White Corridor

by Christopher Fowler

  ‘Just as well we don’t have to do anything except wait for the emergency services to come and dig us out, then,’ said May. ‘I suppose I might try one of your boiled sweets.’

  ‘You won’t like it,’ Bryant warned, watching as his partner popped it in his mouth and pulled a face.

  ‘What flavour is that meant to be?’ May asked, tentatively moving his tongue about.

  ‘It’s either gooseberry or Bovril. They’ve been in the same bag for the last five hours, so they probably taste of both. Put me out of my misery and call Janice, would you?’

  May speed-dialled the number and spoke to the sergeant. ‘Your hunch with the old lady paid off, Arthur,’ he said, after listening to her report. ‘They’ve found their witness. A seventeen-year-old West Indian kid called Owen Mills. They’re interviewing him now.’

  ‘What time was he sighted leaving the morgue corridor?’ asked Bryant.

  ‘Hang on. Janice, Arthur wants to know what time the boy was seen exiting from the corridor—nine-oh-five A.M.’

  ‘So unless Giles’s estimated timings are off, he didn’t kill Oswald. How did he get inside?’

  ‘Arthur wants to know how he got in,’ May asked, then turned to his partner. ‘He just pressed the buzzer.’

  ‘That means Finch admitted him. I wonder why he would have done that. Can you ask her—’

  ‘God, you ask her,’ said May, thrusting the mobile at him. ‘I can’t keep relaying the conversation.’

  ‘Janice, the boy wasn’t just loitering; he went there with a specific purpose. Ask him what it was. Act like you know why; you’re just seeking confirmation. No, I’ll wait.’ He rattled the sweet bag at May. ‘Want another one?’

  ‘No, thank you.’ He spat the brown-and-purple drop into a tissue.

  Bryant returned to the phone. ‘Just passing by? Well, he’s lying. He’d seen someone punch that code and repeated the action to speak to Oswald, who would never have let him in without a very good reason, so the lad must have thought about what he was going to say. Keep trying, I need to talk to John for a mo.’ He turned to May. ‘What’s the one thing that was different about the morgue this morning?’ he asked.

  ‘There was a fresh cadaver in it,’ said May as an idea dawned.

  ‘Precisely. I’m betting Mills knew the deceased, which was why he went to the morgue: to see the body. Why won’t he admit it? Because she was found dead in a shop doorway, and he’s frightened of being implicated.’

  ‘So he probably knows she died of an overdose, and that means he might even be the one who supplied or administered it.’

  ‘Possible, but not quite what I’m thinking. If he suspected he’d killed her, he’d be reluctant to walk into a Metropolitan Police compound. Janice: Renfield’s overdose case, you need to quiz Mills about his possible relationship with the girl. He may be able to confirm an ID. Okay, I’ll call you back.’

  Bryant replaced the mobile in its dashboard cradle and briskly rubbed his hands together. ‘I think perhaps this could work, crime investigation by remote control. I could do this from the comfort of my armchair at home and never have to visit any more crime scenes. It would be interesting if the boy’s appearance at the morgue had some direct influence on Oswald’s death, wouldn’t it? It might mean the dead girl held a secret worth killing for.’

  He picked up the mobile once more and redialled. ‘Janice, I know you don’t want to let the others out of your sight, but I think it’s important that Dan and Giles work together at Bayham Street. I think they’ve missed something. Yes, I do have an idea but I’m not going to tell you what it is, because this is your chance to prove yourselves. Get them to call me back.’ He grinned at May. ‘We’ll have this whole thing sorted before Princess Poison sticks her royal nose around the door, trust me.’

  May knew it was the worst possible declaration Bryant could make, because in his experience, a remark such as this usually heralded the arrival of the moment when everything started to go horribly wrong.

  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.

&
nbsp; ‘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.