White Corridor

by Christopher Fowler

  ‘For God’s sake don’t tell him that. He thinks he has a bestseller on his hands. Remember to call me if you feel the slightest anxiety, won’t you?’ He hovered awkwardly in the doorway. ‘I know I haven’t always been there for you in the past, but now that you know part of the reason why—’

  ‘It’s fine, Granddad,’ April assured him. ‘You don’t have to say anything.’

  But after her grandfather had left the office, his turn of phrase began to puzzle her. Part of the reason? He had finally been honest about her mother’s death, but was there more she had not yet learned about her blighted family?

  7

  PATHOLOGY

  Oswald Finch was peering gimlet-eyed through the crack in the door like some grizzled old retainer considering whether to admit a tradesman into a mansion. Bryant wrinkled his nose at the sour reek of chemicals drifting through the gap. He looked up from his desk and gave a start.

  ‘Good Lord, Oswald, you frightened the life out of me; it smells like something has died. Don’t lurk outside like some grotesque from Gormenghast. Come in and stop scaring people.’

  The ancient pathologist creaked into the room and lowered himself gingerly onto a bentwood chair. ‘Piles,’ he explained, grimacing into a tragedy mask. ‘I’m at the age where my diary is marked with more hospital appointments than social events. Of course, doctors can do miracles now. Do you know, I’ve hardly anything left that I started out with. Nothing is in its original place. The doctor who opens me up is in for a shock. My intestines lose several feet every year.’

  ‘Well, I’d love to discuss the state of your internal organs all day, but as you can see I’m pretending to be busy.’ Bryant ostentatiously flicked over one blank page to examine another. ‘What do you want?’

  Finch sniffed noisily and looked around with disapproval. ‘The state of this place. A little order wouldn’t kill you. What’s in those petri dishes?’ He pointed to a row of plastic bowls arranged on the windowsill.

  ‘It’s rat excrement. I scraped some from the heel of that woman found dead beside the canal at York Way. The canal rats feed mostly on discarded junk food, but those samples contain grain. There’s not much loose grain in King’s Cross, so I guessed she was moved from somewhere else and dumped after dark. The rats had fed on a particular type of red split lentil used in Indian cooking. We tracked the ingredient to a factory in Hackney.’

  ‘I still don’t understand,’ Finch admitted. ‘What’s it doing on the windowsill?’

  ‘Oh, Alma told me it was good for growing mustard cress. I love ham-and-cress sandwiches.’

  ‘You are quite astonishingly disgusting. No wonder I never come up here from the morgue.’

  ‘Too much paperwork, no doubt.’

  ‘No, too many stairs. I was wondering if you’d heard anything about the equipment I was supposed to be getting. I’ve been promised new tanks, a small-parts dissection table fitted with a decent stainless steel drain and a second mobile instrument cart for seven months now, and the cover is still off my extractor fan. Plus, one of my refrigeration cabinets is on the blink. I suppose it was you who left several wine boxes and a tray of sausage rolls in there.’

  ‘They’re for your send-off.’

  ‘Ignoring the fact that it is unsanitary and illegal to keep foodstuffs in a refrigeration unit reserved for body parts, the sausages are past their sell-by date.’

  ‘So are you, old bean. I thought you’d be pleased.’ Bryant narrowed his watery eyes in suspicion. ‘You haven’t become a vegetarian, have you?’

  The pathologist looked troubled. ‘I have the awful feeling that by retiring at this late stage in life, I may find myself with no purpose. I can’t just wither away in Hastings.’

  ‘No choice, old sock. Your retirement’s been accepted and processed. You can sit on the pier and throw stones at the seagulls.’

  ‘But I like seagulls.’

  ‘After a few months of watching them you won’t. Just think of all the fun that lies ahead.’ Bryant stapled some papers together and sniffed. ‘Personally I’ve always found Hastings to be positively suicide-inducing, but I won’t be living there. I’m sure you’ll discover some advantages; it’ll be as quiet as your morgue, and you won’t have me pulling hideous practical jokes on you anymore.’

  Finch gloomily picked something unpleasant from his nails. ‘I suppose that’s true. I worked it out the other day. Over a period of more than forty years, you’ve played a mean-spirited trick on me at least once a week, which comes to well over two thousand japes, jokes, hoaxes, wind-ups and pranks played out with a straight face against my person, while I am trying to carry out the serious business of ascertaining causes of death to make your department look good. You tricked me into cutting up my credit cards over the phone, nurturing a rare mollusc that turned out to be a mildewed mango seed, calling my wife to accuse her of conducting a fictitious affair with a limbo dancer and telling my son that he’d been adopted following his rescue from a Satanist cult. You super-glued my office door shut, put gunpowder in my cigarette filters, sewed prawns into my jacket pockets, dropped a live eel down my toilet, relabelled my sandwich box with plague bacillus warnings, hid whoopee cushions in my cadaver drawers and retuned my radio to receive fake “end of the world” bulletins. No wonder I’ve never had any respect around here. Poor Raymond Land, I’ve finally come to understand exactly how he feels.’

  ‘You’d better sit down, Oswald, you’ve gone scarlet. You don’t want to have a heart attack the week before your retirement, eh? Everyone knows that your sense of humour petrified as soon as death’s dark caul wrapped itself around you. Besides, you know I only play jokes because I respect you. You’ll be sorely missed.’ Bryant had secretly petitioned the Home Office to have Finch’s pension increased. ‘At least we’ve got young Giles Kershaw to take over the position. I was thrilled to nominate him in your place.’

  ‘I’ve been meaning to talk to you about that. I’m afraid I turned down Kershaw’s application.’

  ‘What on earth did you do that for?’

  ‘In my opinion, he doesn’t have enough experience.’

  ‘But he’ll be devastated, Oswald. The job was all but promised to him.’

  ‘Then it will teach him not to be so ambitious,’ said Finch. ‘These overbearing young graduates come along thinking the world owes them a living, when they have to pay their dues.’

  This wasn’t like Oswald. Bryant assumed that the pathologist was out of sorts because the reality of his long-pending resignation had finally sunk in. Everyone knew he was happiest when he was elbow-deep in somebody’s chest. Physical and mental health problems had a way of crowding in when one’s purpose in life was removed, and Finch’s purpose was to provide resolutions to unfortunately truncated lives.

  ‘You’re looking done in, old friend,’ said Bryant gently. ‘Why don’t you go and put your feet up?’

  ‘I don’t trust you when you’re nice to me,’ Finch complained. ‘Besides, I can’t. It’s my last week, and the workload will be starting up again.’

  ‘I haven’t seen any cases come in this morning.’

  ‘That’s because the unit’s officially shut from today, so Faraday has been instructed to release me to the Met, to help out with their overload. That means I’ll be dealing with Sergeant Renfield, God help me. I daresay I’ll be kept busy right up until the moment of my departure.’

  ‘Then you should have shared your work with Kershaw. I think I’d better have a talk with him. You’ve made a wrong call there, Oswald. He’s a bright lad and deserves to go far, even though that upper-class accent makes him sound as if he’s being strangled. He did a great job on that business with the Highwayman. I hope you won’t have disappointed him too much.’

  ‘What about me? I was having a farewell party on Friday, but now there won’t be anyone here to see me off.’

  ‘Never mind,’ said Bryant jovially. ‘We’ll post your cake to Hastings.’

  8

  CON
TROL

  The morning sky was such an impossibly deep shade of blue, it seemed as if the earth’s atmosphere was barely thick enough to protect them from the cruel infinity of space. Madeline and Ryan sat on an outside table at La Vieille Ville and enjoyed the sun’s warmth on their faces. The scent of pomegranates and jasmine blossom hung in the warm air. In the kitchen behind them, Momo the chef was stirring the bouillabaisse he prepared for the village’s housebound residents once a week.

  ‘I think I could live here.’ Madeline pushed back her book and rested her chin on her hands. ‘Clean air, birds singing, lots of flowers, no litter. Do you like it?’

  ‘There’s no-one to play with. We’re stuck here without a car. There’s nowhere to go. You’re always reading.’ Ryan stirred the long spoon about in his ice cream. His complaints had become a refrain the past few days. During the winter season, the trains only called at the little station once an hour, turning every outing into a day trip, and day trips became expensive.

  ‘You would like to go somewhere?’

  She looked up and saw the young man who had rescued her handbag at the parade. He was wearing the same clothes, even down to the leather satchel at his side.

  ‘There is a very beautiful building on Cap Ferrat, the Villa Rothschild. It has many gardens and a waterfall, and is open to the public. I have a car.’ He pointed back at the blue open-topped Peugeot. ‘We could drive there.’

  She saw the boy’s face brighten and realised how much he still missed his father. Ryan had seen a lot more of his good side, and was young enough to be able to forget the bad. Jack Gilby had portrayed himself as a hero to the boy, turning her into a villain in the process.

  ‘Can we go, Madeline?’ Ryan was already pushing his ice cream aside and rising from the table.

  She regarded the young man with a cool eye, but he did not move beneath her critical gaze. ‘That’s a pretty underhand trick, Mr Bellocq,’ she told him as Ryan began tugging at her hand.

  ‘Please, call me Johann.’ He gave a tentative smile, anxious to be accepted.

  As they drove, he thought back to the first time he had seen her, standing on the empty railway platform with a map and a backpack, the boy’s hand held tightly in hers. Her floral dress was English and cheap, her trainers disproportionately large for her thin bare legs. After he had spoken to her, he’d realised that she was everything he had ever wanted in a woman. Down here, away from the mountain villages, there were only blank-eyed American tourists and pompous English couples in ridiculous straw hats. The permanent residents were elderly and sour, too rich to concern themselves with being pleasant. This one—the boy called her Madeline—was different. There was an innocence, a vulnerability about her. She had been hurt by a man and left without money or confidence. She would not sneer at him as others had done. The boy was the key—he needed male companionship; otherwise, he would get on her nerves and drive her away from the village.

  He had broken into the garage of a locked-up summer home in Rocquebrune and taken the Peugeot, carefully repairing the door behind him, knowing it would be weeks, possibly months, before anyone realised it was missing. The vacation villas of the wealthy provided him with everything he needed. From Marseilles to Monte Carlo there were thousands of poorly protected properties, and each fell under a different police jurisdiction. Half the time, the prefectures failed to maintain proper contact with one another. People travelled during the winter months, and the gendarmeries were short-staffed. It was the time of le chômage, the form of unemployment that kept this part of France empty for six months of the year. The perfect time to live a little beyond the law.

  He turned to smile at the boy in the passenger seat, sensing that he had already won the battle for her heart.

  ‘I don’t know, he seems like some kind of exile. From the way he speaks English I suppose he’s French, but there’s another accent. Did I tell you he has pale green eyes? Hold on, I’m lighting a cigarette.’ Madeline tucked the mobile under her right ear and dug for a throwaway lighter. Her one extravagance was a weekly phone call to her half sister in Northern Spain. The pair of them would have gone to visit, but Andrea had married a taciturn mechanic from Bilbao whose eyes had followed Madeline a little too closely when she last stayed there.

  ‘Well, he stands out, I suppose. There aren’t many people out on the streets down here, or in the houses by the look of it, and Jack’s settlement cheque hasn’t come through yet so I’m pretty much stuck here. Of course I look! I go to the bank in Beaulieu every other morning but there’s nothing.’ She checked to make sure that Ryan was not within listening distance. ‘Well, I don’t know, he’s a typical Mediterranean type I suppose, rather good-looking, a little younger than me, and I have the feeling he’s just as lonely. Far from home. I know, of course I’ve got Ryan, but I need adult company as well. No, I don’t know if I’d go out with him, he hasn’t asked me. It’s just that—I always seem to be running into him. It’s a small village, there aren’t that many places you can go, but even so. I hardly ever see the same people twice in London. It just seems a bit odd that we keep bumping into each other.’

  Perhaps he just fancies you, Andrea had suggested. You’re finally free to do what you want. Jack knows that if he comes near you again, the police will be on him. Maybe you should go on a date with this guy.

  The problem was, she had forgotten how to be single. Besides, she had Ryan to look after, and the boy was already getting stir-crazy. She stepped back from the balcony into the neat little room, hemmed between the sheer granite cliffs and the glittering green sea, and wished there was someone she could ask for advice. The afternoon at the Villa Rothschild had passed like a hazy waking dream. Johann had paid the admission fee for the three of them, and they had walked through the Japanese garden beyond the pink palazzina villa that straddled the cape, watching Ryan run after iridescent dragonflies.

  The exotic themed gardens—nine in all—that surrounded the former home of the Baroness Ephrussi de Rothschild were trained into the form of a vast land liner that crested the outcrop of land. To complete this illusion, they had once been crewed by twenty gardeners in white sailors’ outfits with red pompom hats. The place was absurd, vulgar, ostentatious and beautiful, filled with grottoes and pergolas, temples and waterfalls. Tall pines and cypress trees, ancient agaves and tunnels of bamboo fended off the glare of the low afternoon sun, hemming the cadenced emerald lawns in jewelled shadows that crossed the grass like a rising tide. The cicadas all ceased at the same moment, leaving only the sound of sea wind in the treetops.

  She had looked across at Johann and found him staring at the pulsing fountains, lost in thought. His eyes were deep and dark, set close to his brow, as serious as a statue’s. If he realised she was studying him, he gave her no sign of it. They walked beside each other as Ryan ran ahead, but the silence between them was far from easy. ‘Come.’ He smiled. ‘There is a gift shop. I will buy you some postcards of the beautiful gardens, for you to remember me whenever you look at them.’

  He knew she was watching, but was careful not to show emotion. It was important to make her understand that he was a gentleman, and that meant being in control. He had not felt like this around a woman before. Madeline was unlike any of the girls he knew from the villages. He saw things in her eyes none of the others had, strength and grace and acquiescence. She had made mistakes and overcome hardships, but there was nothing of his mother about her, only kindness.

  Most importantly, she was ready for him. He had never been close to anyone since he was a child, but he knew how to make himself appealing. It was as much about hiding bad traits as displaying good ones, and essentially, she could not learn of his predisposition towards breaking the law, which meant arranging their conversations in such a way that she would see nothing wrong.

  If he managed to keep up the subterfuge, he wondered if there was a chance that she might become more than just a conquest. Her pale skin had tanned down, drawing out freckles, even in the days since he
had been watching her. He had seen the full repertoire of her wardrobe now: one summer dress, a couple of T-shirts and a pair of faded jeans. He wanted to hold her, to reassure her that life could be good once again. In turn, he knew she would not disappoint him. He looked up into the sunswept sky and tasted salt, felt cool sea breezes in his hair. If he was to do this, to finally get close with a woman and share his life and his secrets, it meant hiding them for a while longer.

  He was not sophisticated when it came to the subtleties of expressing affection, but he had seen films and watched enough television to provide passable imitations of various emotional states. The next evening, he asked her back to his room for a drink, but when she made an excuse and shied away, he realised he had made a mistake. It was too soon to exclude the boy from a meeting. Persisting, he invited the pair of them to join him for a pizza—it was a Sunday night, and there was nowhere else open in the village—and she accepted, although she insisted on paying her share of the bill. She was determined not to owe him anything.

  The conversation was easier to control when Ryan was seated there between them. He could deflect her questions and ask something about the kid. The challenge would come, he knew, when they finally met à deux. He just wanted to do what was right, what she deserved.

  On Monday night it rained, and Mme Funes offered to take Ryan along with her sons to see an animated movie playing in English at the little side-street cinema in Beaulieu.

  It could have been the night for him to make his move, but he resisted. Instead, he took them both to Monte Carlo.

  9

  THAW

  The statue was of a man in a tall top hat with a bird on his arm.

  Given its spectacular setting, it was a surprisingly modest and slightly ridiculous monument. Flags covered with red and white harlequin diamonds hung from either side of Monte Carlo’s slender square, and parades of palmiers were swathed in tiny white lights. In the centre of the park, water cascaded with immaculate symmetry into stepped fountains. The arcing lawns were blade-perfect, the flower beds as plucked, scented and primped as nightclub hostesses. The view pointed in one direction between the palms frosted in luminescence, towards the icing-and-marzipan splendour of the casino, its base encrusted with polished Lagondas and Maseratis. Only the gawping tourists lowered the tone; untidy and loud in Mambo shorts and Nike socks, they snapped each other standing beside gull-wing sports cars. The tiny, densely built principality of Monaco stood between cliffs and sea, its secret money and tainted glamour lending it a faintly sinister air.