Garibaldi stood on stage beside John Prine, holding a guitar he couldn’t play. He looked out at the audience and then turned to the singer, hoping he would give him some tips. But John Prine was lost in his song – ‘Speed of the Sound of Loneliness’. His head was tilted upwards, his eyes half-closed, his brow furrowed with intensity.
Sweat ran down Garibaldi’s back as he gazed into the auditorium. The lights dazzled but he could make out faces, most of which were looking in his direction. Puzzled faces. Questioning faces. Faces that asked Garibaldi what right he had to be up there beside the great American singer-songwriter.
Garibaldi looked down at the guitar. His hands felt its corpse-like coldness. The chorus was coming and any second now he would have to join in. He had to make sure he hit the right note. He had to harmonise.
He took a breath, shot a sideways look at John Prine, leant into the mike and opened his mouth.
A loud bell rang. So loud that Garibaldi couldn’t hear his own voice, so loud that no music at all could be heard. The bell’s shrill ring filled the whole of the Shepherds Bush Empire auditorium. The house lights came on and 7the crowd, holding their hands to their ears, headed for the fire exits.
Garibaldi turned to John Prine. He wanted to apologise for screwing up – for not being able to play the guitar and for missing the chorus – but Prine was still singing, as if nothing had happened. The fire alarm still rang, but the singer was in his own world. ‘You’re travelling at the speed and the sound of loneliness,’ he sang, as the crowd rushed away.
The alarm was now even louder and right next to Garibaldi’s head.
He reached for it, scrabbling to find the button that would stop it, and realised that it wasn’t an alarm at all.
It was his phone, ringing and vibrating on the bedside table.
He looked at the screen. Deighton.
He looked at the time. 9.00 am.
‘Garibaldi.’
‘Jim. Haven’t woken you, have I?’
‘Not at all. I’ve been up for hours.’
‘We’ve got a body. In the cemetery.’
Garibaldi furrowed his brow and screwed up his eyes. A body in the cemetery. So what was new?
‘The cemetery?’
‘Yeah. Barnes Old Cemetery.’
Garibaldi tried to place it.
‘The one near Rocks Lane,’ said Deighton. ‘You need to get there.’
‘OK. I’m on it.’
Garibaldi yawned, stretched and hauled himself up to sit on the side of the bed.
Another anxiety dream. Another impostor syndrome nightmare. 8
And now a body in the cemetery.
Deciding to wake Rachel with a cup of tea before telling her he had to go, he went into the kitchen, trying to remember where, exactly, Barnes Old Cemetery was, and what he’d heard about it.
He brought two mugs of tea into the bedroom and placed one on Rachel’s bedside table. Standing by the bed, he looked at her as she slept, her dark hair spread on the pillow. Who would have thought when they spent that first night together a couple of years ago, that it would lead to this? Living together. Bringing each other cups of tea in the morning.
Rachel stirred. ‘What’s the time?’
‘Nine o’clock.’
‘And it’s Sunday, right?’
‘Sunday. All day. No school.’
‘I heard the alarm, but I dropped off again.’
‘Why don’t you go back to sleep?’
‘Why?’
‘Something’s cropped up.’
‘Work?’
Garibaldi nodded. ‘Yeah. But there is a bright side.’
‘What’s that?’
‘Gives you a chance to get on top of your marking.’
Rachel sighed, shut her eyes, raised a half-hearted hand in farewell, and turned onto her side.
Garibaldi unlocked his bike from the railings of Rutland Court and cycled into the High Street. Barnes was up and about, enjoying the crisp September morning. He passed the Sun Inn flower stall and glanced to his right where, beside the pond, loud young parents with loud young kids were feeding the ducks and the swans. He winced. Whenever 9he heard the young bankers or accountants or lawyers with their braying wives and their children, whenever his ears were assaulted by their high-volume public-parenting, he always asked himself the same question – was he just getting old and grumpy, or were they prats?
He always reached the same conclusion.
He cycled on, checking out the posters outside The Olympic and the window display of Barnes Books, took a right at the lights opposite The Red Lion and headed down Rocks Lane.
He wheeled his bike towards the police cars and the forensic van parked in the car park, locked it to a stand and walked to the taped cordon and the tent. An information board mounted on a wooden stand caught his eye and he paused to look at it. Welcome to Barnes Common Old Cemetery. He glanced at the pictures and the map, surprised by how he could have lived so close to the place for so long and know so little about it.
‘Sir?’
Garibaldi turned to see DS Gardner in a forensic suit walking through the cordon past a uniformed officer.
‘Morning, Milly. What have we got?’
Gardner stood beside him and looked at the board. ‘Male youth. Twenties.’
‘Any ID?’
Gardner shook her head.
‘Phone?’
She shook her head again.
‘What’s it look like?’
‘Stabbing.’
Garibaldi pointed at the information board. ‘You know much about this place?’
‘Not a lot. Pretty spooky, isn’t it?’ 10
‘Most cemeteries are.’
‘Yeah, but this one’s a different kind of spooky.’
Garibaldi walked with his sergeant towards the police tape.
‘And what have you been dragged away from on this bright Sunday morning?’ said Garibaldi.
‘Nothing much. Only Tim.’
Gardner had been with her new partner for a couple of months. Still early days, still plenty for her to worry about.
‘And you?’
‘Nothing much. Only Rachel.’
He knew as he spoke the words how little he believed them.
Garibaldi showed his card and nodded to the uniform at the cordon, pulled on a forensic suit hood, shoes and gloves and walked along the gravel path.
Light from above filtered through the branches and the leaves. To his left the ping and thwack of balls on rackets came from the tennis courts. To the right gravestones and memorials were dotted and scattered with no sense of order or regularity amongst low-lying shrubs, bushes and foliage. Some were broken, some had sunk into the ground and leant at an angle, many were green and lichened. The place reeked of abandonment and decay.
Garibaldi had seen many dead bodies, but the mixture of emotions he felt when he was about to see a new one always surprised him. Fear at confronting more evidence of man’s inhumanity to man, his capacity for savagery and cruelty. Fear that there but for the grace of God went us all. Fear that whoever killed might kill again. And pity. Pity for the life cut short. Pity for those who would mourn.
But there was also excitement. Not at the thought of what he was about to see, but at the thought of what he 11was about to engage in. Another puzzle. Another challenge. Another chance to bring whoever did it to justice and bring even a tiny amount of comfort to those who grieved.
The fear others might understand, but the excitement he kept quiet about. It might make him seem weird. Or strangely old-fashioned, like he was on some kind of moral crusade, desperate to restore order to a broken world. Both, he knew, were a long way from the truth. It was a lot more complicated than that.
Ahead, Garibaldi saw a large monument. He walked towards it, catching sight on his left of a statue of an angel. It stopped him in his tracks, making him look again to check that he was seeing things correctly.
He was. Above the wings was the trunk of a neck but the angel’s head was missing.
‘See what I mean?’ said Gardner. ‘Weird.’
Garibaldi opened the flap of the forensic tent erected next to the monument and followed Gardner in.
The SOCOs were at work, taking swabs and samples.
The body lay on its front, its head close to a gravestone, the left arm stretched out at right angles, the other arm reaching round the edge of the stone, the right leg raised and bent at the knee. The clothes – jeans, trainers, top – were the clothes of any young man. He looked to be in his twenties, but it was difficult to tell from what was visible. Not much older than Alfie, perhaps. Garibaldi shivered.
He looked up at the trees. Sunlight trickled through the branches, dappling the broken headstones and the back of the corpse and falling on the dark pool of blood.
The Crime Scene Manager came up to him. ‘A couple of things to be aware of,’ he said, pointing at two areas of the ground identified by crime scene markers on the other side of the stone from the body. ‘Vomit and faeces.’ 12
‘And is it as obvious as it looks?’ said Garibaldi, pointing at the body.
‘There’s a lot of blood. On him, on his clothes, on the ground, and there’s some on the stone. Probably his own, but you never know.’
‘And the faeces and vomit?’
‘From the bloke who found him, apparently,’ said Gardner.
‘Shit scared was he?’
‘Taken short on his run.’
‘So he came in here, took a dump and vomited?’
‘Says he relieved himself and then, after he found the body, he threw up.’
‘Sounds like our number one suspect. Or maybe that should be our number two suspect.’ The Crime Scene Manager looked baffled. ‘Any sign of the weapon?’
‘Nothing so far.’
‘Shame. A bloodstained knife would be handy.’
‘What have we here?’
Garibaldi turned to the voice and saw Martin Stevenson walking through the tent flap in a forensic suit.
‘Another round of golf cancelled,’ said the pathologist. ‘I sometimes think they do it just to fuck up my weekends.’
Garibaldi smiled. He liked the pathologist’s sense of humour. Irreverent. Ironic. Intelligent. His favourite ‘I’ words.
Another cry of ‘Out’ came from the tennis courts.
‘Should have brought your racket,’ said Garibaldi.
The pathologist crouched down beside the body. ‘Oh dear, oh dear,’ he said. He looked around at the broken headstones. ‘What kind of cemetery is this?’
‘An overgrown abandoned one,’ said Garibaldi.
‘Very Gothic.’ 13
Garibaldi nodded his agreement. Gothic was the word. ‘You should see the decapitated angel.’
Stevenson looked up. ‘The what?’
‘A statue of an angel with its head chopped off.’
‘Fascinating. You must show me.’
‘It’s not the only one sir.’ Gardner’s voice came from behind them. ‘There’s another headless angel and a headless human.’
‘A headless human?’ said Stevenson, as if the idea held some appeal.
‘A statue, that is. I looked around while I was waiting for you.’
‘OK,’ said Garibaldi, ‘I’ll have a look when—’
‘When we’ve dealt with this,’ said Martin Stevenson as he bent down to look more closely at the body.
Garibaldi looked on as the pathologist set to work. Forensics were busy searching the ground. Photos were being taken, a video camera was recording and one officer was dictating into his phone. ‘Vomit located five metres south of body. Faeces five metres west.’
The pathologist went over to the officer and looked down at the vomit. ‘Chicken curry, I’d say.’ He moved towards the faeces. ‘And this shit looks pretty human as well.’ He sniffed. ‘If I were a gambling man I’d put my money on it being chicken curry as well.’
The sound of the tennis players carried from the courts, a reminder that, only yards away from where a life had been brutally ended and a dead body was being subjected to the probing indignities of forensic examination, Sunday morning life was carrying on as usual.
Garibaldi looked around the cemetery and then down at the victim, wondering what had brought him here.
Sex? A creepy place for it, unless you got your kicks 14from having it off on gravestones or among dead bodies and headless angels. But it wouldn’t surprise him. He’d learned over the years that there was no accounting for the range of sexual appetites.
Drugs? Areas of leafy affluence like Barnes were plagued by them as much as areas of inner-city deprivation. Just different drugs and more money to pay for them.
Stevenson stood up. ‘Looks pretty straightforward but can’t be certain yet.’
He beckoned a couple of SOCOs and instructed them.
Garibaldi looked down on the body as they turned it. It was not quite the final indignity – that would come when it was subjected to post-mortem – but it was a step on the way. The face was now on full display, exposed to the morning light, blank and lifeless, eyes and mouth shut, a far cry from the smiling photo that would accompany the next day’s news report.
The pathologist bent over the body.
‘I’ll leave you to it,’ said Garibaldi.
He bent down to look at the face and the gravestone beside it. He tried to make out the name on the stone but the covering of moss and lichen made it impossible. All he could see was the date – 1848.
‘Want to see the headless angels?’ said Gardner.
‘Headless angels?’ Garibaldi got up and brushed himself down. ‘What better way to start the weekend?’
Gardner walked into the bushes and Garibaldi followed her into the heart of Barnes Old Cemetery, leaving the SOCOs to their work and the pathologist to a closer examination.