White Corridor

by Christopher Fowler

  Turning to the window, Johann flinched from the jaundicing snowscape. It was a moment that could not come again; she threw her weight against the driver’s door as she unlocked it, hauling Ryan out with her. Madeline was on her feet and braced before he had managed to open the rear door. When he did so, ducking his head to come out, she slammed it back against his skull, catching him hard and crushing his unlowered right leg.

  With Ryan pressed against her jacket she turned to run, but her trainers refused to grip against the powdery drifts. She found herself floundering and sliding, her progress confounded by an elemental force that seemed intent on pushing them back. Ahead, the blanched channel of the road appeared and vanished. The tracks between the stalled vehicles had been obliterated. No-one was out on the road. Passengers and drivers alike were heeding the police broadcasts to remain inside their cars. Once more, she could expect no help.

  She tried to see in through the car windows. There was no time to stop and check each interior. She heard only the bluster of the gale and the thrum of engines.

  ‘This one,’ said Ryan suddenly, dragging her over to the passenger door of an abandoned white Vauxhall van, buried in the shadowed drift of a large Spar truck. He tried to turn the handle, but it was either locked or frozen solid. Pulling his mother back to the rear door, he tried again, but this time she helped him and it twisted open. Madeline climbed inside the icy dark vehicle and fell back while he attempted to close the door without dislodging its crust of snow. The door could not be locked, so she made him hold it shut between them, their breath blurring together in grey clouds as they gripped the handle. There was no rear window, and no way of knowing whether he would pass them by.

  All they could do now was hang on to the freezing metal and wait.

  23

  OBSERVATION

  ‘CCTV camera,’ said Banbury. ‘There was someone in the morgue corridor prior to the time period of Finch’s death. He was captured on the hard drive of the security system at Bayham Street. I need to check it out.’

  ‘You’re not to leave this building unaccompanied,’ said Longbright. ‘I have to come with you.’

  ‘I’ll need Giles. We work as a team. We’ll achieve more.’

  ‘Then bring him as well.’ The young forensic scientist’s impetuosity might have angered Finch, but proved useful when a quick eye was required at crime scenes. He and Banbury fired ideas and hypotheses that could reach conclusions others missed.

  ‘Getting a positive ID from a piece of blurry monochrome camera footage is going to be a challenge,’ warned Banbury as the trio dodged slush and traffic in Camden High Street. ‘But it’ll give us the exact second he appeared, and that’s a start point.’

  ‘Arthur says there’s an old lady who lives opposite the mortuary entrance. If we’re patient, she might get us a description.’

  ‘If someone else managed to enter that room, there should be evidence of a forced entry, and the lights would have been on,’ Kershaw was muttering. ‘Do you think the old lady can tell us that? And how do I really know if anything has been taken? Finch never showed anyone what he kept there. He certainly never catalogued it properly. None of his ledgers are up to date. He stored most of the important information in his mind. If someone was trying to get back at the unit, there are a lot of easier ways than breaking into a locked room and resealing it to appear as though it was never entered.’

  ‘Mr Bryant thinks we don’t need him to sort this out,’ said Longbright, but she did not pass on everything Bryant had told her. Watch Kershaw, he’d said. The boy is clever but lacks understanding. He needs to develop his emotional responses.

  She listened to Kershaw and Banbury arguing together as they headed into the Camden side streets, and wondered if it was possible that either of them could have caused the elderly pathologist’s death. Finch had been more frail than he pretended; it could have been an accident. At best, a lie. At worst, manslaughter or murder. The DS knew she could not afford to let either of them out of her sight.

  Back at the unit, Mangeshkar and Bimsley had taken Bryant’s advice literally, and were seated across from each other, trying to solve the puzzle of the medical examiner’s death by themselves.

  ‘We know how they think, sort of,’ Colin told his fellow DC. ‘We should be able to make a positive contribution. Apart from anything else, think how it would help our careers.’

  ‘Bryant would start by looking for some kind of supernatural influence,’ said Meera scornfully. ‘He probably thinks Finch was cursed by witches, or placed under an evil spell that made him punch himself in the heart.’

  ‘He just uses the process as part of what he calls “Open Thinking,” Meera. You don’t suppose he really believes all that stuff.’

  ‘I don’t? Then come and look at this.’ She grabbed Colin’s sleeve—his hand would have provided too much contact—and led him to Bryant’s room. ‘Does this look like the headquarters of London’s most advanced crime think tank to you?’

  She had a point; on the mantelpiece was Bryant’s chased-silver human skull, which had been smuggled out of Tibet by dissident monks and now oozed rank-smelling algae from its brainpan. Beside this, wax from a pair of wonky black candles belonging to a satanic cult had dripped over his copies of The East Anglia Witches: An Investigation Into the Nature of Evil, The 1645 Omens of the Apocalypse, Grow Your Own Hemp and The Beano Christmas Annual 1968. On the wall, a drawing of a fractal pentagram with a Scraperboard print of a goat’s head pinned at its centre was signed ‘To Arthur—Happy Winter Solstice, love, Maggie.’

  ‘You knew his methods were weird when you were transferred here,’ Bimsley reminded her. ‘You’ve also seen the results he gets.’

  ‘Yeah, he almost got John’s granddaughter thrown off a roof, didn’t he? They managed to hush that one up. He may get results, but only by putting others at risk. I’ve been based with dodgy units before, but at least I knew what I was dealing with on the problem housing estates. I was thinking of transferring out of here anyway, before this happened. The whole idea has been a mistake. Everyone in the unit is infected with the same weird mind-set. I was taught structure, responsibility, a chain of command; instead I’m surrounded by anarchists and nutters.’

  ‘You don’t really want to leave,’ Bimsley told her.

  ‘Really? You know that, do you?’

  ‘You’re still holding my sleeve.’ Bimsley grinned at her.

  ‘At least it’s not your hand.’

  ‘It is now.’ He pressed his slender fingers into her palm.

  ‘And you—you’re the worst of the lot!’ She threw his hand aside as if it were a tarantula and stalked from the room.

  ‘You’re just playing hard to get,’ he called after her. ‘I won’t wait forever!’

  Eleanor Newman’s room had been decorated by her husband in the late sixties, but he had died of a stroke just after laying the last piece of swirly amber carpet, and the place had never been touched again. Longbright felt completely at home in an apartment that resembled John Steed’s set from The Avengers. She had been sporting the bleached-blonde Ruth Ellis look for long enough now, and felt it was time to move forward a decade into the Emma era. As she sank back into a black leather Eames chair, Banbury showed Mrs Newman footage of the mortuary corridor from the hard drive, loaded onto his MP3 player.

  ‘Dear me, he looks like a drab grey duck,’ said Mrs Newman, rolling her wheelchair a little closer, ‘with the hoodie, the baseball cap and the baggy trackie bottoms, the universal dress code of the socially impoverished male. It’s not the lack of money, it’s the paucity of imagination I find so depressing.’ Although her face was densely lined, she still had the bone structure of a model and the posture of a dancer. She examined the images with a keen and careful eye. ‘I miss less from this window than your cameras.’

  ‘This is the footage shot from the far end of the corridor,’ Banbury explained. ‘The lighting isn’t very good but you might be able to tell if this was the boy you
saw. It’s like regular film footage, just on a little screen. Can you see?’

  ‘Is there any particular reason why you’re addressing me as if I’m a five-year-old? I was a camerawoman at Pinewood Studios for thirty years, young man. I may be old, but I probably have a better visual grasp than you. The only difference is that I can afford more memory than this piece of rubbish. Won’t they at least buy you a sixty-gig iPod?’ She gave the plastic screen a desultory flick with her nail. Kershaw suppressed a laugh as he caught Banbury’s disgruntled glare. ‘I wasn’t at the window when this boy entered the building. The nurse must have been running my bath. No details on his face, but he’s got rather a nice bum. It’s not the equipment you need to concentrate on; it’s the lighting. You say you work for Arthur?’

  ‘That’s right, ma’am.’

  ‘I met him in 1968, you know. What a year of riots and revolutions; it felt as if we were on the brink of a reborn world, a wonderful time to be young and idealistic. I tried to get him to go out with me. I suppose that was before either of you was born. Wait, run that back. Any chance of you enlarging the image without it pixelating too much?’ She felt for a pair of glasses on her side table and fixed them to her nose. ‘The badge on his sweatshirt, I recognise it. Camley Road Canoe Club. It’s a ten-minute walk from here along the canal. Funded by Camden Council to keep problem kids off the streets. Upload the shot onto my computer and I’ll print you off a screen-grab.’

  She indicated the mock-Gothic cupboard behind her. Banbury opened it and found himself looking at twenty grand’s worth of state-of-the-art kit. ‘I can’t get out to the world anymore,’ Mrs Newman explained, ‘so now the world comes to me.’

  The Camley Road Canoe Club was a trapezoid of stained concrete perched over the edge of the Regent’s Canal. It was surrounded by an estate of neat redbrick dolls’ houses with fake lead-light windows and white plastic drainpipes, the architectural equivalent of an Essex girls’ hen night. The clubhouse appeared to be shut, but a bored-looking girl with hoop earrings and a dangling fag divorced herself from two male friends and buzzed them in when she saw that they weren’t about to go away. ‘It’s shut,’ she told them. ‘Ain’t open ’til the weekend.’

  ‘Why’s that?’ asked Longbright, who had already noticed that she was wearing the badged club sweatshirt.

  The girl studied the sergeant’s perfectly coiffured Ruth Ellis hair in amazement. ‘Shuts early in the afternoons. Council cutbacks, innit.’

  ‘Do you work here?’

  ‘Why?’ The girl grouped herself defensively against the youths at her back.

  ‘We’re looking for this lad. Wondered if he’d been in recently.’

  ‘Don’t know him.’ The girl spat smoke, barely bothering to look. One of her friends, a skinny Indian boy with spiked hair and the posture of a boomerang, peered over her shoulder. ‘That’s Dizzee,’ he said firmly. ‘He don’t come here no more. Got kicked out, innit.’

  ‘Shut up, Pravin,’ the girl snapped, clearly not happy about sharing her knowledge with strangers.

  ‘But he was a member of the club.’

  ‘Yeah.’ A grudging admittance as she examined the end of her cigarette.

  ‘Then they’ll have a record of his address here.’ Banbury headed for the reception computer, addressing the Indian boy, who obviously wanted no trouble. ‘What’s Dizzee’s real name? Dylan?’

  ‘Mills,’ said the boy. ‘Owen Mills.’

  ‘Dylan Mills is the real name of the hip-hop singer Dizzee Rascal,’ Banbury explained to the mystified Longbright. ‘This kid is smart enough to wear a hood, but dumb enough to wear a badge.’ He seated himself behind the reception desk and typed for a minute. ‘Here you go, one-oh-five Disraeli House, that’s on the Crowndale Estate. Call it in.’

  Forty-five minutes later, a very nervous Owen Mills found himself sitting in the interview room at the Peculiar Crimes Unit.

  ‘Welcome to the PCU,’ said Longbright, offering a hospitable smile. ‘How would you like to help us solve a crime?’

  24

  REMOTE

  She should have felt safe, but knew she was still in danger, even though it seemed Johann had lost them. She sensed him out there, prowling along the straggling line of stalled vans, grocery trucks and half-buried cars. She wondered how long their hiding place would remain safe. The gale had whipped the snow to such a blinding intensity that he was probably in danger of losing his bearings. She had bruised his leg and forehead, but were his injuries and the adverse weather conditions enough to protect them?

  Johann felt no pain in the subzero temperature as he limped beside the traffic. Some vehicles had come to a stop after sliding from the icy camber of the road into the gorse and hawthorn, and proved impossible to climb around. Some had been abandoned to elemental forces, and were being mutated into molten white shapes. Others showed vague dark figures huddled within.

  He had not come dressed for this kind of weather; England was supposed to enjoy mild winters, not suffer arctic conditions. He felt as though everything was starting to slip from his control. In France he had enjoyed freedom to do what he pleased, but now a real threat hung over him. He had managed to outwit the local police before, but if he was captured here, where police technology could identify him in an instant, his past would count against him. It was no longer about the passport she had stolen; it was about his love for Madeline. If he could win her back and save her from herself, he knew she would never betray him. If he failed—well, she was English, and would do the right thing by going to the police to make sure he was locked away.

  The boy was her weak spot, and she knew it. Wherever Ryan hid, she would always be close by, somewhere here in the quarter-mile column of blocked traffic, slowly being obliterated by the narrowing white valley, surrounded by treacherous moors. He swore under his breath, shaking his head in bitter laughter as he trudged through the thickening drifts, his trainers soaked, his leg starting to ache, his feet wet and numb. What a fix, what an idiot. This is what happens when you let a woman in.

  He knew that if he didn’t protect himself from the blizzard, he would gradually succumb and freeze to death. In the mountain schools they taught you all about subacute hypothermia, and how your metabolism got damaged if your body temperature fell below thirty-two degrees centigrade. It was important to keep checking for warning signs: rapid breathing, confusion, forgetfulness, blue fingers, swallowing difficulty, unsteadiness, the need to urinate. He had been in snowstorms far worse than this, but never without shelter or the right clothes. Nothing looked familiar. The cars had become organic and mysterious, dying creatures whose steel carapaces were rimed with ice. He turned around and tried to shield the snow from his eyes. That was when he spotted Danny’s frosted-over Spar truck, twisted across the road at a perilous angle. He made his way back in the direction of his ride and hammered on the passenger window.

  Danny leaned across and grinned, flicking open the door. ‘Blimey, you picked a good evening to go for a walk, didn’t cha?’

  ‘I can’t find my friend.’ Johann pulled himself into the warm cockpit of the cab and stamped snow from his numb feet.

  ‘Thought you said she was your wife. Course, that’s your business. Nobody’s going anywhere in this, mate. You’re better off in here with me. There’s a generator in the back, and cans of spare petrol, loads of grub. I do this trip every winter, and I’ve been caught out before. The wind comes off the moor and builds drifts across the road. Never seen it this bad, though.’

  ‘You think everyone is still here?’

  ‘What can they do but stay put? The nearest village is six miles away, and there are rivers and ponds all over the place. You wouldn’t want to fall into one tonight. I spoke to my missus in Guildford, and she says it’s nearly as bad there. Biggest temperature drop ever recorded in a single day, she reckons.’

  ‘Then we must wait together, where we are safe,’ said Johann, as he began to regain the sensation in his limbs.

  ‘Prin
cess Beatrice of Connaught?’ Bryant pulled a horrified face. ‘How typical of Faraday to think that sucking up to a minor royal is more important than tackling a murder investigation.’

  ‘This is Kasavian’s doing,’ said May. ‘Raymond Land has a hold over him that prevents him from personally closing the unit—’

  ‘—because he knows about the minister’s affair with a married woman—’

  ‘Exactly, so Kasavian is craftily getting someone else to provide the ammunition for him while we’re stranded here.’

  ‘Can’t you turn the heater up? My nose is turning blue.’

  ‘I’m rationing our energy. Those veal-and-egg pies you ate should keep you warm for a few hours. I don’t know where you put it all. Besides, you’ve got plenty of blankets.’ May plugged his phone charger into the cigarette lighter. ‘I wonder how they’re getting on at the PCU.’

  ‘I need to be there,’ muttered Bryant. ‘I’ve failed poor old Oswald. I can’t be of any use stuck in a snowdrift without my walking stick. Ironic, isn’t it? My greatest field of expertise is completely wasted here. There’s nothing I don’t know about the streets of London. I know where the iron from St Paul’s railings came from, and who haunts the Rose and Crown in Old Park Lane, and what went on in the Man-Killing Club of St Clement Danes and the Whores’ Club of the Shakespeare’s Head Inn, and how to play Mornington Crescent without cheating, and why there was a London craze for electrifying yourself in the mid-eighteenth century, but I know absolutely nothing about the countryside. Here I’m simply a very, very old fish out of water. If you opened that car door right now and shoved me out, I’d simply lie there and die in the snow. I don’t know how to make a bivouac out of curlews’ nests or how to tell whether sheep have got conjunctivitis. I can remember only one old country saw, and that’s relating to the sighting of one-legged ducks: Mallard with less than two good feet, rainy day and then some sleet. I can’t look after myself in the open air. In fact, the very term “open air” is anathema to me. I come from a city of closed air.’