Читать книгу The Manhattan Puzzle - Laurence O’Bryan - Страница 17

The policeman fixed the blue and white tape stretching from side to side of the alley. The two jumpsuited forensic officers who’d just gone under hadn’t bothered to secure it properly after they’d passed; typical.

They were probably too excited about the corpse to think about mundane matters.

It wasn’t often you found a murder victim with these sorts of injuries in Soho. He was glad he didn’t have to stand near the body any more. How anyone could do such a thing to a beautiful woman was beyond all understanding.

Maybe now, at last, they’d move the body. It was attracting far too much attention. The journalists and the TV crew were a gawping entourage.

‘Sorry sir, this area is restricted,’ he said.

A tall man with close-cropped dark hair and a weary expression pulled an ID card he’d seen only once before out of his pocket. It was in a brown leather wallet. It had the crown insignia and the words SECURITY SERVICES MI5 beneath it.

‘May I take your name for the crime scene log, sir?’ said the policeman.

‘Henry Mowlam,’ said the man, as he lifted the blue tape and passed underneath.

Henry went up the stairs slowly. They were narrow, nicotine coloured. He passed the policeman guarding the entrance to the room. This one had a better look at his card, which was a good thing, and then he let him through.

The room where the girl had been murdered was splattered in blood. There were trails of it on the walls and on the ceiling too. Henry stood in the centre of the room and turned slowly.

Then he went close to the splatter lines. Were they triangles?

He shook his head. ‘It’s just a coincidence,’ he whispered to himself.

Ever since he’d figured out that the square and arrow symbol in that old book could also be a representation of a skull, he’d been seeing them everywhere.

He been warned about how certain ‘cases’ could get under one’s skin at his last annual evaluation and they’d both known what the lady from human resources had meant.

But that didn’t mean he was going to heed the warning. There was no way he could just let all this go.

There was a lot more than a takeover and a murder going on here. He could feel it deep down inside him. He’d seen evil before, seen its effects, but he’d never seen it like this, part ancient, part modern. It was like a layered puzzle.

And Henry had a theory about it.