White corridor (9 page)
14
MORTIFICATION
At five to twelve on Tuesday morning, DS Janice Longbright pushed open the door of the Bayham Street mortuary and entered the musty passageway that ran beside the former school gymnasium.
She looked up at the narrow windows, paused, and took a slow, deep breath. Having resisted promotion from the status of Detective Sergeant for so many years, it now seemed that she was to have the responsibility of leadership placed upon her whether she liked it or not. An uncomfortable-looking Giles Kershaw was waiting for her outside the door. The young forensic scientist coughed loudly, but remained at the threshold of the room. He leaned around the jamb, reluctant to enter.
‘Giles, either go in or stay out,’ said Longbright, more in puzzlement than irritation. ‘What on earth’s the matter?’
Kershaw looked sheepish. ‘Oswald didn’t want me here at all, so I’m not sure I should be intruding upon his turf.’
‘Oh, don’t be so sensitive and territorial. I don’t understand what’s so important that you couldn’t talk to me about it on the phone.’ The sickly look on his face stopped her. ‘Tell me what’s happened.’
‘I think you’d better take a look,’ said Giles, running a hand through his lank blond hair as he stepped back to admit her first. ‘The door was locked on the inside. I had to use one of the spare keys to get it open. This is just how I found the place.’
She moved carefully into a room that was still more like a gymnasium than a morgue. Most of it was below street level, with five short windows near the ceiling framing a dusty view of passing ankles on the pavement outside. An old wood-and-steel climbing frame still stood in the corner, the last surviving remnant of the St Patrick Junior Catholic Boys’ School gym. The bare brick walls had been painted gloss white, and the aluminium-cased strip lights that hung low across the steel desks added a forensic glare to a room which still smelled faintly of plimsolls and hormonal teens. The sprung wood basketball floor had been covered with carpet tiles. Longbright noted a folded pile of black micromesh sheets, a scuffed stainless steel dissecting table, several glass-fronted equipment cabinets, Finch’s old wooden desk and, at the rear of the room, a bank of four steel body drawers, but there was no sign of the pathologist.
She had expected to find Finch in his usual spot, seated on a bentwood chair beside one of the sinks, reading a gardening magazine. He was now past the age when he could spend much of his day standing. She looked about, puzzled. ‘I don’t understand. Where is he?’
‘Look under the sink,’ Kershaw instructed her. Longbright slowly bent over, apprehensive of what she might find. Finch was lying on his back with his papery eyelids shut, his bony death’s-head face finally suited to circumstance. He looked for all the world as if he had decided to take a nap on the floor and then simply drifted beyond the vale of sorrow.
‘Seems entirely at peace, doesn’t he?’ Kershaw voiced her thought. ‘At a guess, I’d say he’s been dead for at least an hour. The exact time might prove difficult to pin down, but I’ll get to that problem later. There’s no blood, no outward sign of the cause. The only anomaly I can see is the angled bruise on the left side of his neck, about two inches long, just above his collar.’
Longbright crouched beside the pathologist’s body and gently touched her hand against his skin. ‘Looks new. What do you think it is?’
‘I don’t know. I came here looking for Dan and found this instead. He’s cold to the touch. There’s a contusion on the back of his head, presumably caused by the fall. Ought we to call someone?’
‘I’m not sure if he has any surviving relatives left in this country. His wife and son went home to Poland.’
‘I’d heard he was depressed. John told me he’d changed his mind about leaving the unit, but Raymond Land wouldn’t take back his resignation. There’s a clear handprint on the stainless steel counter, Finch’s own I’d guess, because there’s a band missing on his fourth finger, where he wears a ring. It would be consistent with him placing his left-hand palm down on the surface. It’s the sort of thing you’d do to steady yourself. My first thought was heart attack, but what about suicide?’
‘Surely a sudden illness is the most likely explanation,’ said Longbright.
‘Of course, that’s the first thing Dan will be considering after his examination of the room. The door was locked from the inside, and the only key in the room should be on the hook behind Finch’s desk, except it’s not. The windows require a pole to be opened, and have no external fastenings.’
‘There’s another way into the mortuary,’ said Longbright, looking up. ‘The ventilator shaft.’
‘Right, the cover’s missing from the front of the extractor fan.’
‘The pipe measures about forty-five centimetres,’ said Dan Banbury, walking in beside them. ‘So unless someone trained a monkey to come and attack him I think we can rule out that possibility.’
‘Murders in the Rue Morgue,’ said Longbright. ‘How on earth do you know what the pipe measures?’
‘You learn to make accurate measurements from sight-readings in this job,’ said Banbury casually. ‘My wife’s a district nurse. She does the same thing when she’s pouring me a beer, measures it out to the centilitre. Look further under the table.’
‘What is that?’ Longbright spotted the grey metal object, a double-ended aluminium blade.
‘He’d been complaining for weeks that no-one had come to replace the extractor cover.’ Banbury pointed to the ceiling, and the framed end of the ventilation pipe. ‘Looks to me like the fan blade worked itself loose and finally came off, falling down and striking him on the neck.’
‘A bit unlikely, don’t you think?’ said Kershaw.
‘You wouldn’t believe the stats on accidents in the workplace. Employees have more than one point six million a year in Britain alone, impaling themselves on pens, getting electrocuted by ungrounded metal toilets, falling out of windows, choking on paper clips. University College Hospital had a woman last week who had managed to cut her throat opening a padded envelope. There’s no sign of a forced entry, and this is a secure building. Even so, Finch had the door lock changed last month so that it could only be opened from the outside with a key. Apparently he was fed up with Mr Bryant wandering in and being rude to him all the time.’
‘I don’t think he could face retirement in Hastings,’ said Kershaw.
‘This is not suicide, Giles. He was strange, I’ll admit, but he’d have to have been pretty bloody perverse to loosen the blade of an extractor fan and stand underneath it with his neck exposed, waiting for it to fall off. Besides, there’s nothing to stand on in here. He’d never have been able to reach it in the first place.’
‘I’m talking about finding some kind of malignant chemical in his body. Finch had a background in biology and chemistry. If he had really wanted to commit suicide, he’d have been able to access any amount of painless drugs for the purpose.’
‘I know Arthur has always encouraged us to rank the most bizarre possibilities beside more obvious causes of death,’ said Longbright, ‘but isn’t this going a bit far? Even if he did found the PCU upon that idea.’ She studied the prone pathologist with sadness. ‘Poor Oswald, he never did get to leave this place.’
Longbright rose and checked around the room. She couldn’t smell alcohol on the body, and Finch had no history of drink or drug abuse. Clear-headed suicides usually tidied up before killing themselves. The pathologist’s casebook and notes were scattered over the workbench. True, he had tried to rescind his resignation, and was probably mortified about his failure to do so, but depression was his natural state.
She wondered whether to tell her bosses and have them return to the unit, but decided against it. She understood their thought processes better than anyone, and could partially reproduce them if necessary. It was time for her to become more independent.
‘What would John do next, do you think? Set up a common approach path, run a particle sweep, start swabbing for DNA?’
‘The trouble is, neither he nor Bryant ever operated in the prescribed official manner,’ said Banbury. ‘Their methodology is as unpredictable as a wind before a storm.’
Longbright pinched a glossy crimson lip and studied the scene, trying to clear her head of preconceptions. Finch had been standing at his workbench, and had fallen onto his back. He was left-handed. If the fan had spun off and fallen on him, wouldn’t he have heard the sound of it coming loose? What had absorbed his concentration so intently? She looked at the workbench and saw loose papers, an uncapped ballpoint pen, notebooks, a broken-backed toxicology manual, nothing out of the ordinary.
‘What’s the first thing you do if you hear a noise above you?’ she asked Banbury. ‘You look up.’
‘Helicopters,’ said Banbury enigmatically. ‘That’s what we used to call those seeds with little wings that fell from trees when we were nippers. They don’t fall straight down, do they? The fan blade wouldn’t, either. It’s lightweight aluminium. Finch looked up, stretching his neck, and it could have come down at him from an angle, striking a blow from the side.’
‘What, you think the blow to his neck caused a blood clot, some kind of internal haemorrhage? That seems no more likely than the idea of him killing himself.’
‘I’m not going to perform an autopsy on him, Janice,’ stated Kershaw. ‘Not only would it be unethical, the idea of using Finch’s own medical instruments to divine the cause of his death would be highly inappropriate. We’d have to falsify the paperwork.’
‘See, that’s the difference between you and Oswald. He would never show such squeamishness when it’s a matter of doing the right thing.’
‘I’m not squeamish.’ Kershaw bridled. ‘It’s a moral issue.’
The detective sergeant was not one to see the world in shades of grey. ‘You knew about the unit’s habit of ignoring the boundaries of propriety before you came to us,’ she warned him. ‘If you want to prove yourself a worthy successor to Oswald, this is where you start.’
‘At least it’s not difficult sealing off the site,’ said Banbury. ‘As far as I’m aware, there are only four sets of keys into the mortuary, including Finch’s own. Giles, can you see if he has a set on him?’
Kershaw flicked a lick of blond hair from his eyes and knelt beside the body. He carefully detached a pair of keys, one Chubb, one Yale, from the pathologist’s pocket and placed them in a plastic bag. As the unit had no photographer of its own, Banbury photographed the body’s position and marked it. All that remained was for Finch to be lifted onto his own table.
‘Well, we’ve got an instrument of death, but I don’t think this was quite the simple accident it appears to be,’ said Banbury.
‘What do you mean?’ Longbright studied his face for clues.
‘Giles, is it okay to pick up the fan blade?’
‘So long as you’ve grid-marked it.’
Kershaw raised the aluminium spinner by its fin. ‘The central pin holding the propeller to the shaft has sheared. Looks to me like a slow stress fracture, and they take a long time to develop. You can see the thing was spinning anticlockwise because this edge’—he pointed to the top rim of the right-hand blade—‘is covered by a thick layer of dirt, and so is the opposite side of the other blade. There’s a dent on the very end, which I’m willing to bet will match the crescent dent on the fan housing.’ He pointed upward. ‘You can see the mark where it flew off from down here. So, let’s piece the event together and find out what’s wrong.’
Banbury had a commonsense attitude to police work that the others sometimes lacked. You could see cogs turning in his head. ‘I know that the fan housing fell off some weeks earlier—it’s over there on its side, under Finch’s desk, waiting to be reattached. Finch complained about it to anyone who would listen, and wasn’t happy about having to operate beneath the uncovered blades. But I suppose he needed the air on whenever he was working. The pin finally snapped, and with nothing to stop it, the spinning blade dropped, bouncing against the housing, which would have sent it down into the room still spinning, but at an angle. But Finch was standing right underneath—we know that by the way in which he’s fallen—so how on earth could he get hit by a fan blade that was veering away from him? That’s one point. This is the other.’
He indicated the two clean edges of the blade. ‘If the blade is spinning counterclockwise, it would be one of the two dirty edges that would hit him. However, as you can both see, the rims of dirt on either blade have not been disturbed, nor is there a dirt-mark on Oswald’s neck. So, although this thing is the only potential weapon in the room that is likely to have caused such a bruise, it seems it didn’t do so. If Finch wasn’t killed by a falling fan, what did kill him?’
He led them over to the door handle. ‘The lock hasn’t been forced. If someone came here looking for trouble without having the right keys, Finch would have had to let them in himself. For any assailant, the obvious weapons couldn’t be more visible.’ He pointed to the glass cabinets where an assortment of scalpels and knives stood in their racks. ‘He always returned them there after they’d cooled down from the steriliser. Suppose he somehow bashed himself on the furniture and suffered a trauma?’