‘You think they wiped the knife? Or had a vehicle parked by the gate?’ asked Erika.
‘That’s for you to find out,’ said Isaac. ‘I’ll keep you in the loop with the post-mortem.’ He went back into the front garden.
Erika and McGorry changed out of their Tyvek suits, handed them in, then ducked under the police tape into the road. They buttoned up their coats against the cold. A large police support van had just arrived, and was attempting to park against the kerb. One of the police cars pulled out to make extra room, and it got stuck in the snow, its wheels spinning and squealing.
‘So, we’re looking at someone who had a car, potentially,’ said Erika. ‘They got in and drove away. But where?’ Erika looked up and down the street. The house was on the end of the terrace, with an alleyway running along the side. It was overlooked by the back gardens of the houses in Howson Road, which ran parallel to Coniston Road. ‘I want to get the house-to-house going ASAP. There should be plenty of people home on Christmas Day. I want to know if anyone saw anything, and I need the details of persons of interest in the area: violent offenders, anyone with previous or ongoing convictions.’
Two uniformed officers had come to help the squad car, and were giving it a push. The engine roared and the wheels spun.
‘There’s a railway bridge at the end of the next road, which leads over to the Fitzwilliam Estate,’ said McGorry.
Erika nodded. ‘Worth including in our H2H, but whoever goes in there needs to go easy.’ She knew that the Fitzwilliam Estate, like many high-rise council buildings in poor areas, was known for trouble. She peered down the long alleyways running along each side of the terraces. ‘And we need to check out if any garden gates back onto these alleyways…’
They stepped out of the way as the squad car broke free from the snow. It shot past, took a right at the end of the street, and parked outside the school opposite. The support van pulled into the gap by the kerb and turned off its engine. In the sudden silence came the click of a camera shutter. Erika turned to McGorry.
‘Did you hear that?’ she murmured. He nodded. They looked up at the surrounding windows, but couldn’t see anything. There was a rustle directly behind. Erika turned and looked up into the branches of a tall oak tree across the road, next to the railings of the school playground. A young man who looked to be in his early twenties was slithering down the branches. He stepped onto the top of the metal railing lining the playground, and dropped down into the alleyway. He was scruffy, with long blond hair, and had a long-lens camera around his neck on a strap. He glanced at Erika and McGorry, then bolted for it down the snowy alleyway.
‘Hey! Stop!’ shouted Erika. McGorry headed off in pursuit down the alleyway, and Erika followed. The young man wore a long coat, which flowed out behind him as he ran. He jumped up onto the lid of a wheelie bin, and vaulted up and over a high wall with tall trees behind it. Seconds later, McGorry reached the wheelie bin, hitched up his coat and heaved himself up shakily. Erika tottered unsteadily along and reached the bin as McGorry grabbed hold of a branch of one of the thick, snow-covered evergreens and climbed up onto the lip of the wall.
‘What’s over there…?’ she started, but he jumped off, and landed on the other side with a thud and a yell. The branches above the wall swayed, dislodging the snow, and then they were still. Erika heard more yelling, and instinctively reached for her radio in her pocket, but it wasn’t there. She looked back down the alleyway, but the road with the crime scene appeared a long way off.
‘Shit, if he’s broken something…’ she muttered, thinking how much paperwork there would be to fill in. Shaking the guilty thought away, she took off her heels and shoved them into the pockets of her long coat, before hitching the coat up to climb up onto the wheelie bin. The plastic lid creased and bent downwards with her weight. She hooked her leg up onto the brick wall, and grabbed a branch of one of the evergreens to steady herself, dislodging more snow on top of her head in the process. The ground was higher on the opposite side, and Erika dropped down softly onto a bed of soil and leaves between the wall and the thick row of trees. She slipped her shoes back on and walked out of the trees into a large, snow-covered garden. A gap in the middle was churned up with two sets of footprints, and there were two large sheds, a greenhouse, and a long polythene tunnel beyond. The garden’s high walls muffled the sounds of traffic from surrounding streets.
McGorry was moving slowly towards the sheds. He turned to Erika and put a finger to his lips, pointing to the second shed in the row of two, closest to the house. She nodded. The house was large and crumbling. The sash windows were grimy, with peeling paint. A tall gate in one corner was blocked by overflowing rubbish bins. The back door to the house had a small roofed porch with steps down to the garden, which were covered in plant pots.
As Erika reached McGorry, from inside the house came a cacophony of clocks chiming the hour. The blond-haired lad appeared from behind the shed, and ran back to the wall. McGorry moved faster, tackling him to the ground. Erika hurried over to them, but lost one of her shoes in the process, and fell back into the snow.
‘Calm down!’ said McGorry as the lad fought, throwing punches and landing one in McGorry’s face.
‘Get off me!’ cried the young man. He was wiry with a thin, feral face and bright blue eyes a little too far apart. Erika got up, losing her other shoe in the snow. McGorry was churning up the snow, struggling to keep hold of the young man, who kicked and flailed, and then got the upper hand, pushed McGorry’s face into the snow. McGorry flailed and reached around, managing to get hold of the camera, and tightened the strap around the boy’s neck. The boy released his grip on the back of McGorry’s head, and grabbed at the strap tightening around his neck.
‘Get back!’ shouted a voice. ‘Let him go!’ A large, elderly woman in an orange onesie was at the top of the porch steps, holding a shotgun. Her grey hair hung past her shoulders, and she wore huge glasses that magnified her eyes. She aimed a shotgun at them, and advanced towards them through the snow.
Erika put up her hands. The elderly woman’s eyes looked crazed, and she felt this situation has suddenly escalated to red alert. McGorry coughed and spat out snow, still holding the strap tight. The young man was scrabbling frantically at his throat.
‘John. Let him go!’ shouted Erika. McGorry let go of the camera strap, and the lad fell onto the snow, coughing. ‘I’m Detective Chief Inspector Erika Foster of the London Metropolitan Police, and this is Detective Inspector John McGorry. We can show you our warrant cards, but you need to put the weapon down… Now.’
The woman looked anxiously between Erika and McGorry, but she didn’t lower the gun.
‘That is my son you are attacking, and you are trespassing on my property!’
‘We are police, and your son was trespassing and photographing a crime scene,’ said Erika. She wondered what the woman was capable of.
‘Joseph! Come away from them!’ the woman shrilled, still training the gun at them. Joseph coughed, and staggered over, his coat covered in snow.
‘Elspeth!’ shouted another voice. An elderly man emerged behind her from the back door. He looked like an eccentric university professor, and was wearing a long blue cape and a tatty skull cap dotted with sequins. He had a magnifying lens fixed to his head with a band, giving him one huge, staring eye. ‘Elspeth, put that down at once!’