What Abigail Did That Summer by Ben Aaronovitch (most read books TXT) 📕

more and says he will explain next time you and he are facing each other in a SCIF.

20

It Could Be a Folly

Officially it’s known as the Tumulus, but everyone I know calls it Boadicea’s Mount because they think she watched her last battle with the Romans from there. The archaeologists say they’re wrong because (a) the last battle was further north and (b) you got to pronounce her name with a hard ‘c’.

It’s a big lump forty metres across that sits upslope of the Model Boating Pond and is covered in trees and bushes. Because it’s a scheduled monument it’s surrounded by a crusty wrought-iron fence that needs some serious love and attention. Peter and me did a vestigia pass on the place in the spring, but Peter wouldn’t let me hop the railing to check inside. He said he’d done a historical check and the two main theories was that either it was a genuine Bronze Age burial mound or an eighteenth-century landscaping folly. It hasn’t been excavated to find out, on account of it being scheduled and all that.

Foxes don’t care about scheduling and neither, apparently, did wandering teenagers. Indigo leads me around to where there is a gap in the fence.

‘That’s where Zebra reported they go in and come out,’ she says.

‘Is someone tailing the last one out?’ I ask.

‘Of course,’ says Indigo.

I follow Indigo through the gap, but Simon uses one of the benches that back onto the fence to jump over. I hear him crash through some bushes and start laughing.

‘What’s so funny?’ I ask.

‘Cut myself,’ he says and, emerging from the bush, shows me the scratch on the palm of his hand. I give him some clean tissues to ball his fist around and stop the bleeding and we follow Indigo further into the bushes. I’m half expecting to run across the Cat Lady again, but instead we push out into a clearing right at the top of the mound. It’s hushed and quiet and you could be in a forest for all that you can hear the outside world.

In the centre of the clearing is a silver and black microwave. A big one, the sort they use in cafés and canteens. The plug and electric cable are neatly coiled on a side bracket. The door is closed.

Simon goes to open it but I tell him no.

‘Fingerprints,’ I say.

Sitting in a box under my bed are the nitrile gloves that I bought to practise with my forensic kit. Peter says that the Feds always walk around with a couple of pairs in their pockets just in case. I put that on the list of things that I will start doing as soon as I get home.

I tell Simon to take off his T-shirt.

‘Why?’ he asks.

‘I need something to cover my hands,’ I say, and he gives me one of his slow looks. ‘I can’t take mine off, can I?’ I say after a while.

For a moment I think he’s going to ask me why not, but then he nods and pulls his T-shirt over his head. It’s red with a white stripe across the chest and when he hands it to me, it feels expensive.

We crouch down by the microwave and I slip my hand into the T-shirt and reach out for the door.

‘What do you expect to find?’ Simon asks.

‘Don’t know,’ I say.

‘Maybe it’s hands.’

‘What?’ I freeze before I touch the handle.

‘Maybe it’s full of hands,’ he says. ‘That he’s cut off as trophies.’

‘Get on with it,’ says Indigo. ‘The suspense is killing me.’

I snatch the door open – before I chicken out.

‘Oh,’ says Simon, and sounds bare disappointed.

The microwave is full of phones, neatly stacked to make maximum use of the space inside. Most of them are smartphones, screens dark, turned off or out of battery. A couple have LCD half-screens, also blank. I don’t touch anything but it looks like the inside of the microwave is dry and the phones aren’t damaged – one has a cracked screen, but that could just be wear and tear.

A scenario is forming in my mind. The kids come here, drop off their phones, go wherever they’re going, then come back, pick up their phones and go home. The Feds will have been trying to track the kids’ phones, but getting stuck in the big open cell area that is Hampstead Heath.

And maybe a microwave would shield them from triangulation.

I bet Simon’s mum would know.

‘Everybody stand up, but don’t move,’ I say, which predictably causes Simon and Sugar Niner to make the same joke at the same time.

‘How can we stand up if we can’t move?’ they both say, but I ignore them.

I tell them to stay where they are and look around to see if they can spot anything.

‘Anything what?’ asks Sugar Niner.

‘Anything left behind,’ I say.

I’ve been in clearings like this before, down by railway lines, behind bushes in parks, in those ignored spaces between the blocks of an estate. Normally, once the locals have found them, they get filled up with rubbish, crisp packets, used condoms, whippets, fag ends, old syringes . . . all that kind of shit. I once found a hardened steel combat knife with a twelve-centimetre blade that I passed on to Peter in case someone had got themselves jooksed by it and it was needed in evidence.

There was none of that in this clearing, which made me think that nobody was coming here to shag, do nitrous oxide or eat crisps. Just to stash their phones before they went wherever it was they were going.

Which was definitely not normal behaviour.

Simon spots it first – a splash of yellow half hidden in a bush by the desire path in and out of the clearing. I hand him back his shirt and go to have a closer look. It’s a yellow cotton shirt with white polka dots, sized for a small girl. I lift it up carefully by the collar and see that the trailing edges at the front are wrinkled