White corridor (15 page)

25

CONSTRICTION

‘I don’t know what we’re looking for,’ said Banbury, flicking on the tic-inducing neon overhead. ‘God, it’s freezing in here.’

‘Oswald never turned up the heating because of the bodies, although he was supposed to keep the place at eighteen degrees centigrade,’ said Kershaw, pulling on plastic gloves. ‘He completed his training prior to public refrigeration. Everyone revered him as the perfect medical examiner, but he had his peculiarities, just like everyone else. And I can’t tell if the thermostat was raised this morning, so we have no exact time of death yet.’

‘Stay within the markers.’ Banbury pointed at the pathway of yellow tags he had attached between the doorway and the steel dissection table.

‘If I do that, I won’t find anything new. If there’s something to be seen, it’ll be found at closer quarters. Bryant was eager to release us. He knows there’s more to this than meets the casual eye.’

‘How can he? He’s stuck in a snowdrift four hundred miles away.’

‘They were old friends, despite all those tricks he played on Oswald. He knows what he was likely to do or not do.’ Kershaw carefully unlocked the medical cabinets that ran along the rear of the converted gymnasium. ‘It looks like we do have something missing here. MEs are required to list everything they keep on their shelves. I thought you checked them.’ He pointed to a laminated card placed in a pocket of the door. ‘According to the register there’s supposed to be a bottle of naltrexone in this space.’

‘What’s that?’

‘It’s a type of naloxone, an opioid antagonist. It’s a fast-acting drug used to reverse the effect of strong narcotics like heroin and morphine. Addicts often have it as part of their emergency kit. And it’s not here, which means Finch must have used it recently. Don’t touch the hazard bins, they’ll contain sharps. Let me do it.’

He rooted about in the yellow plastic bin-liner for a few minutes, but turned up nothing. Pulling open the body drawer where he had stored the medical examiner, he bent over Finch with a halogen torch.

Banbury wasn’t keen on watching his partner study the corpse of a coworker, and kept his distance beyond the end of the drawer. He was more comfortable examining the circumstances of crime; dead faces bothered him. ‘What are you looking for?’ he asked.

‘Needle marks. It occurs to me that Finch might have been a user.’

‘You think he was a drug addict?’

‘No, but we know he suffered from heart disease and plenty of other age-related illnesses. He was a very private man. If he was in pain, he might have covered up the fact and taken something to quell it, like morphine. It’s the kind of traditional opiate that would have appealed to him. You take it in tablet form as well. Cancer patients can ingest it as a syrup. It would have made him lethargic, though, and I haven’t heard any reports of unusual behaviour on his part. If he’d accidentally overdosed, he would have had reason to use the naltrexone.’

‘I thought you already checked his body.’

‘I only had time to carry out a preliminary survey before I was accused of murder by the unit’s resident Diana Dors. Besides, Finch’s skin tone was naturally jaundiced, and I had no reason to look for opiates.’

‘We haven’t got much in the way of prints,’ said Banbury, disappointed. ‘I think Finch was in the habit of frequently cleaning the surfaces with sterile wipes.’

‘What about the floor?’

‘Sprung wood flooring sealed under a polymer—I might get something more from the carpet tiles, or in the corridor. By the time visitors reached here, their shoes were clean.’ His mobile suddenly played the first seven bars of the overture to
Utopia, Limited
. ‘Sorry,’ Banbury apologised. ‘I lent it to Mr Bryant and it came back playing Gilbert and Sullivan. Hello?’ He listened for a moment. ‘I don’t know. Hang on. Giles, the body of the unidentified girl—where are her clothes?’

‘Finch probably tagged and sealed them—is that Bryant?’

‘Yes, he says to go through everything she was wearing. He thinks Mills might have come back to take something from her.’

‘Tell him I’ll have a look.’ Kershaw tried the steel file cabinets beneath the sink and found what he was looking for. Removing the clear plastic envelope, he unzipped it and shook out a floral miniskirt, black tights, knickers, dirty white Nike trainers, a stained green T-shirt, a man’s belt, a grey long-sleeved sweatshirt and a bra. Everything smelled of alcohol. ‘Cheap brands, well cared for but worn for too long. Colour fading from overwashing. No bag.’ He upended the packet and found a handful of beaded arm bracelets, the kind sold on every stall in Camden Market.

‘There’s not much there to tell you about her life,’ said Banbury.

‘Actually, there’s quite a bit,’ Kershaw contradicted. ‘She started drinking hard and thieving in the last year of her life. A drug user but not dependently so. Probably got kicked out of her parents’ house, did some sofa-surfing in old school friends’ flats.’

‘You can tell that from her clothes?’

‘She was a size ten when she bought these things. Everything here was fashionable about a year ago, and the trainers are worn over. Even taking into account the fact that women tend to buy their bras and pants a size too small, Finch’s notes suggest she died at a heavier weight than that indicated by her clothes. Hard drugs are appetite suppressants, so that couldn’t have been her problem.’

‘How do you know she was a thief?’

Kershaw poked his finger through matching holes in the sweatshirt and T-shirt.

‘She shoplifted them with the tags intact, then was forced to tear them out. No rings, no money, no purse, no jewellery of value. Either she was robbed on the street or she sold everything she had. If this kid Mills really knew her, he was probably her only friend. What do you think sparked the change in her behaviour?’

‘I’m not good with people,’ Banbury admitted. ‘I stick with surfaces, software and stains.’

‘You techies have no soul,’ muttered Kershaw, sniffing a trainer. ‘She washed, kept herself nice. There’s perfume and soap beneath the alcohol; I think it’s a Donna Karan brand. Strange that she’d have an expensive perfume but no money to buy clothes.’ He set down the training shoe. ‘You think you know how children grow up. It’s just biology. But something happens: unmentioned damage, a private passion, the shock of lost innocence; the points change and the train gets diverted. How does that work? I wish Bryant and May were here. They’re so good at understanding this sort of thing. What would they do now?’

‘The only lead is the boy,’ said Banbury, ‘so they’d ask him what it was he came to take.’

Kershaw stared thoughtfully at the sad little bundle of clothing. ‘I thought you said Finch did a preliminary on her?’

‘He did. At least, he told several people he was working on the case, and he always made notes as he went along using the Waterman fountain pen Mr Bryant gave him for his birthday.’

‘That’s what I thought. He’s jotted down her height and weight but that’s all.’ He held up the ring binder Finch kept on his work table and flipped it open. ‘The pen’s here with its cap off. Apart from that, his last entry in the book is dated six days ago. No other notes. Why didn’t he make any?’

‘Maybe he didn’t feel they were conclusive enough to set down just yet.’

‘If he’d been suffering from the effects of morphine, he wouldn’t have been thinking clearly,’ said Kershaw. ‘You may not want to stay around for this, Dan. I have to perform an autopsy on Oswald.’

‘Have you done one before?’

‘Plenty of times, at college, but this will be my first live corpse. I’m going to find proof that he was murdered.’

‘You’re supposed to keep an open mind about the cause of death until you uncover defining evidence.’

‘Bryant thinks he was killed.’ Kershaw reopened the drawer containing the medical examiner’s body. ‘That’s good enough for me. I’d like to hear what Owen Mills has to say for himself.’

The unheated institution-green interview room was supposed to appear bare and depressing, somewhere witnesses could deliver concise statements before fleeing as quickly as possible. While she waited for Mills’s next monosyllable, Longbright thought about pinning up a few movie posters, Ava Gardner and Gregory Peck, perhaps. The boy didn’t seem very bright, and was having trouble dragging up any kind of plausible story. First he told them that the street door to the mortuary had been left open and he’d simply walked in. Then he tried to suggest that he and Finch were friends, but could not seem to recall where or when they had met. As for the girl lying dead in the morgue drawer, he had never seen, heard of or met her.

The sergeant knew that when suspects chose to hide the truth, they were better off sticking with very simple statements. The ones who offered too much detail tried so hard to convince that they were rarely believed. While DC Mangeshkar took over the questioning, Longbright slipped outside and rang the senior detectives.

‘We’re not getting anywhere with him,’ she admitted. ‘I could really do with your help.’

In the misted cabin of Alma Sorrowbridge’s transit van, Arthur Bryant held his hand over the mobile and gave his partner a look of concern. ‘John, I have need of your technical knowledge. Is there a way I can get some close-up pictures of the dead girl’s body?’

‘That should be easy. Let me get Dan Banbury on my phone. If he’s still at the morgue I’ll have him take digital shots and get them sent to this mobile, but you’ll have to specify exactly what you’re looking for.’

Bryant rang off with a promise to call back, waiting while Banbury sent through photographs of the dead girl’s ankles, her wrists and the back of her neck. The elderly detective raised his bifocals and studied the images. He only needed to search for a few moments. ‘Ask Mills to return her neck chain, and while you’re at it, ask him what he’s done with Oswald’s notes.’

‘What did you spot?’ asked May, puzzled.

‘A bit of a long shot. She’d put on weight recently, so I thought we might be able to see if the lividity of the body would point to her wearing a chain that had grown a little tight. With the cessation of circulation, the blood settled gravitationally, but at that point she was still wearing the chain, so it left a white line around the back of her neck, see?’ He showed May a photograph of a blotched red neck with a pale thread traversing it. ‘The next assumption we might dare to make is that the chain could identify either her or Mills. Perhaps it was engraved with an inscription. He really doesn’t want to be linked to her. The constable on Renfield’s beat would have searched her and the surrounding doorway for regular forms of ID. Someone should check with him to make sure he didn’t remove anything. My guess is the boy holds all the keys to her identity.’

Longbright was beginning to wonder if Owen Mills was only dumb in the sense that he was refusing to talk. He lounged in his chair, legs crossed at the ankles, and stared in silent insolence at the detective sergeant. With time of the essence, it was too risky to merely wait him out. There was enough evidence to hold him for trespass on government property, but not much else. Mills’s pockets were empty; he might have taken the chain and disposed of it.

As the silence in the room stretched into its seventeenth minute, Longbright discreetly checked the time and tried to think of a way to break the deadlock. ‘Okay,’ she said finally. ‘Owen, I’m not going to ask anything more about your presence at Bayham Street. We’re not getting very far, are we? I’ll let you go home for now.’

Mills’s deadpan expression glitched with a trace of satisfaction, and he swung lazily to his feet.

‘Wait—show me your left hand.’

Reluctantly, the boy opened his fist and raised it. There, a tiny blue curlicue stained his palm.

‘What is that?’ Longbright held his wrist and examined the mark. A fragment of mirror lettering revealed the familiar spikes of Finch’s strange handwriting.

‘You had his notes after all. You crumpled them up with your sweaty palm and transferred the still-wet ink from his fountain pen.’

Longbright rose and walked behind Mills, gently teasing her fingers down the collar of his sweatshirt.

‘Hey!’ Mills attempted to squirm away, but the DS was too quick for him. She extracted the cheap gold chain from under his shirt and hauled him back to the chair.

‘I think you’d better sit down and tell us what you did with the papers you took,’ she said, permitting herself a smile. ‘Then you can explain why you stole jewellery from a dead girl.’

26

ERADICATION

‘I spy with my little eye, something beginning with S.’ Bryant looked out through the frosted windscreen with cheery wide eyes. His white fringe was standing on end, an effect of the lowering temperature. He looked like Jack Frost’s grandfather.

‘I’m not even going to dignify that with an answer.’ May sighed.

‘Can’t we call them again?’

‘You said yourself that they need to stand on their own feet. We won’t always be around, you know.’

‘I certainly won’t be around for much longer if you continue to ration the heater.’ He tapped ineffectually at the radio. ‘The bulldozers should have been here by now. All they keep saying is that the driving winds are keeping rescuers at bay.’

‘This isn’t the only road blocked. Presumably it’s affecting every major route for miles around, and there’s more snow on the way. We’re going to be here overnight, so we should try to get some sleep.’

The props in the back of the van were wrapped in old blankets, bubble wrap and plastic bags to protect their edges. Keeping warm would be easy enough, but Bryant worried how the passengers in other vehicles were faring. He knew they should really go and check, but stepping outside now would place them both in danger. Neither man was equipped to face subzero temperatures.

They put the heater back on, and were dozing in its desiccating warmth when the fist at their window made them both start. All John May could see was a pair of alarmed brown eyes peering through the furry tunnel of a green snow hood. He rolled down the glass.

‘Thank God,’ said the man, ‘nobody else will open their windows—there’s been a terrible—’

‘Wait,’ May shouted, ‘I can’t hear you. Go around the back.’ He climbed out of the van and plodded around it, cracking ice from the frozen rear door handle. The man in the green parka clambered up and shook down his hood. He was young, Chinese, frightened. If he noticed that he had been seated next to a gigantic gold-painted statue of Ganesh the Elephant God, he chose not to comment. ‘I’m in the Honda Civic back there. My engine stalled and the heater died,’ he explained. ‘I needed to keep warm but didn’t have any other clothes in the car with me. There was a truck behind me—I could vaguely see the driver in my rearview mirror—so I thought I’d ask him if I could sit in his cabin. The truck’s side windows were covered in snow and I couldn’t see in, so I tried the driver’s door. I’m sorry—’ The man fought down a wave of panic. ‘I need to call the police—my mobile has no battery left, I just needed to tell someone—’

‘It’s all right, you’ve found yourself a pair of police officers,’ said May.

‘He’s dead, lying across the seat; someone’s cut a hole in his throat. It must have only just happened, because blood is still pouring out. I tried to stop it, but didn’t know what to do.’ He held up a crimson left hand.

‘Was he alone? Did you see a passenger?’

‘No, but the door was swinging open. It hadn’t been properly closed. I must have only just missed him.’

‘It’s probably a good thing that you did. You’d better stay here while I go and look.’

‘I’m coming with you,’ Bryant called from his base deep within the passenger seat.

‘It’s freezing out there, Arthur. You’re better off staying in here.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous. My blood is so thin I’m virtually reptilian. I haven’t felt anything in my extremities since I landed on my arse in the Princess Diana Memorial Fountain. Besides, you need my help. You’re not as steady on your pins as you once were.’

‘I resent that,’ muttered May. ‘Come on then, just for a minute, but do your coat up properly.’

With the wind trying to whip the handle from his grasp, May had trouble closing the van door until their witness reached out to help him pull it shut. The detectives padded back along the column of stranded cars to the grocery truck, but any footprints that might have been left around it had already been obliterated by the gale. The snow coated their ears and eyes in feathered clumps. The mere act of breathing stung their noses and throats. The sky, the hills, the wind itself was white. The moorlands had been transformed into a blanched ice-desert, the trees bent low in frozen peninsulas of frost. May needed gloves and proper boots. His leather town shoes had become soaked in seconds. As he fumbled with the driver’s door, he realised he had already lost all sensation in his hands.

‘Oh, let me do it,’ said Bryant. ‘There.’ The door came open in a spray of crystal shards.

The driver’s body was splayed across the seat on its back with one arm draped across a distended stomach, the mouth agape, as in the throes of a nightmare. The interior of the cabin had been darkened by snow building up across the windscreen, but there was enough light to reveal the hole beneath the driver’s chin. In the freezing exposure of the cabin, blood had quickly coagulated and darkened across the upholstery.

‘Penknife or scissor wound,’ said Bryant. ‘Interesting.’

The dead man appeared to be in his mid-forties but was probably younger. He wore the blue overalls provided by his company. A badge read
Bentick’s—We Deliver
. ‘Dreadful skin, looks like he hasn’t had a drink of water in years,’ sniffed Bryant. ‘Subsisted on a diet of cigarettes, coffee and bad motorway food.’

May had forgotten to pack the Valiant, his trusted old cinema torch, but he was enough of a pessimist to still carry a pencil flashlight in his jacket. He shone it into the pale wash of light and picked up blood spots on the steering wheel, a streak across the base of the windscreen, a still-wet smear on the dashboard. ‘No struggle here,’ he told Bryant, ‘just surprise and collapse. He was attacked by someone who posed no threat. Someone he probably thought was a friend.’

‘The passenger. A hitchhiker, you think? He fled the scene pretty quickly. Blood on the passenger door handle. He won’t last long out there in the blizzard.’

‘Not unless he’s climbed into one of the other stranded vehicles. Someone else could be in danger. We need to get a description of him somehow. I can’t get much from the crime scene in these conditions.’

Bryant looked up at the windscreen. ‘I don’t understand. This window is snowed over. How could your witness have seen the driver through the glass?’

‘You don’t think that’s our man?’ asked May. ‘Why on earth would he have come to us?’

‘I don’t think he faked looking that terrified, John. We can’t trust what we see. Snow and wind can do anything to this landscape.’

‘Okay, let’s get back to the van. You’re starting to turn blue.’

They trudged back through the white valley of stranded cars. The rear door of the van stood wide, and without its heater running the Bedford had started to ice solid. Their witness was nowhere to be found. May took his mobile from the dashboard and got connected to the Plymouth constabulary.

‘They can’t get anyone to the area,’ Bryant was informed. ‘The Highways Agency has stopped all traffic because the winds are expected to stay at gale force tonight. They’re saying that as long as no-one’s in imminent danger we should just sit tight. They’ve got GPS and mobile tracking equipment, so they have a rough idea of how many people are stranded here. They’re going to try and drop in emergency supplies the moment the wind lets up.’

‘A snowbound murderer,’ said Bryant with relish. ‘It’s almost too good to be true. We know he’s stranded here with us, but what is he doing?’

Outside in the white corridor of the arterial road, twenty-seven drivers and passengers were marooned in their vehicles, spread over half a mile of inundated road. Johann moved among them, silent and trackless, prepared to pass from one warm haven to the next, desperately searching for a mother and her son.