With the building dark beneath it, the skylight on the roof of the Land Trust was a pyramid of pure black. Down the smooth black of the glass, something sticky had run, black on black, all the way down into the crust of soft spring snow at Barrow’s feet, where it puddled in sunken loops and pools like molasses. On top, a contorted mass was somehow pinned or perched. But the moon was going down on the far side of the Mound, and dawn was an hour and more away. The whole scene on the roof was a clot of shadows, and the wind was full of wet flakes. Along the way, at the small obstacle of a couple of cops on a roof, the snow caked Barrow’s coat and got in his eyes, plastered Drummond’s back where he’d turned it as a windbreak. Drummond was trying for a flame from his lighter, but even with his hat shielding the flint every spark was instantly quenched.

‘Joe, can you go git the patrolman’s flashlight?’

‘Sure, Phin. Hold on.’

Barrow stepped carefully back towards the little hutch holding the door to the stairs. There was already a mess underfoot. As he expected, the uniform who’d called them in, from the phone down in the lobby, was waiting only a few steps down, on the narrow flight winding round the top of the elevator shaft. Just behind him was the night cleaner who’d found the door unlocked originally. She’d gone out onto the roof, and then run screaming onto Creekside to flag down the patrolman. Neither of them looked what you’d call avid. The cleaner, a heavyset taklousa in her forties, had her mouth clamped shut to hold in shock or nausea. The patroller, only twenty or so, was doing the classic takouma stone face – the set pose for male strength when something bad happened. He’d been out to the skylight too. Not rubberneckers, not spectators. Yet there they still were, keeping close; commanded somehow by the presence of death, compelled to wait attendance where it had visited. It took death repeated over and over, in Barrow’s experience, death repeated in quantities too great for meaning, to wear that solemnity away. It took a war. Soldiers could learn to just walk on by in the presence of death, not many other people.

‘Gimme your torch, tastanagi.’

‘Yessir.’

‘Just “Detective”.’

‘Yes, Detective. Sorry, Detective.’

Perhaps not even twenty, thought Barrow.

‘Hey,’ he said, ‘had the snow started when you went out?’

‘Not really. Just a few flakes, maybe?’

‘But nothing on the ground.’

‘No.’

‘Uh-huh.’ So, nothing to be learned from footprints; no reason to worry about churning the snow. He turned.

‘Officer?’ said the cleaner. ‘I need to go soon. My babies will be waking up, and my man’s on the early shift.’

‘You must wait in case there are questions!’ the patroller said to her.

‘Yeah, stay put,’ said Barrow.

He went back out, jiggling the flashlight. It made a tinny rattling sound, from a loose contact. For a moment, the scene remained as it had been, whirling and blind, the snow that had congregated wormily in the dim blue streetlamps down on Creekside Drive blowing up and over the three sister-towers of Water and Land and Power, and spattering the looming bulk of the Mound behind them, and weaving away in lines of flickering grey over the dark immensity of the Plaza beyond. Fifty-seven varieties of dark. Then the switch caught. In the beam, the flakes turned to pearly swimmers. And what had been black on black leapt out into scarlet.

‘Whoa,’ said Drummond. ‘Messy.’

‘Yep,’ said Barrow. ‘Phin, you’re standing in it.’

‘Shit,’ said Drummond, backing, and crouching to swipe the porridge of blood and snow off his black oxfords.

The huddled object on the skylight still didn’t make complete sense. A body, of course, and one which had bled out in gouts down the glass; oozed in the other ways death inflicted, judging by the smell reaching his nose through the chill of the snow and the city’s usual bouquet of coal-smoke and river. But though at one end it terminated in a pair of ordinary man’s legs, dressed in the pants of a dark blue suit, at the other it seemed to have a bundle rather than a head, and from the wreck of the chest between, where blood seemed to have exploded more than just run, rose a shape like a pair of fans, or fish’s fins. Rope ran a couple of times round, hog-tying the corpse to the summit of the glass, and forcing the violated chest up.

Barrow squinted, and the scene resolved itself. The bundle at the head end was the dead man’s clothes, shirt and jacket and coat pulled inside out over his face. The peculiar fans were his ribs, cracked open and somehow pulled wide. Since he was the one holding the light, Barrow stepped closer and shone the beam in, on a cavity full of red ruin and streaked bone, with the tangle of liver and guts visible at one extremity, and a frosting of granular pink, from the snow. The best you could say for the view was that it was tidier than the effect of a shell burst. But there was less in the hole than there should have been: this was obvious. It was a cavity reamed out, a space from which something had been torn.

‘Any more, uh, pieces, rounda side you’re on?’ Barrow said.

‘Pass the light,’ said Drummond, and paced a circuit, lighting up each black blob in the slush till one of them proved more solid, a slick red-brown lump protruding ragged tubes. ‘Well. Seems like this gentleman done mislaid his equipment for Valentine’s Day.’
‘Cold, Phin.’

‘I’m on a roof, in the snow, lookin’ at an e-visserated corpse. At 4 a.m., dammit. When I could be—’

‘Not this again.’

‘—when I could be in Cal-i-forn-i-ay. In the soft and velvet night. Maybe out under those big ol’ stars. In a hammock.’

‘Just shut up.’

‘In my grove of orange trees . . .’

‘You ain’t got a grove of orange trees.’

‘No, but I will.’

‘Yeah, yeah.’

‘Man’s gotta have a dream, Joe. Where’s yours?’

‘Back in my bed. I left it there when I got up, do this job. This job you got me signed up for, case you don’t remember. So quit belly-aching.’

‘Who’s belly-aching? I’m trying to inject a little ro-mance, here, is all, brother. But okay, okay.’

Drummond found his flask and poured a small dash of corn liquor over the cleanest-looking bit of skin at the side of the shattered chest. The blood streaked away, leaving a bare spot of flesh – scrawny, middle-aged, most definitely in its chicken-neck paleness takata – to which he applied a forefinger, making a little vaudeville business of drawing up his sleeve first.

‘Well?’

‘Not quite stone cold, but getting on.’

‘Few hours, then.’

‘Yeah. Midnight, one o’clock maybe. Though it’s a cold night.’

‘Lucky for us,’ said Barrow.

‘Whaddaya mean?’

‘I mean think how this’d smell in August.’

‘True. True. And that is why the good Lord created see-gars, to block the noses of the police. But I cain’t light up in this, dammit,’ said Drummond, waving a hand in the flying flakes.

Normally, it was true, he would have had a stogey wedged in his wide mouth by now, talking nineteen to the dozen around it and sending up blue smoke in puffs and swathes like a curtain between him and whatever his hands were doing. Smoke and nonsense as the two of them rolled over the body of a drunk in an alley hit a little too hard when someone stole his wallet. Smoke and nonsense as they heaved the deadweight from a bathtub, in an apartment buzzing with flies where a wife-beating had tipped into homicide. Smoke and nonsense when they fished up a citizen from the brown water after a fight on a riverboat. Or, increasingly, when they went out with the meat-wagon to a waste lot, to retrieve the bullet-chewed remains of a moonshiner, curious about causes and culprits or absolutely not, depending on what arrangement Drummond had made just then with the opposing sides in the liquor war. Barrow left that stuff to him. He took the money and preferred not to know. Traditionally, it was Benny Shokcha’s takouma mob that had the department in its pocket, but the takata were getting themselves organised at scale, with shipments coming in now from the Illinois state line, and by freight car all the way from Canada. All standard business for the Murder Squad; and all of it Drummond would face with a smokescreen of smoke and a smokescreen of words, the set of his features as he gripped the butt making him look comically startled. He had a funny-pages face anyway, lips and eyes and nose drawn on a little too big and simple for his skinny white-trash head, and a cowlick of straw-coloured hair flopping on his forehead. But no cigar now, and whatever this rooftop gutting turned out to be, it was not a standard death.

‘This is real . . . elaborate,’ said Barrow. ‘I mean, doing someone like this? Doing it up here?’

Drummond shrugged. ‘Better see who it is. The why’s usually in the who.’

‘Yeah.’

Drummond held out the flashlight. ‘You're turn, brother,’ he said.

Barrow peeled back the layers of cloth around the corpse’s head, sodden with blood and now stiffening. A white (formerly white) office shirt, not expensive, darned here and there; a dark blue suit coat, also cheap, also shiny with wear; last an overcoat in dark wool, the lining discoloured cotton not silk, one of the buttons not quite matching. Not a bum’s wardrobe, but an outfit for respectability kept up on a tight budget. A clerk, not a tycoon. And when he pulled up the last heavy layer, that seemed to be who Barrow was looking at, though it took a while to get to an impression of what the living face had been, from the mask of gore that struck him first. The throat had been cut, deeply, gapingly, in a crescent-shaped gash from which all the life must surely have gushed out before the killer set to work on the man’s chest. It made it hard to attend to the small, weak, upside-down middle-aged chin, just as the streams of blood that had run into the astonished mouth, and coated its fixed shriek, made it hard to notice the small teeth with many fillings and gaps, and the rivulets pouring down the face to pool in the eye-sockets disguised the careful shave, the anxious little eyes, the lines of fretfulness around them. Dead, it was lurid and terrible; alive, it must have been mild, petulant, inoffensive, a face it was hard to imagine someone taking enough exception to, to think its owner should be spectacularly butchered on a roof.

The way the body was draped, with the head tipped back further than it had ever done in life thanks to the slashed throat, kept the dead man’s thinning hair and forehead more or less right underneath him, out of the blood flow, and it wasn’t until Barrow crouched and played the torch down there that he found there was a word smeared on the forehead, written by the looks of it with a fingertip dipped in the mess above. Capitals. B-something.

‘Phin, come look. Can you make that out?’

‘What?’

‘There. On his head.’

Drummond squatted next to him, hat pushed back for a better view. Barrow watched his comical blue eyes widen.

‘I can get B–A–S – something. Maybe, “Basil” – like the name?’

‘No,’ said Drummond. ‘Now, this is gonna be complicated; you’ll see if it isn’t. This is gonna be a can of trouble opening up right here.'