Pluie Noir
Part One
Murder City
When Nick Marshal arrived at the police station he still hadn't ate any breakfast. Not for the first time this year he had stayed in bed a little too long and just managed to get washed and dressed quick enough to catch the underground.
"You missed a button", said one of his colleagues as he entered the canteen. Nick stood still to investigate his shirt and grumbled a short 'thank you' to the guy from the uniformed department. Quickly he rearranged the buttons on the white shirt before someone could get a glimpse of his bare upper body.
From the small canteen they had in the station he took a cheese sandwich and out of the vending machine a can of cold coke. With the improvised breakfast under his arm and his briefcase in his right hand he tried to unlock the door to his office with the left hand. A grunt of annoyance left Nick's mouth as he finally kicked the door open and dropped the can on his desk.
"What's going on in the world of police", he mumbled to himself while chewing on the sandwich. He browsed through some paperwork he had left on the desk before the weekend. Nick's desk had a minimalist design, mostly because he always was too lazy putting anything decorative. He was working as a detective for the London CID and only about a week ago he had made promotion so to have his own room.
The remains of a nagging headache got stuck in his forehead. It had been a long night yesterday of sitting in front of the television and drinking whiskey. The painkiller he took in the morning before drinking coffee didn't work and he searched in the drawers for another packet. That moment someone knocked on the door of his office.
"Enter", said Nick shortly with a raspy voice. When his colleague Jason David came in he looked up from the desk. Jason didn't say anything but just stared at Nick with a roguish smirk.
"This is the office of a chief detective; shouldn't you go and play somewhere else?" Then he burst into a cheerful laugh and slapped Nick on the shoulder.
Marshal was a tall lanky figure with messy dark blond hair and grey eyes. He pulled a painful looking face when Jason slapped him and pushed his workmate away.
"Calm down a little, I have a headache. By the way, with my new job there is also a responsibility over you. Why are you ten minutes late?"
"Traffic jam, as always", explained Jason. "But that is not relevant now. I was sent here to tell you about a phone call we just received, a man's found dead in his apartment this morning."
"I still wonder why you keep taking the car to work", said Nick as they drove through the city a few minutes later. "I always take the underground."
It was early autumn and very clouded; with a relatively high temperature it was a little stuffy outside.
"I told you before", said Jason impatiently. He was driving and aggressively drummed on the steering wheel whenever they had to stop.
"I have this phobia that I can't sit on the seat next to the window. In case of emergency I want to be near the aisle."
Nick looked at his colleague; Jason Ryan David was a native Londoner from West Ham. He looked a bit like a dumb muscle but was in fact a clever witted man. He had short hair and was sturdy built, his blue eyes always made a vivid impression and he usually talked a lot. Jason could be somewhat blunt now and then, perhaps a result of his working class heritage.
"I don't see the problem. If you don't want to sit near the window, then don't. Take the outside seat."
'That is exactly the problem", said Jason with a sigh.
"There are also other people in the train. If I take the outside seat there's a chance that someone enters and wants to sit next to me. That means I have to scoot to the window seat. I mean, I can't stand up and ask the other person to sit there. I'd look like a bloody idiot and if the train is very crowded I bother other passengers too."
Nick silenced and seemed to ponder how to react on Jason's explanation.
"Then search for a place where the window seat is already taken and sit there, what about that? Or just stand the whole ride."
"Do you realise how stupid it looks if a guy sits down next to someone whilst there are enough empty places around?" was the immediate reaction.
"Same about standing, if I stand in a half empty train it looks bonkers. If I stand in a full train people will stand up for me to offer their seat."
Nick grunted loud and shook his head in astonishment.
"Your problem is not your phobia, but the way you care about what other people think. Why should they bother about you?"
The house where Richard Schultz used to live before his demise was situated in quiet and very common neighbourhood. Every house had a neat looking front garden and a car on the driveway. Nick imagined that on Saturday mornings everyone here was washing their cars or mowing the lawns. As the row of houses passed the car window they all looked identical. If it wasn't for the one with yellow police tape around it and a small crowd standing near. Two patrol cars were already parked on the driveway and a van from the forensic team stood closest to the door.
"I hope they do their work quickly", grumbled Nick as he stepped over the tape.
"In this damp weather a dead body will soon stink like hell." A uniformed policeman came to Nick and Jason and shook hands.
"Richard Schultz did not wake up this morning", he explained. "Every weekday he gets up at about eight and always waves to the neighbours when he passes their window on his way to work. This morning the curtains remained closed and he didn't answer the phone. His neighbours, a retired couple, immediately got suspicious and phoned the police."
During talking they had walked inside the house. It had a Spartan looking interior design without any decorations.
"Where is the body?" asked Nick when he didn't see anything suspicious in the hallway or through the doorway to the living room.
"Upstairs in the bathroom", said the policeman. "I must warn you, it's a little… messy."
He led Nick and Jason up the stairs where they ended up at a small landing. It was swarming with forensic people.
"Are you the detectives?" asked one of them. "We are still searching for evidence inside the bathroom, so if you please will just stand in the doorway and look from there."
Jason and Nick both poked their heads into the room and oversaw the crime scene. The uniformed officer hadn't said a thing too less with 'messy'. Richard Schultz had been caught wearing nothing but some boxer shorts as he just wanted to take a bath. The murderer had hit him through the chest with a blade of some sort almost cutting the man in half. A second wound appeared as a large hole through his hip. Schultz had been bleeding so much that the bathtub was filled.
"Fucking hell, what an awful mess", said Jason and turned away from the view. Nick stood a little longer and examined the body itself that lay belly down in the tub folded in an unnatural position. The detective's eyes then travelled to the wall where blood also had splattered against the bathroom tiles. But what really caught Nick's attention were the indefinable symbols or letters that had been drawn in blood.
"Jason? Did you see the writing on the wall?" he asked without looking over his shoulder.
"I did", was the short answer. "Looks like the work of a psychotic killer. Let the forensic boys take photos of it and send them up to cryptology."
Back downstairs Nick and Jason explored the living room a little to get a first impression what kind of person Richard Schultz had been. There were some chairs and a sofa, a wooden coffee table, a large bookcase and a desk. All the furniture seemed rather old, the oak chair behind the desk creaked heavily as Jason carefully sat down in it.
"Looks much like the house of my grandparents", he remarked. "All that oak and old fashioned cushions, obviously my grandma has more stuff hanging on the wall."
In terms of decoration the room had indeed a Spartan look as Nick noticed earlier. The only notable piece was a painting that hung above the empty mantelpiece. It displayed the image of a castle in the hills surrounded by pine trees.
"The neighbours that contacted us first describe him as an introvert type", told the policeman who silently had been watching the two men from CID. "They never saw him with friends or family. Every day he went to his work in the morning and after returning home he stayed inside till the next day. But he was very polite to them, always said hello when they saw him."
Jason turned around in the desk chair.
"He was a loner then, was he? That does not make our work much easier. The only opening we have is his work; didn't they report him missing yet?"
Nick was standing in front of the large bookcase and let his finger slide over the many titles.
"It seems Schultz was a religious man", he said. "All his books are about spirituality and associated subjects." He looked further down the case.
"Even about Satanism and witchcraft I see. Where did he work?"
"At a large bank in the city", told Jason. "I found a couple of papers her on his desk, including a pay check. He received an average salary, perhaps he wasn't more then a simple administrational worker."
Together they walked outside into the crowd that only had turned bigger since the time they had arrived.
"For now we have enough material", stated Nick. "We go back to the station and have a briefing."
At that moment a short blond woman in a brown jacket and a black skirt appeared next to Jason's car. "Are you leading the investigation?" she asked bluntly and showed a business card. Nick recognised the logo of a small news website. Hardly before he could nod she fired the next question about him. "What can you tell about the way the victim was murdered?" Nick opened the car door and leaned with one arm on the roof.
"We don't want to disclose anything at this moment", he answered impatiently. Jason already sat down behind the steering wheel and wanted to start the car.
"Last question", said the young woman. "Do you know why he was killed?"
Nick sat down and looked up to the reporter who now bowed over to him.
"Because someone wanted him dead", he answered dryly before slamming the door shut.
"Do you think it will be a large article?" asked Jason with a smirk as the drove away from the crime scene. Nick didn't catch the irony in his colleague's voice and frowned.
"No. As long as they don't know about the symbols on the wall it's just an ordinary case. Someone being killed in London is not so special; we live in a murder city."