Tuesday, 22 December 2015
3:43 P.M.
Blake pulled up outside the property at the same moment as the Armed Response Unit. En route, he had been passed the information the team had cobbled together at short notice on their new prime suspect.
Lucas Theodor Keaton was the multimillionaire owner of a telecoms company that had been bought out in the 1990s, providing him with a healthy payoff and a place on its board. From that time on, he had concentrated predominantly on his charity work and on helping start-up businesses.
Encouragingly, S-S Mobile, whose servers had contained the hidden messages, was a subsidiary of Keaton’s original Smoke Signal Technologies. In addition, the depot that supplied all the compromised mobile phones had links to this little-known parent company.
Keaton had a wife and two children, all deceased.
He and the two boys had been caught up in the 7/7 bombings. Although Keaton had escaped relatively unscathed, one of his sons had been killed outright. The other had succumbed to his injuries over a year and a half later, following which Keaton’s wife had taken her own life by fatal overdose.
“Cheers for that,” Blake had said to his colleague on the other end of the line, now feeling suitably depressed.
“But it gets worse.”
“Worse than him losing his entire family?”
“His brother”—the constable back at New Scotland Yard clicked about on his computer—“had taken his place attending a charity event back in 2001 over in the States . . .”
“Don’t say it!”
“. . . September 11.”
“Jesus Christ!” Blake almost started to pity their prime suspect. “How unlucky can one man be?”
“The brother had no business whatsoever at the World Trade Center. He was just walking past at the wrong time.”
“Reckon this Keaton bloke’s cursed or something?”
“All that money and he’s had the most miserable life imaginable. Goes to show, doesn’t it?” was the constable’s rhetorical farewell before hanging up.
With Saunders engaged with the operation at Piccadilly Circus, Vanita had sent Blake alone to accompany the team to Keaton’s enormous Chelsea residence.
As the armed officers hurried up the steps to break through the front door, Blake sheltered out of the wind behind a postbox to light up a cigarette. Despite the prestigious postcode, the leafy street wasn’t a particularly pleasant place to be: almost a third of the houses appeared to be undergoing major building works—lorries, vans, and even a mini-crane were scattered among the sports cars in the resident parking bays. The noise was obtrusive.
“Mate!” Blake called to one of the passing construction workers, producing his identification. “What’s going on? Street falling in or something?” he asked, wondering whether it might be in some way relevant.
“This?” asked the rotund man, gesturing to the mess. “Nah. With property prices at such a premium, every square inch you can stake a claim to counts. So some enterprising billionaire, becoming stir-crazy confined to his measly ten bedrooms, realized that directly beneath his basement, everything down to the Earth’s core was wasted space that he could be utilizing . . . and now they’re all at it.”
Blake was a little surprised by the articulate response.
“Course, if I started digging through the floor of my place, I’d just end up in the kebab shop downstairs,” the man added with a sigh.
“Detective!” a member of the Armed Response Unit called from the doorway. “All clear!”
Blake thanked the well-informed, kebab-scented man and hurried into the house. The entrance hall alone was larger than his entire Twickenham flat. A sweeping wooden staircase ascended from the mosaic floor, the other seven officers already lost within Keaton’s sprawling home. Fresh flowers burst from expensive vases, and a large portrait of the family hung on the back wall.
“If you’re in a hurry, I’d start on the third floor,” the team leader advised Blake with a knowing nod.
Blake started in the direction of the staircase.
“Sorry. I meant down,” the officer clarified, pointing toward the corner. “The third floor down.”
Descending the stairs, Blake’s phone made a quiet beep as he lost signal. There, just one level beneath the property’s wholesome facade, the first signs of a tainted mind began to bleed through.
The room appeared to have been an office at some point in the past, but now the walls were suffocating beneath pictures of the happy family: another professionally commissioned portrait beside casual holiday snaps, hand-drawn sketches neighboring their photographic counterparts, each and every one of them framed and hung with precision.
“Computer in the corner,” Blake told the officer, expecting it to be in the van by the time he resurfaced. “Phone there . . . and this picture,” he said, choosing what looked like the most recent, based on the ages of the two boys—gap-toothed smiles and matching haircuts.
They moved on, the temperature dropping as the stairs creaked underfoot, the stale air thickening in their lungs. To Blake, it felt as though they were sinking deeper into Keaton’s subconscious . . .
This was where he slept.
A small camp bed stood unmade against the far wall, surrounded by what could only be described as a shrine. Items of jewelry, clothing, childish drawings, and toys sat in ordered piles around the bed. Candles had melted into the wooden floor around the perimeter.
“Christ!” Blake jumped, only just noticing the depiction of the crucified Jesus hanging on the wall behind them: feet and wrists nailed to the wooden cross, hands dangling uselessly, a tangled crown of thorns tearing into his head: a violent inspiration for the atrocities of the previous few weeks.
Blake frowned and reluctantly took a step backward into the room to read what had been scrawled in finger-paint either side of the Son of God:
WhEre tHe FuCK weRE yOu?
He almost tripped over the cushion on the floor as he took a photograph of the wall to include in his report.
“Moving on?” he suggested eagerly to the officer.
As the temperature dropped another couple of degrees, they negotiated the narrowing staircase to the property’s lowest level.
They’d made it two steps into the room before Blake’s heart sank.
Books, journals, folders, diagrams littered every conceivable surface—stacked several feet high or else adding to the paper floor underfoot—years of work, the harvest of an obsessive mind.
They had less than an hour.
Two other officers were already sorting through the mess, a recovered laptop bagged up and ready for transport.
“This pile contains just about every newspaper story on the Ragdoll murders,” one of them called across. “On the desk is everything we’ve found so far relating to Alexei Green. This Keaton guy’s completely obsessed with him from the looks of it—been collecting stuff on him for years.”
Blake moved over to the stack of articles and CDs, handwritten notes labeling Green’s various interviews and talks at conferences. He picked up a journal and flicked it open, the first page simply titled “Session One,” followed by what looked like a word-for-word transcript of Keaton’s first meeting with the psychiatrist.
The lead officer was reading over his shoulder:
“Looks as though this Keaton was just another recruit, then.”
“But he can’t be,” whispered Blake, looking again at the mind spilled out in ink around them.
There was a crash as one of the officers knocked a precarious stack of books across the floor. Very calmly, he leaned down to take a closer look at what he’d uncovered:
“Boss?”
“What?”
“Do ya wanna get the bomb squad boys down here?”
The team leader looked concerned: “I don’t know. Do I?”
“Doesn’t look live . . . homemade, but still . . . yeah, I think so.”
“Shit . . . Everybody out!” he ordered.
“I’m staying,” Blake told him.
“Live or not, first sign of an explosive, I am to get everybody to safety.”
“If Keaton’s our man—” Blake started.
“He’s not!”
“But if he is, we need what’s down here. Get your men out. Get these computers to the tech guys, and get the bomb squad here . . . please.”
The officer looked torn, but then collected up the recovered laptop and followed his men up the stairs, leaving Blake alone to wade through Keaton’s thoughts.
He quickly picked the journal back up, opened it to Session One, and skim-read the page. Aware of their time constraints, he skipped forward to Keaton’s ninth session with the psychiatrist, rapidly losing hope that they had found their Azazel after all.