White Corridor

by Christopher Fowler

  ‘So, somewhere in that history there must be records revealing his movements, and we can provide the identities he adopted. What’s the point of having satellite tracking systems if they can’t keep tabs on people like him? I mean, it’s little use knowing where he’s been. We need to know what’s making him strike now. If we understand what drives him, perhaps we can stop him. Luckily, we have an expert right here who may be able to help us.’

  May saw how his partner’s mind was working. ‘Don’t tell me. Your white witch; she’ll know all about satanic groups.’

  ‘Exactly. I have to go and talk with her.’

  ‘No, let me do it,’ said May. ‘You can’t take any more cold. Stay here in the warm with Madeline and the boy. Just tell me what you want to ask her.’

  ‘He’s followed Mrs Gilby here for two reasons: He wants what she took from him, and he’s developed an obsession with her. She says he believes that only she can redeem him. He can give the authorities the slip every time he changes identity, but if they get a fix on him he’s sunk. She has the passport of the last man he killed, and he needs it back. He might try to contact other branches of this Société Du Diable, and use their members in some way. Ask Maggie if they also operate from somewhere in the UK. Find out if they’ve heard from him, and warn them that he’s dangerous. These groups are notoriously private. Contrary to what the newspapers would have us believe, they rarely try to recruit innocent members of the public. But they must be made to inform us if he gets in touch. It would be helpful to know exactly what it is they believe in, and if he’s operating in accordance with their doctrines.’

  After May had plunged off into the diamond drifts once more, Bryant called the Plymouth Emergency Services and tracked down their Severe Weather supervisor, who informed him that they had abandoned the use of helicopters and were still working hard to clear the railway tracks. The first train was setting off in a few minutes, and would reach them in just over an hour.

  Bryant was both pleased and dismayed by the news. He looked forward to being able to feel his extremities again, but knew that a train might bring those who would take the case away from him. He sat back and thought about Johann Bellocq’s missing passport, and the young woman who had hidden it. Bellocq needed his past identities in order to stay free, but he also saw a chance of salvation in Madeline. Why, though? What was he planning to do once he had found her again?

  She feared him because she needed to protect her son, but there was some other reason why he had tracked her all the way to another country. Bryant understood from the few textbooks he had read on the subject that most serial murderers operated within a tight radius of their homes. Something wasn’t making sense.

  The detective’s ears, nose, feet and brain were frozen. His neural impulses had slowed until they were as faint as fogbound harbour lights. Breathing on the windscreen, he drew lines in the condensation, as if trying to trace the connections in his mind. It was too easy not to think.

  The two investigations, one far away, one close at hand, both immediate and pressing, overlapped each other in his head like architectural drawings on tracing paper. The icy air felt like the long-expected touch of death, destroying his cells and removing his senses. He considered the story of Johann’s childhood, recounted by the woman he hunted. Johann continued to brutalise because he had been able to kill his mother without remorse. He had even waited until his grandfather’s death to act.

  He had been raised in a land of devout Catholics, but had finally chosen a far stranger path to God. Had his mother been so strict that she had drawn out a monster from within her child? In his experience, even those who renounced the confines of a constricting religion never truly forgot the primal fears they developed as children. How did Bellocq reconcile those terrors with his embrace of the darkness?

  How could he find the permission to kill within himself?

  Why would he track a young woman and her son all the way to another country, just to protect his last identity, when he could surely commit the same crime and gain a new persona, find a new redeemer? Was there any point in attempting to even understand what went on in his mind?

  Yes, because if you understand it, thought Bryant, you understand the man. And then you own the key to catching him. An alarm bell rang in his head, faint and persistent. The driver of the van with whom he had hitched a ride still had his own passport tucked inside his jacket. Why had Johann not taken it and simply started again? Why did he need the one she had stolen from him?

  Because that’s not why he followed her here, Bryant decided. The passport has nothing to do with it. Only Madeline Gilby thinks it does. In that case, he just wants the photographs back, even though by the sound of it they won’t directly incriminate him. They’re pieces of circumstantial evidence that might place him at the scenes of the crimes, but they also have personal significance to him; that’s why he took them, and why he needs to retain them.

  Bryant turned to the rear of the van and saw that mother and son were curled in the shadowed storage compartment, asleep beneath the moulting goatskin rug he had set aside for the Eden scene.

  When his mobile rang, he tried to stifle the sound, so as not to wake them.

  ‘Arthur, this is weird,’ said May. ‘I’m with Maggie right now, and she says that Le Société Du Diable isn’t a meeting group at all. It’s a cybersite.’

  ‘You mean it only exists on the interweb thingie?’

  ‘That’s right. It’s just a forum used by teenaged Goths and lapsed Catholics to moan about their lives and discuss death-metal music; it’s not a proper satanic site at all. She’s most disparaging about such organisations.’

  ‘I don’t understand. Why would he have bothered to lie to Mrs Gilby? Besides, he’s not a lapsed Catholic. According to her, he’s such a believer that he thinks God watches him whenever there’s a clear sky. I don’t like the sound of this, John; something is not right about the man’s life. I’m starting to think we’ve been mightily had.’

  ‘I’m coming back,’ said his partner. ‘My battery’s nearly dead, so I’ll get off the line. Don’t do anything reckless.’

  ‘I need to go and find the envelope Mrs Gilby took from her attacker. We have to expose him. Is there any way of getting its contents transmitted?’

  ‘I can upload digital shots and send them back to the unit in seconds, but what if you have an accident out there? Wait in the vehicle and I’ll collect it.’

  ‘She put it under the front passenger-side wheel arch of her rented blue Toyota,’ Bryant explained. ‘It’s about ten cars in front of us, around the curve.’

  ‘I’ll go after it now.’

  May bade farewell to Maggie and her group, and set off along the road until he reached the bend, where it banked steeply. The snow had started to fall heavily once more, and was rapidly obscuring the way ahead. If Johann thinks God is watching him, he could strike whenever the clouds hide him from view, thought May. That’s now.

  A new sense of urgency drove him on, but the route had scabbed over with gem-hard ice, and the going was difficult. When he heard the rumble, he thought that a train must have finally managed to break through, but upon looking up at the side of the hill he saw what appeared to be rocks disappearing in the great plateau of white smoke.

  A plain of snow the size of a football pitch was slowly gaining momentum. It gathered speed as it slid down towards the road, bursting between the trees and spraying over the bushes. When it hit the valley of cars, it raised and shoved them gently, silently, to the far bank, burying several completely. May fought to keep his footing, but the avalanche was fracturing the ground in a pattern that reminded him of the partition of ice floes, shaking and finally tipping him over onto his back.

  As he clambered back to his feet, May saw that the other half of the traffic corridor had been cut off and that he was completely separated from Bryant, without any way of reaching him.

  42

  CULPABILITY

  Giles Kershaw agree
d to join Longbright for the interview. She had been planning to take Banbury in with her, as he was the burliest officer they had apart from Bimsley, but no-one knew where the detective constable was. The pair of them peered through the window before they went in.

  Sergeant Renfield was squirming about on an orange plastic chair as if he had been tethered there. He was so furious that he had changed colour. His ears were white, his cheeks were a deep crimson, his nose almost blue. If his face had been rounder he would have looked like an archery target. He had once told Longbright that the Met was run like a doctors’ surgery and the unit behaved like a bunch of alternative therapists, and his detention today confirmed this belief. He had always fancied his chances with the detective sergeant, but now he was displaying the bitterness of a man who knew that he had been irrevocably rejected.

  ‘What the hell do you think you’re doing, bringing me in here?’ He spat the words at her as she entered.

  ‘I wanted to keep this more informal, but the heater’s broken in my room,’ she told him. ‘And it’s less public in here.’

  ‘You’ve lost the bloody plot, Longbright. I knew you lot were hopeless without your bosses around, but this is a bloody joke.’

  ‘No joke,’ said Janice. ‘You went back to the mortuary to see Oswald, didn’t you?’ She knew she was chancing her arm with this supposition, but needed to provoke a reaction. If he decided to call her bluff and demand evidence, she was lost.

  ‘I didn’t have much of a choice, did I? Finch phoned me and accused me of screwing up. He told me he’d put it in the report if I didn’t come over and sort it out at once.’

  ‘So you went back to Bayham Street and had it out with him.’

  ‘Finch hadn’t been out in the field for years; he had no idea what it’s like on the streets: the chavs, the drunks, the endless aggression. The Camden junkies are worse than their dealers, because they’re either whining excuses or angling for a fix, by which time they’re little more than animals. I’d seen that girlie on the street before, or if it wasn’t her it was someone damned well like her.’ Renfield was eager to explain his side of the story. ‘Anyone who tells you that rehabilitation works is a liar. They’ll swear to God they’re clean, and you can lift the gear out of their pockets while they’re talking to you. No matter what they say, you know you’ll see them again, shooting up in a toilet or a shop doorway. That’s what we did when we picked up the girl; we dealt with the situation.’

  ‘Then why did Finch call you back in?’ asked Longbright.

  ‘Listen, I’d been on duty all night, and she looked like another dead junkie.’ Renfield’s body language proclaimed him guilty without the need to speak.

  ‘You bypassed the hospital and sent her straight to the morgue, didn’t you?’ said Longbright. ‘That’s why you went yourself. You didn’t call the paramedics.’

  ‘I saved everyone a docket. You think you have the monopoly on unorthodox procedure? If it improves the situation for all parties concerned, do it without thinking twice. Bryant himself told me that. Finch was a doctor, he could have signed her off easy enough, but instead he had to make life difficult for everyone. My boys were coming to the end of a long shift; they were knackered.’

  ‘What did Finch tell you about Lilith Starr?’ asked Longbright.

  ‘He said the girl was in ana—ana—’ Renfield stuttered.

  ‘Anaphylactic shock?’ asked Kershaw.

  ‘Yeah, that’s it.’

  ‘It’s an extreme allergic reaction to a particular substance,’ the young forensic scientist told Longbright. ‘Her immune system would already have been compromised because she was a junkie. Under anaphylaxis, the system decides that some alien substance poses a danger, and overreacts by creating huge quantities of the antibody immunoglobulin E. The body releases an excess amount of histamine and the throat closes up, making it difficult to breathe.’

  ‘What happens after that?’ asked Longbright.

  ‘All sorts of problems can occur,’ said Kershaw, ‘but mainly, immunoglobulin E expands blood vessels, causing a drop in blood pressure, which leads to loss of consciousness.’ As if to avoid letting Renfield off the hook, he added, ‘There are usually visible signs a paramedic would immediately notice. Swelling and rashes on the skin, or on the lips and tongue if it was something ingested orally.’

  ‘Even Finch didn’t know what had set her off,’ snapped Renfield. ‘It’s a mistake anyone could have made. He said it could have been any number of things.’

  ‘That’s right. Nuts, drugs like morphine or X-ray dye, dental painkillers, something in the dope she’d taken,’ Kershaw confirmed.

  ‘Finch’s competence in diagnosing her isn’t the matter at hand,’ said Longbright. ‘I want to know whether he made you so angry that you attacked him.’

  ‘Of course not. God, he’d made me angry often enough in the past. You think I couldn’t take it from him? He had a go at me, and I left.’

  ‘Then why didn’t you tell us when we first talked?’ Longbright demanded.

  ‘Because he and his lads dropped off a woman at a morgue who wasn’t dead,’ said Kershaw disgustedly. ‘He didn’t turn up at Bayham Street with a paramedic, just one of his constables. When they’d found her in the doorway, her body was cold to the touch and showing signs of cyanosis. They couldn’t find a pulse, so they made an assumption, when a hospital might have saved her life.’

  ‘It wasn’t you who found the body, was it?’ said Longbright. Renfield was too experienced to have made such a mistake.

  ‘My PC is nineteen years old, Longbright. The kid’s in shock; it’s his second week on the beat. She would have died anyway, if not this week then the next. Finch didn’t care about that. It was my call, but he told me he was going to report the boy.’ Renfield looked miserable. ‘He never let anything go. That’s why he wouldn’t support your promotion, Kershaw. He didn’t trust you not to make the same kind of mistakes.’

  ‘So before you left the mortuary, you waited until his back was turned, then tore the pages out of his report and destroyed them.’

  Renfield shook his head violently. ‘No, I never saw any report. I didn’t think he’d had time to write it up, and wouldn’t have touched it if he had.’

  Longbright left the interview room in a bad mood. Whatever else Renfield was, he wasn’t a liar. She went to Bryant’s desk and sat down behind it, rubbing her eyes, hoping that being in his tobacco-stained room would somehow provide her with inspiration. On the chart before her was the time line of Finch’s final hours. All the question marks and gaps she had left were now filled in, and they were no closer to the truth.

  She checked the clock on the wall: two forty-five P.M. Two and a quarter hours left before the Princess turned up with her entourage to find the staff under arrest and the place in a shambles. She could almost see Kasavian and Faraday rubbing their hands with glee.

  There was still one loose lead to tie up. The missing boy, Lilith’s former lover, Samuel. She was considering the problem when Kershaw knocked on her door and stuck his head through. ‘Can I let Renfield go, Janice? He’s kicking up a fuss.’

  ‘Apply the same restrictions I’ve applied to everybody else, then get back to the morgue. I want you to test out something for me. It’s a ridiculous idea, but it’s the only one left. This is my last shot before we’re out of time.’

  ‘What do you want me to do?’

  ‘Assume Finch was in pain, on medication, not thinking clearly. He knew he wouldn’t live to enjoy his retirement. I want you to see if it’s at all possible…’ She wondered if she could even bring herself to say the words. Kershaw waited obediently. ‘Could it have started with an accident? Knowing that he was dying and contemplating suicide, could he have pulled the ultimate practical joke on his old nemesis? When the fan blade came loose and fell on him, you don’t think he could have decided to make it look like murder, just to get the most bitter last laugh of all on Arthur?’

  43

  IN PLAIN
SIGHT

  Longbright looked around at Arthur Bryant’s memorabilia. On the opposite wall was a sampler stitched in gratitude by the Oregon Ladies’ Sewing Bee after he had solved the Chemeketa Rain Devil case for them in 1963. It read The Greatest Secrets Are Hidden in Plain Sight. It was a favourite sentiment of Bryant’s. What was hidden in plain sight here?

  She missed him looking over her shoulder, discoursing on any bizarre subject that took his fancy. She missed the stagnant reek of his pipe, his furtive watering of the sickly marijuana plant beneath his desk, the tottering stacks of mouldy books he dumped on her, the impossible requests, the childlike innocence in his eyes whenever she suspected him. You’d know what to look for, she thought. You’ve shown us how a thousand times over. Why can’t I remember what to do now?

  She studied the books on the shelves, trying to imagine Bryant in the room, arguing with John about methodology. He’d be stepping off on a tangent, refusing to follow the obvious routes of detection, leaving the doorstepping and data-gathering to others while he blew the dust from volumes of ancient myth and folklore. It was amazing how he managed to reach accurate conclusions by examining the case from the wrong end, and no matter how often he explained the process to her, it still didn’t make sense. She read the spines on the opposite shelves: Victorian Water Closets: A Social History, Sumerian Religious Beliefs & Legends, Colonic Exercises for Asthmatics, The Adventures of Captain Marvel, Mend Your Own Pipes, The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe, Pornography and Paganism, Courtship Rituals of Papua New Guinea, Code-Breaking in Braille. How on earth could any of these help?

  Lilith Starr had suffered an allergic reaction to something other than the chemicals in the recreational drugs she had taken, but what? Longbright took down A History of Vivisection and idly thumbed through it. Samuel, Lilith’s former boyfriend, had disappeared, but Owen Mills was still around. Even though he wasn’t with her when she died, he was still the only person who could shed some light on her condition. She decided to give him one last try, but found that his mobile was switched through to voice mail.