘Honest as the day is long. Always helping other people. That’s Terry’s trouble, if anything. Does charity work in his spare time. One of the best.’ It seemed that everyone in the shop agreed with that sentiment.
‘What did he do here?’
‘Painting, decorating, some building work, welding, a bit of demolition.’
‘Do you have a list of his most recent jobs?’
‘They’ll be in the book,’ said Jess. ‘Come with me.’
Dan Banbury was in many ways the PCU’s least likely member, in that there seemed to be nothing wrong with him. He was the married one who lived with a loving wife and a well-adjusted ten-year-old son in the suburbs of South London. He was the unit’s voice of common sense, and had been selected for precisely this reason. However, he possessed a skill that singled him out as unusual: He had an almost preternatural ability to understand what had happened in a vacated room. He followed standard procedures, establishing a three-dimensional grid pattern at a crime scene to mark off prints and collect fibres for analysis, but above this he had an understanding of the way in which frightened humans confronted one another. He saw the shape of their fears and passions, the psychology of their actions, the way in which they translated their emotions into physical movement. The ghosts of violence were visible to him.
The extraordinary thing was that, until being asked to join the PCU, he had been entirely unconscious of this sensitivity. Bryant had found such a skill present in only a handful of forensic experts, and had campaigned for Banbury’s inclusion in the unit. He needed people who saw more deeply than those around them.
When Banbury entered Delaney’s flat, he quickly recognised four people: Terry Delaney, his girlfriend, his daughter and a stranger. Terry was the most noticeable. Signs of his occupancy were everywhere, from the newspaper he had folded back to read over breakfast, to the whiskers rinsed from his razor and imperfectly cleaned from the sink, to the toothpaste that had dried on his brush. The bed had been occupied by one, but there were magazines, titles that would be read by a woman in her mid-twenties, thrown onto the bedside table beside a half-emptied tub of makeup remover and a brush containing long hairs. She was a dyed blonde, untidy, and her habits had annoyed Terry. He kept his territory tidy and separate. The little girl had slept on the couch in the neutral zone of the lounge. A single duvet was stored beneath it, together with her pyjamas, pink slippers, a jewelled hair clip.
But it was the stranger who interested Banbury most. Judging by the faint oily striation on the front door lock he had first tried to use a simple burglar’s tool to gain entrance, but had been defeated by the London bolt set in place on the inside of the door. He had gone down the hall and climbed out of the window, reaching around to the apartment’s bathroom casement. The carpet tiles at the end of the hall were rarely walked on, but the pile was slightly flattened at their edge, as if someone had reached out on tiptoe.
The conversion of the house into flats had placed the bathroom sill in a shaded corner behind a tree, and had left the second floor vulnerable. The window was awkward to access, but easy to open if you recognised the type of catch. This had been no ordinary burglar. He had not been looking to steal a CD player or a television. Anything heavy or awkwardly shaped would have proven difficult to manhandle across the building’s exterior. This thief was after something that he could pocket. He had ransacked the place without bothering to put anything back, but had not been able to avoid precision. He wanted Delaney to know that someone smart was onto him.
But then the householder had unexpectedly returned. He had unlocked the door from the hall, stepped inside, let the door swing shut behind him and stopped, confronted by his dismantled apartment.
And in the next room, the stranger had stopped, too. His search had suddenly ceased at this point. It had not been a good idea to wear workman’s boots because they had steel inlays, and were so heavy that they were easily discernible from any other marks on the carpet. Some criminals kept a specific pair of shoes to burgle in. Banbury would have liked to be able to access FIT, the Footwear Intelligence Technology system that catalogued over 14,000 images of shoe print types. He crouched on the floor and looked for pattern, wear, size and damage features, but could not see enough detail with his naked eye.
The prints led to behind the door, where the intruder must have waited—they were heavier here—before attacking Delaney. Now the bootprints danced in a tight circle, to be joined by twin drag marks, Delaney’s shoes, the toes rather than the heels, as he was pulled away to the couch and laid down on his stomach. A single droplet of blood had fallen, and there was a small patch of dried fluid on the carpet that looked like spittle. Banbury sniffed delicately, wondering if he might catch a faint chemical odour in the room, but found none. Yet Delaney had simply fallen to the floor. Not a drug, then; something else with the power to render a man unconscious in a second—or perhaps kill him outright. A thin knife or long needle, through the underside of the jaw or behind the ear, straight up into the base of the brain. The signs were so easy to read that Banbury felt as if he had witnessed the entire scene unfolding before him.