White corridor (12 page)

19

INTIMATIONS

DS Janice Longbright closed her mobile and perched on the edge of the desk, crossing her legs in a slither of caramel nylon. It was now 5:45
P.M
., and Giles Kershaw had returned with his preliminary notes on the examination of Oswald Finch’s body. The shell-shocked members of the PCU had been gathered in Longbright’s office, although no-one had yet managed to contact Raymond Land, who had last been seen tottering back from an extended Masonic luncheon with his Home Office liaison man, Leslie Faraday, in Covent Garden.

‘Have you spoken to John and Mr Bryant?’ asked Dan Banbury, following the unit’s odd tradition of referring to May by his first name and Arthur by his last.

‘It’s not necessary to raise your hand, Dan, you’re not in school. No, I thought I’d call them in a minute, with all of us here. Giles, have you got a time line for us?’

‘Hang on a mo.’ Kershaw unfolded his spindly legs and rose to the blackboard he had erected under the window. ‘I’d usually PowerPoint my notes to you all, but we have no network.’ He glanced accusingly at Banbury, who seemed not to mind. Bimsley had chosen to sit next to Mangeshkar, who had moved her legs as far as possible away from him. April sat at the back, watching intently, her arms folded protectively across her chest.

‘The bruise on Oswald’s neck wasn’t the only one,’ Kershaw explained. ‘I found another, identical in shape and discolouring, on the left side of his chest. It would appear he suffered a thrombotic attack after getting thumped on the opening of his pulmonary artery and aortic valve, which prevents blood from reversing its flow back into the left ventricle of the heart. The convulsion interrupted the rhythm of his heart and stopped it. The whole thing happened very quickly, and was over in a few seconds. He was standing when this happened, and immediately fell down beneath the counter.’

‘How do you know that?’ asked Mangeshkar. ‘How can you be sure he didn’t simply suffer a traumatic episode due to the weakness of his heart? Why does it have to be linked to his bruises?’

‘The marks go deep, Meera; they were made with great force. The one on his chest has actually torn several layers of the epidermis. They weren’t caused by just bumping into the furniture, and they’re fresh enough to have occurred at his time of death. There’s a secondary contusion on his skull where he glanced against the table edge as he fell. His right shoe twisted, causing a faint spiral pattern on the flooring, and he instinctively put out his left hand to break the fall, so he still had consciousness at that point. Dan lifted a partial palm print from the floor.

‘No instruments of any kind have been removed from the wall cases, and there are no prints on the blades of the broken fan, even though I had my money on it having been used as a weapon. It couldn’t have simply spun down, striking him twice in succession. It’s not a boomerang. But as a weapon it would have carried prints easily, so I was surprised that none showed up. However, when I examined the clean edges of one of the blades, I found a tiny sweat mark that suggests it might have come into contact with Finch’s neck.’

‘If you’re telling us that someone else was there—leaving aside that impossibility for a moment—and chose to hit him with a ceiling fan, surely you can run a DNA match on his sweat marks, and separate them out from any other prints in the room?’ asked Banbury, whose love of technical wizardry made him want to press the human genome into service in the form of computer code.

‘Dan, we have Finch’s prints on file, and I promise you, there are no outsider prints at all. I dusted the place from top to bottom, and all we have are finger marks from other members of the PCU. I know that because you’re all on file. So, our time line.’ He produced a piece of chalk and began scratching away on the board, oblivious to the teeth-gritting noise it made. ‘Finch arrived for work this morning at eight
A.M
. There was nothing booked on his schedule for the day, so it’s hard to be totally accurate what he got up to. Dan, you checked the phone log.’

‘No outgoings in that time, and the internals don’t register, but we know he called Land to talk about his position here at the unit, because Land called Mr Bryant to discuss the matter further.’

‘Then Sergeant Renfield came over from Albany Street station with a docket for the body that was delivered to the Bayham Street Morgue.’

‘Finch had a case?’

‘He’d agreed to help Renfield out. Young unidentified female, probably living rough on the streets of Camden, found dead in a doorway of the Office shoe shop this morning, corner of Inverness Street and Camden High Street, exposure combined with a drug intake. Colin, you rang around the hostels, didn’t you?’

‘No obvious candidates yet, Sarge. I’m waiting for the Eversholt Street Women’s Refuge to call me back.’

‘Did Oswald carry out an autopsy on her?’ asked Meera.

‘He’s supposed to wait for hospital notes,’ said Banbury, ‘but he’d started some preliminary exploration, then locked her back in the body drawer. I just took a quick look at her, and now the cadaver can’t be moved anyway, at least until Giles and I have finished in there. No-one’s come forward to claim her, and I don’t suppose they will straightaway.’

‘Did Oswald leave any notes?’

‘Just an estimated time of death on the report form, which he set at five-thirty
A.M
., an external description and some basic observations about her condition.’

‘No other appointments or personal notes to himself?’

‘Nothing that I can find,’ said Banbury. ‘There’s no obvious point of entry for an intruder, and no way of gaining access. Giles, you checked Finch’s body for long-term defects, didn’t you?’

‘He shows some symptoms of having had a weak heart,’ said Kershaw. ‘I took a look at an artery and found it pretty furred up. I don’t suppose he’d have lasted very long in retirement, but I don’t think he killed himself. There’s a two-centimetre cut on the palm of his left hand, fresh and very fine. It looks like it was made with the point of a scalpel. He’d put a new blade in this morning and dropped the wrapper in his bin. I have to say that the position of his body suggests an attack. What if he was surprised, raised his hand in defence, was jabbed, and the attacker struck again with the handle? Of course, that raises more questions than it answers. Anyway, here’s your time line.’ He tapped the blackboard with his chalk.

‘Finch enters the morgue at eight
A.M
. and locks the door on the inside, returning the key to its hook. He gets an immediate call from Renfield saying that he’s on the way over with a case. Renfield turns up ten minutes later with someone, presumably a paramedic, drops off the body and they leave. Finch starts work, then stops when he realises he won’t get the hospital notes until later in the day—there’s a bit of confusion about this at the moment—so he locks the corpse in one of the drawers and starts to write up his notes. We know that at around eight-thirty
A.M
. he calls Land and tries to get him to rescind his resignation. Apparently he began to have doubts about leaving after talking to Mr Bryant yesterday. At nine forty-five
A.M
. I go to see him about his refusal to recommend me for the position of unit pathologist, and I admit it, we have a bit of a contretemps. While we’re arguing, Meera turns up, wanting to sit in on the rest of the autopsy.’

‘It couldn’t have been very comfortable for you,’ said Longbright, ‘having to confront the man who had just destroyed your chances of promotion.’

‘I don’t much care for your implication,’ Kershaw said, bridling. ‘I’ll admit I wasn’t
comfortable
about seeing him, but I’m a professional. I didn’t let my true feelings show.’

‘How long did you stay?’

‘Only a few minutes. Oswald told me he was waiting for documentation to come through before continuing his casework, so I left him to it. I don’t think he’s legally bound to wait for it, but that’s what he told me.’

‘We know he was in an argumentative mood. Did he seem different in any other way?’

‘It’s hard to remember.’ Kershaw seemed so uncomfortable with the question that Longbright had the distinct impression he was holding something back.

‘And to your knowledge he had no further visitors.’

‘No, but we have no way of being sure because no-one has to get signed in at Bayham Street. You can walk in from outside without being seen so long as you have the access code to the front door. The morgue is cold, and his body temperature may have fallen sharply, I say
may
because the thermostat’s on the fritz and I can’t tell if the heaters were on the whole time, but I assume he died between ten
A.M.
and eleven
A.M.
’

‘By which time it was already snowing hard,’ Longbright added, making a note.

‘Yes, that’s an odd thing,’ Kershaw admitted. ‘The morgue lights were off, and given the size of the windows it means that Finch must have been sitting in virtual darkness, which means that his killer—if a killer it was—attacked without needing much light. There’s a street lamp outside, but the bulb is broken. And as I say, the key to the morgue door was still hanging on the hook.’

‘I don’t suppose we have a way of checking how many other keys were still in place at any time through the day.’

‘I know they were there before, because I had to borrow one, and the remaining keys were all there when I returned mine an hour later.’

‘There must be absolute secrecy about this while we conduct an internal investigation,’ Longbright warned. ‘If that Home Office hit man Kasavian finds out what’s happened here, we’re dead.’

‘We won’t be able to let John and Uncle Arthur know yet,’ said April. ‘They’re only contactable on their mobiles until they get to their hotel, and the lines of communication won’t be secure.’

‘Then we’ll have to work by ourselves for the time being,’ Longbright told her. ‘We have the only keys to Bayham Street, and we daren’t admit anyone else to the investigation, so I’m afraid we have to consider ourselves all under house arrest here at the unit until we can get to the truth.’

20

SNOW-BLIND

‘Qanugglir.’
Bryant enunciated so carefully that his dental plate nearly fell out. ‘Snowy weather.
Kanevcir
. First snowfall.
Kanut.
Crusty snow.
Anymanya
. A snowstorm.
Igadug
. A blizzard.
Qaniit
. Feathery—’

‘All right,’ May interrupted. ‘I know you know all of the Inuit words for snow—’

‘Sixty-seven,’ said Bryant absently, staring out of the windscreen.

‘—but it’s really not very helpful. In fact it’s rather annoying.’

The blizzard showed no sign of abating. The wind had risen to a roar, lifting the snow that had already fallen, swirling it into bleached dunes. The high hedges were buried beneath sculpted white plumes, the sides of the roadway banking into an immense channel, its centre half mile packed with marooned vehicles, anchored in undulating spines of snow. A nearby tree appeared to have been hung with crystal pendants.

Visibility had fallen to around six metres. The vehicle in front of them, a green designer SUV sold on its ability to bounce bounty hunters across rugged terrain but generally owned by middle-class mothers who insisted on driving their fragile darlings to school, had been hastily abandoned, and was subsumed to the top of its wheel arches. The Spar truck behind was starting to look like a Rachel Whiteread sculpture. Looking in his rearview mirror, May could see the driver arguing with his mobile phone. In the last few minutes, one or two passengers had attempted to alight from their vehicles, only to be driven back by the pounding winds.

‘How long can this keep up?’ asked Bryant, smudging a clear patch on the windscreen with the back of his woolly mitten.

‘It’s Dartmoor,’ replied his partner. ‘Normal weather rules don’t apply out here. We have a full tank, but we’ll be in trouble if the engine dies. We can’t stay in this cabin without heat.’

‘It’s a marvellous thing, snow,’ said Bryant wistfully, appearing not to hear his partner’s concerns. ‘As much as six feet can fall in a single day, and the volume is ten times that of the equivalent moisture in rainfall. I remember snowfalls in the East End that were so heavy they pulled down the overhead telegraph lines, temperatures so low that sheets of ice slid like guillotine blades from the roofs of cornering taxis.’

In the last few years, Bryant seemed not to concern himself with common fears. He made his way through the world in a state of blithe cheerfulness, leaving a trail of concern and distress behind him. Others fretted for his welfare far more than he did himself, and May had been pressed into service as a professional worrier for everyone’s well-being.

‘We cannot stay here,’ May reiterated. ‘People die stranded on Dartmoor, Arthur. It happens almost every winter.’

‘Can I light my pipe?’ Bryant’s watery blue eyes rolled up at him beseechingly. ‘It would help me think.’

‘No, you cannot. I daren’t open the windows. We’ll freeze to death.’

‘A lot of mysterious goings-on on Dartmoor, you know,’ said Bryant, digging in the glove compartment. ‘I was reading about them in my guide book. Hound Tor is haunted by the spirit of a hanged woman, and Okehampton Castle is positively alive with the ghosts of slaughtered nobles. And apparently you should never drive on the B3212 between Postbridge and Two Bridges after dark because a pair of dismembered hairy hands are liable to wrench the steering wheel away from you, sending you careening into a bog. Then there are the Piskies, who are the unbathed children of Eve, exiled by God from the Garden of Eden and sent to Devon, who are said to contain the souls of dead babies, and of course witchcraft is still practised today across Dartmoor, especially near Ringastan. That’s a stone circle excavated in 1903 that was found to have had a false floor in it, filled with coils of human hair.’

‘Really, Arthur—’

‘Oh, I know all this seems like old hat, but during the winter solstice of 2005 the police at Moortown found half a dozen sheep with their necks broken and their eyes torn out. Their corpses were arranged in occult patterns. Seven more dead sheep were found arranged in the shape of a heptagram at an ancient pagan sacrificial altar in the shadow of Vixen Tor. Perhaps we’ve been stranded here for a reason.’ Bryant rolled his blue eyes meaningfully as the wind moaned around the van.

‘This is ridiculous. I’m going to call Janice and see if she can find out what’s happening with the emergency services.’ May speed-dialled her number on his mobile and listened.

But Bryant had started having morbid thoughts; he looked out at the ferociously blank landscape and wondered what it would be like to die outside, a painless numbing of the senses accompanied by a shutting out of light, kinder than drowning or even fading in a hospital bed; a sort of suspended animation that held the possibility of being reversed. Snow White and Sleeping Beauty had both slipped into comas, only to be revived by the heat of another human life. He felt something—a faint tremor, a flutter of the heart, a fleeting premonition that beat overhead like a death’s-head moth and vanished with the intrusion of May’s voice.

‘Well, what are they suggesting? Of course we’re going to stay put, we don’t have much of a choice. Call me back, then.’

May was staring oddly at the disconnection, as if trying to understand what he had heard. ‘What’s the matter?’ asked Bryant, suddenly concerned about what he had missed.

‘I don’t know. She sounded very strange. I think she wanted to tell me—I don’t know, exactly.’ He shook the idea from his head. After working for so many years with each other, they had developed certain intuitions that ran against their voiced opinions. ‘She says the whole of Southwest England has been hit by blizzards. They’re trying to mobilise snow clearers and marine emergency helicopters, but all rescue vehicles have been grounded until the high winds abate. Traffic’s at a standstill everywhere, and there’s worse weather to come. Even the ploughs have been caught out. We have no choice but to stay put here.’

‘I wouldn’t worry; it won’t take long to clear the roads, and meanwhile we have food and water and heat. Apart from Alma’s surplus sandwich mountain, there’s a hamper in the back. I was taking it down for the raffle.’

‘We should check on the other drivers, warn them to stay in their vehicles, try to make sure they’re all right.’ May opened his window and peered out, trying to see, but the blast of icy snow that burst into the van cab forced him to quickly reseal it. He dropped back in his seat, frustrated. ‘I knew I shouldn’t have left London.’

Several hundred metres back along the road, Madeline and Ryan sat inside their stalled Toyota clinging to each other as the temperature plunged. Snow had soaked a length of stripped cabling and shorted out the vehicle’s ignition. ‘Don’t worry,’ she told her son. ‘The snowploughs will come and get us. They’re prepared for storms like this.’

‘Why doesn’t the heater work without the engine running?’ Ryan asked. ‘It’s not like it uses petrol.’

‘No, but it runs on electricity. Here.’ She had found a red emergency blanket in the boot of the vehicle, but it wasn’t wide enough to go around both of them, so she tucked it in around her son, hoping he wouldn’t notice that her teeth were chattering. ‘When we get home I’m making you hot chocolate and buttered crumpets with melted cheese and Marmite, and you can watch all the TV shows I don’t let you watch normally.’ Ryan had trusted her and the new man who had come into their lives, only to be betrayed. The least she could do was let him watch some unhealthy television once they were safe and warm again. She hugged him close to her, sensing his fragility through the rough nylon blanket.

‘Mum, can’t breathe, you’re squashing me,’ he called from within the folds.

‘Don’t worry,’ she said, convincing herself, ‘everything’s going to be all right.’

‘Where’s Johann? Why can’t he come with us?’ said the muffled voice.

She closed her eyes and tried to avoid imagining the dangers that might lay in wait for them both.

‘We ain’t going anywhere in this.’ The van driver smelled of rolling tobacco and cabbages. His name was Danny, and he transported cartons of counterfeit cigarettes to his supermarket in Cornwall. He had offered Johann a lift from the port because he felt the police were less likely to stop trucks with codrivers. Johann watched the silver Toyota setting off ahead of them, and created an absurd story about needing to keep within sight of his ex-wife because she was worried about breaking down on the motorway.

Danny had heard worse, and dutifully stayed within ten vehicles of the Toyota. It wasn’t difficult; driving conditions had rapidly become atrocious, and no-one was overtaking or speeding. He’d expected to cut off the edge of the A38 and make a stop outside Plymouth, where he had promised to deliver some whisky to his business partner, but the traffic slowed to a crawl, and had now stopped altogether.

‘I’ve never seen weather like this, man.’ Danny tapped out a Romanian Rothmans and lit up. ‘It’s as far as we go until the ploughs get here.’

‘Don’t worry about it,’ Johann told him. ‘I can see my wife’s car from here.’ He opened the passenger door and swung himself down into the snowdrift. ‘Thank you for the ride.’

‘But I didn’t get you there,’ Danny called after him.

‘You got me as far as I needed to go,’ Johann shouted back, but his words were torn up by the driving gale.

‘They’re stranded in a blizzard somewhere at the southern edge of Dartmoor,’ said Longbright. ‘April, try to get an update on conditions from the Devon and Cornwall police. Tell them we’ve got a couple of senior officers snowed in, see if we can get them out and brought back here. Colin, you’d better try and track down Raymond Land. We’ll have to tell him what’s happened. Dan, you come with me to Bayham Street and give me a walk-through.’

‘What about me?’ asked Giles Kershaw, rising from his seat.

‘You stay here, Giles. You had both motive and opportunity. Out of all of us, you’re most under suspicion of murder. Meera, make sure he doesn’t go anywhere and remember you’re under suspicion as well. Neither of you are to use a phone or a computer until I return. You’re on your honour. Don’t make me have to enforce this by calling in the Met.’

My God,
she thought, running down the steeply angled stairs to the street,
if we really have a murderer inside the unit, there’s no-one I can rely on to help me
.