White Corridor

by Christopher Fowler

  ‘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?’

  ‘You’re thinking he underwent a natural termination in the form of a cardiac arrest? It would make life easier to think so, but there’s no sign of cya
nosis, no muscle tension, no dilation of his pupils.’ Kershaw knew that once accident, natural death and suicide were ruled out, only homicide remained. It was a conclusion he would be reluctant to reach. ‘So what was it?’

  In the faintly humming room, beneath bleach-white lights, the three officers stood looking about themselves, and wondered. ‘He was argumentative and frail,’ said Longbright. ‘Suppose he fought with someone, and they lost their temper? All of us have wanted to thump him at one time or another. Some have more reason to do so than others.’

  Both she and Banbury turned to look at Giles Kershaw.

  15

  MATRIARCHY

  ‘I detest motorways,’ Bryant complained for the third time as he attempted to realign his overcoat buttons. ‘How on earth are you supposed to know where you get off?’

  ‘There are several absolutely enormous signposts along the way,’ May pointed out.

  Bryant squinted through the windscreen. ‘Did I miss Taunton?’

  ‘You slept through Taunton and Exeter,’ said May. ‘We’re about to come off the M5 onto the A38. Why this spiritualists’ convention has to take place in such a remote corner of the country is beyond me.’

  ‘It’s an area perfectly attuned to the mysteries of the netherworld,’ replied Bryant. ‘You clearly have no historical appreciation of the countryside.’ This was a bit rich coming from a man who only left central London to attend funerals, and complained bitterly every time he did so. ‘There’s not much traffic, is there?’

  ‘The journey’s taking longer than I thought. Sensible people have probably been listening to the weather forecast. The Devon and Cornwall Police have been issuing warnings to stay indoors for the past hour. Damn, I’ve missed a sign now,’ May rubbed his forehead wearily. ‘I was looking out for Buckfast and Ashburton.’

  Snow had been falling fast and hard for more than two hours, blotting the pallid sky and sheening the grey, half-empty road. Across the light woodland, a village spire flickered through falling flakes.

  ‘I’ll map-read for a while.’ Bryant dragged the ancient guide out of his overcoat and leafed through it without recourse to his reading glasses. ‘I knew you would eventually need me to get us there.’

  ‘I’ve been meaning to ask you for years, Arthur, but we so rarely get the chance to talk like this. Where did your fascination with the occult and alternative religions start? I mean, all that stuff you believe in, psychogeography, pagan cabals, astromancy, witchcraft and predestination, where did it all come from? You’re from sensible working-class East End stock. I’m sure your mother didn’t have time for such things.’

  ‘That’s the paradox,’ said Bryant, popping a Milk Bottle into his mouth and chewing pensively. ‘East-Enders are a prosaic but superstitious lot. My father would never bring a budgerigar into the house or put his boots on the bed, or take photographs of babies, or hand a knife to a friend, or touch a Welshman…’

  ‘Wait, what were those things supposed to signify?’

  ‘Well, all house birds except canaries were considered bad luck because sailors left them at home while they were at sea. If they didn’t return to claim them, the birds acted as reminders of lost husbands. Boots on a bed meant a death in the family, because that was how you chose the burial boots, by laying them out. Photographing babies was tempting fate when they were so likely to die before the age of two, and knives cut friendship.’

  ‘And not touching a Welshman?’

  ‘Oh, he just couldn’t stand them. Take this next exit.’

  ‘Are you sure? I thought we were supposed to stay on the motorway until it ended.’

  ‘You wanted to bypass Totnes.’

  ‘No, I said the A38 did that anyway.’

  Earlier they had glimpsed the pale ribbon of the sea, but now to their right was the bleak vastness of Dartmoor, where the frosted roads dwindled into twisting corridors of hedge, and coasting winds could buffet snow into mazelike drifts. The dark hills had faded beneath an unblemished whiteness of freshly ironed tablecloths. Fat snowflakes almost blotted out the slate sky.

  Bryant had been a good passenger for most of the journey by dint of the fact that he had been asleep, but now he was wide-eyed, aching and fidgety with boredom. ‘It was difficult not to seek alternative meanings in our house,’ he continued. ‘My devout grandmother lost all three of her sons in the Great War, and my aunts lost their children in the flu pandemic that followed. Then, just when we all seemed to be recovering in the intervening years, my uncles were drowned at sea and we were bombed out of the family house in Bethnal Green. Where did our devotion to God get us? If you ask such questions as a child and don’t receive any satisfactory answers, you start to look for other means of proof.’

  ‘So you attend spiritualists’ conventions. A bit outmoded isn’t it, all that table-rapping?’

  ‘Every street in London once housed a woman with so-called special powers, someone to whom the neighbours would turn for traditional remedies and health predictions,’ said Bryant, pensively sucking his sweet. ‘It was a strictly matriarchal network, of course. Mothers brought their babies around and wives would ask for advice on aches and pains, allergies, sexual health and marital problems. Often the wisdom they received was based on sound psychological sense, and the kind of conservative values that required everyone to remain in his or her rightful place before the advice could work. Many of these superstition-based remedies were rendered nonsensical by the changing times, but some are still with us. And of course other, more alternative services were also offered: the psychic comforting that followed bereavement, predictions and palliatives linked by the searching-out of signs and symbols. My grandmother used to read tea leaves for the local ladies, and told them she saw angels. The tradition went back hundreds of years, and only came to a proper end in the 1970s.’ Bryant paused for breath while his partner increased the speed of their windscreen wipers.

  ‘Nowadays, increased awareness of mental and physical health means that the spiritual urban mother-figure has all but disappeared in Western society. Meanwhile, technology has supposedly given us the means to gauge psychic energy. I don’t believe in the supernatural, just the untapped power of the mind. Look in the papers; we read about tiny women lifting cars off their loved ones and boat people surviving without water, and don’t think it odd. Extreme situations can make heroes of us all.’

  ‘Just because you trace your beliefs to your grandmother doesn’t mean you should still believe what she told the neighbourhood.’

  Bryant shrugged. ‘I have to. She was so often right, you see, and she insisted that I, too, had her gift. Which I believe to this day.’ He tapped his map. ‘Next left.’

  ‘I really don’t think we’re supposed to turn off yet,’ May anxiously pointed out.

  ‘The A38 takes us in a sort of horseshoe, but we can cut part of it off. We should be able to make up some lost time.’

  It was against May’s better judgement to take practical advice from his partner. Arthur’s kaleidoscopic manner of determining complex solutions to simple problems could prove disastrous. Perhaps because he wasn’t concentrating hard enough, perhaps because he was worried about the rapidly increasing intensity of the snowfall and reaching their hotel before night, he listened and acted accordingly, forgetting for the moment that Arthur was reading from a map printed before the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand.

  16

  INTERNECINE

  ‘There’s no blood,’ the detective sergeant remarked, searching the spot where Finch had fallen. ‘He must have given his skull a good crack.’

  ‘An autopsy will show if there’s been any cranial bruising or bleeding into his internal cavities.’ Kershaw sighed and rubbed his hand across his face. ‘If I didn’t know better, I’d think he did this to test me. Did Raymond tell you who Finch’s successor is to be?’

  ‘I really don’t think this a good time to have that conversation,’ said Longbright. ‘I’m appointing you in charge of this case,
Giles. You knew him well, and you’re familiar with his room.’

  ‘I’m technically a forensic scientist, not a coroner.’

  ‘I assume you’re fully trained in pathology, otherwise you wouldn’t have been applying for Finch’s job. I heard you received the highest pass-grade in your year.’

  ‘But I could be prejudicial to the findings,’ Kershaw warned. ‘In these circumstances, you’re meant to appoint an outsider.’

  ‘I’m not meant to do anything,’ Longbright informd him. ‘This is the PCU, not the Metropolitan Police, and you’re now in charge. Call Bimsley in and keep him on site until you’ve got some preliminary findings. I don’t want you left alone in here.’

  ‘I say, that’s a bit strong.’ Kershaw rose and flicked back his hair, affronted, his public school background drawn to the fore in any confrontation with someone he considered to be from an inferior class. ‘I’m assuming you’re appointing me because you trust me.’

  ‘Yes,’ Longbright admitted, ‘but I also sent you down to visit the morgue earlier, which makes you a potential suspect with a strong motive, placed at a possible crime scene at the estimated time of death.’

  For once, Kershaw was dumbfounded. ‘Then I can’t possibly be seen to be investigating my victim’s murder. I can’t find myself guilty.’

  ‘You might try taking Mr Bryant’s advice about thinking instinctively rather than putting all your trust in the circumstantial evidence. I want a report from you before we close tonight.’

  Returning to the PCU, the detective sergeant found DC Mangeshkar at work in the office she shared with Bimsley. ‘Why were you looking for Giles Kershaw this morning?’ she asked. The forensic scientist had informed her of Meera’s visit to the mortuary.

  ‘I was going to ask him if I could help out with the unidentified female they brought in. I didn’t think Finch would let me watch the postmortem; I just wanted to examine his case notes. I heard it had already gone down to Bayham Street, so I went there.’