by Ivo Stourton
“I want to speak to him as soon as I’ve seen the body.”
She nodded. “Of course. One would hope that given his confession, you and your men could wrap up your investigations overnight. Charles will be able to get hold of me if there’s anything further you need. In the meantime I trust you will encourage your team to respect the parameters laid out in this evening’s meeting. Your Superintendent has requested a full report from me on your departure.”
She put out her hand to him, and he shook it. Her skin was very pale in the gloaming. Oates turned as he left the room, and watched her collecting her notes from the desk at the back. She paused, her features still with thought. In that moment she appeared to him like a white marble statue of a pagan god, dredged from the earth, cleaned, restored and put on gleaming display in a modernist museum.
She was layered with time – on the surface, a freshness borne of recent attention. Beneath that, an aged thing who had absorbed more than a natural lifetime of human experience, who had watched a century of history accrue from behind her impassive beauty. Underneath it all, as with the ancient gods, there was a bedrock layer that predated her creation, a force of nature to which she had given a human face. As Oates turned to walk down the stairs after Charles, he realised he did not have the requisite learning to reference the symbols in her neat dress and well-groomed hands, and he wondered what it was she embodied for those who worshipped her: wisdom, hunting, lust or war.
CHARLES WALKED AHEAD of him down the stairs, and he managed to restrain himself from talking to Oates until the two of them had passed through the narrow doorway into the great court. Supper was over, and the students were dispersing in twos and threes from the dining hall. The long evening was drawing in, and lights glowed in the high Victorian Gothic windows of the chapel, the bulbs of chandeliers showing warmly through stained glass.
In the fresh air with Charles’s giggly curiosity beside him, Oates felt again like a schoolboy who had emerged unscathed from the headmaster’s office after an interview about some crime the two of them had committed together. He knew he would have to work hard to retain his suspicion of the ebullient public relations officer, and so when Charles asked him how fierce the old woman had been he remained non-committal. Charles however had correctly judged the atmosphere when he put his head around the door, and with his prior knowledge of Miranda he seemed to intuit exactly the nature of their exchange.
“She can be quite evangelical about what we do here. Bloody hard work for a PR man like myself, to keep the wheels on when the boss goes all starry-eyed. Still, never a dull day. And she’s got more of a personal interest.”
“What’s that?”
“Well, in perfecting the Treatment, obviously.” Charles pulled his plump cheeks back in a parody of Miranda’s youthful skin.
“She suffers from this… Tithonus Effect?”
“She’s never talked about it. You’ve met her, she never talks about anything outside of her work. But I would have thought so, wouldn’t you?”
“How old is she?”
“Oh, DCI Oates! You should know better than to ask that of a lady! But I should say it’s a safe bet she was bent over her textbooks in these very halls when you and I were mere glimmers in our fathers’ eyes, and peering into the human soul whilst we were trying to figure out what the big and the little hand do.”
As they passed under the old gatehouse that housed the school reception, Oates found himself marvelling once again at the sheer size of the spa. A further street opened out beyond, with a couple of students milling around in the light of the streetlamps. Another groundsman was positioned just outside the gate. He had one of the long mechanical arms which council cleaners use to retrieve rubbish from hedgerows, and he was using it to pick up a dead swallow from the gutter. Oates had seen three of the groundskeepers now, and they all had the same bearing, the indelible imprint of a life spent in the military.
They crossed the road, and just before they entered a doorway on the other side, Charles put a hand up in front of Oates’s chest, bringing him to a halt. He cocked his head and grimaced.
“Do you hear that?”
Oates listened. From a window somewhere he could hear music. It had the unmistakable sound quality of a record-player, speakers turned outwards on the summer night. He didn’t recognise the song, a seventies lounge-ballad. A man’s warbling voice mounted a scale whilst a female chorus ladelled sugar into the backing vocals.
“What is it?”
“It’s the soundtrack to my working life. What you can hear is Demis Roussos, with The Demis Roussos Phenomenon, the only EP to climb to the top of the UK hit parade in 1976. Demis spent just one week at number one, but after that we’ll have Kiki Dee and Elton John demanding we don’t do anything untoward to their hearts, then ABBA will be resurrected to inform us of the age and temperament of the Dancing Queen. When we were still at the planning stage for life inside St Margaret’s I begged Miranda to bring forward the freeze date by just a couple of months so we could have The Clash and The Ramones, but she thought them redolent of a social upheaval that might disrupt the therapeutic atmosphere. Demis may only have lasted from the 17th to the 24th July in the real world, but here he plays on a loop for a week every new term. You wouldn’t believe the royalties we pay his estate. It’s like working behind the counter of a shop at Christmas for all eternity, with Let it Snow playing on repeat. If it turns out this Ali chap went on a rampage, and you’re short a motive, my money’s on Demis.”
“I’ll bear it in mind,” Oates said.
They entered a second court, a small functional space compared to the grand open vistas of the main body of the school, where the students had their accommodation in a mix of Victorian brickwork and sixties concrete and glass. Charles explained that each guest had their own room. Outside one of the staircases was a rope of old-fashioned blue police tape, and a young officer was chatting to a couple of the students who had gathered there.
All the time, Charles kept up his friendly patter, and Oates continued to resist the insinuation of his camaraderie. Charles rebounded from each rebuff with the clumsy enthusiasm of a teenage suitor. As Oates walked past the stout dormitory walls, the spa felt like a fairytale palace – the cold queen, her oafish jester, and her personal army of ex-special forces in blue overalls.
OATES LEFT CHARLES to supervise the conversation between the young policeman on guard outside the stairwell and the small crowd of students. The first flight of stairs was wide, but the second flight was half a ladder, a skinny little passage between the walls. He could smell death about half way up, the heavy metallic odour of spilt blood. By the time he arrived in the room, the SOCOs had already set up the Oracle and taken their readings.
The tripod, with its various sensors and lenses hanging like mechanical fruit from its limbs, stood a few feet from the body. Tiny sound waves probed the wounds, and the cameras fed the pattern of the blood spatter back into the program. The thermometers registered the ambient temperature of the room and of the corpse. Further instruments probed the stiffening of the joints, and the degree to which the blood had settled in the lower veins and arteries. When all the data had been stored and processed Oates and his fellow officers gathered around the screen to watch the preliminary analysis. In the simulation the bright orange figure of the assailant entered the picture from the left of the screen, and brought the knife down on Prudence Egwu.
The murder weapon, which lay now on the floor beside the dresser, was a distinctive African knife with a bone handle. As the scene played out, the computer registered the vital statistics of the attacker – height, six foot. Weight, 90 kilos. Probability male, eighty-six per cent. Probability age range eighteen–thirty-five, sixty per cent. Oates frowned in irritation at the data lines. He had specifically told the SOCOs to switch off the probability metrics, because it was bloody obvious that most violent crime was committed by young men, but there was a homicidal old lady or two in the world, and seeing the odds in black a
nd white made it harder to spot her.
On the screen Prudence raised his forearm, and the first blow sheered to the bones in his wrist, partially severing the hand. Oates had only to look up to see the fan of blood pumped from the wrist across the neat cream walls of the room. The Oracle emitted the victim’s facsimile scream, together with the distance at which it would likely have been audible, through the walls and on the ground below. The attacker advanced, stabbing over and over again, raising the knife almost above his head each time and bringing it down into Prudence’s chest. It was those long arching blows and retractions that had thrown spatters across the ceiling. He kept striking after the victim had fallen to the floor, the assault continuing long after death. The timer running in the corner of the screen showed three am the previous night.
“Is that thing calibrated to the time in here, or the time outside?”
“In here. There’s no other way to fix it, otherwise it gets upset about the temperature.” The technician patted fondly at the steel legs of the Oracle.
“So that’s, what… about seven pm outside of Wonderland?”
“Yeah. Maybe.”
“Figure it out. Any fingerprints, DNA?”
Bhupinder shook his head. “We’ve run one sweep. We’ll do another just to be sure, but I’d guess what little we’ve found will turn out to be the victim’s. It’s weird, after an attack like that, not to leave anything behind. Someone must have done some cleaning up. I just knew this would be a long one.” He gazed morosely at the floor, toeing the edge of a pool of blood with his plastic slipper.
“Chin up. It’ll all be over by Christmas,” Oates said, and his subordinate grinned ruefully. “Can someone please find me a pack of cigarettes I can smoke in this place?”
He walked over to the bed, where a large photo album lay on the bloody covers. He lifted it up in his gloved hands, and turned through the pages. The first few shots of the family Egwu were truly ancient, pictures of a large unsmiling African holding a spear and wearing a crown of bones and feathers with several woman clustered around him on his ornamented chair. The brown sepia tones of the early portraits gave way to the bleached colours of nineteen seventies snaps, as the crown, frown and feathers gave way to sharp suits, afros and smiles in the later generations of Egwu men. By the time the camera had travelled all the way to the early twenty-first century, the pictures had the flat quality of print-outs from digital, and the formal portraits had disappeared entirely in favour of graduation and wedding snaps. There was even one of Prudence Egwu as a young man on safari with a smiling African guide.
Oates flicked through the last of the snaps, and was about to toss the book back down on the bed when he noticed one blank page. A picture had been removed. It had a place and date written underneath it in a neat hand: Prudence and Capability, my two boys! London, Chelsea, September 2005. Oates looked at the space, the white shadow cast by a little mystery.
“Ah! Another oversight.”
Oates was annoyed to find the PR man leaning over his shoulder. He was wearing plastic slippers, latex gloves and a hairnet like the other men in the room.
“Who the hell let you in here?”
“One of your chaps said you had done your reconstruction thingy – amazing machine! – and I might come in. He’s a City fan apparently but I won’t damn a man for that.” Charles grinned broadly, and scooped the album from Oates’s hands. “This should really have been checked and removed at induction.”
“Someone got one photo,” Oates said, and indicated the missing picture. “Do you know where this is?”
“Well, not personally, no. But someone in our welcome team undoubtedly will. We confiscate any little anachronisms the guests might try to bring in and keep them safe for the duration of their stay. This picture is dated after the freeze date, so they will have taken it. They should have taken the whole album. Prudence and Capability… dear me, I would have sued my parents.”
“I want to know if your people have that photo.”
“Of course, Inspector! Your wish is my command and all that.”
“That knife, you let the guests bring weapons into the spa with them?”
“Only period appropriate ones.”
Oates took a last look around the room, trying not to be rattled by his companion’s impermeable good humour. He asked him to wait outside whilst he completed his inspection of the crime scene, and Charles left with a salute. Prudence Egwu had had time to unpack. His clothes hung in the wardrobe, sweatshirts and jeans in the style of over fifty years before.
His packing case, an unusual item bound in the skin of some kind of reptile with his initials stamped on it in gold, was stashed neatly at the end of his bed. He had been looking at the photograph album before the arrival of his assailant – the light blood misting on the cover indicated it had been lying on the bed when the first blow was struck, and there was a corresponding blood-free patch on the coverlet.
He had also been drinking whisky, though not a lot. A seventy year old Islay was stoppered on the sideboard. It would have been a recent vintage, by the strange logic of St Margaret’s. A single glass, still half way full, stood undisturbed on the lid of the trunk. Oates looked at it, and wondered if the stuff tasted worse for being stripped of its years. It was the kind of booze a man shared, if only to impress. Had Prudence Egwu expected visitors? He came back onto the tiny landing to find Bhupinder flicking the underside of his throat.
“We’re never going to get him down these stairs,” Bhupinder said.
“He’s a big bugger. Still you know what they say. Take your time, he’s not going anywhere.”
Some of the men chuckled in recognition of the familiar joke. A constable brought Oates a pack of cigarettes in a brand he had never seen from the tobacconist on the high street which ran away from the gates of the school. Bhupinder went ahead to find Charles. Oates waited until he was outside to light up, which was a good thing, because the first puff had him clutching his knees in a coughing fit. Through watering eyes he stared at the packet: ‘Pall Mall, Famous Cigarettes’. No wonder they were famous, they blew the back of your throat off. The filter was about a quarter the length of any cigarette he had ever seen. He took another drag, ready for it this time, and enjoyed the unaccustomed rush. Some things really were better in the old days.
The little crowd around the police tape had disappeared, and the court at the bottom of the stairs was empty. Night proper had settled on St Margaret’s, and the students were in bed. Voices carried from the open window above. With their superior out of the room, the men spoke more freely as they began to move the body.
“Maybe this isn’t the time to tell you, but this is my first.”
“You’ve never done a body before?”
“On traffic I have, loads. Just never like this.”
“Hey lads, we’ve got a virgin!”
“Bloody hell, he’s heavy.”
“What did you reckon of that Miranda?”
“Lovely lady.”
“Are you joking? She gave me the willies. The tide wouldn’t take her out.”
The sound of laughter came behind him down the stairs. Oates was torn between storming back up the stairs and telling them to shut up, and a nostalgic wish to be able to go and join them. There was no one about to hear, and the good feel of the cigarette tipped his mood to indulgence. Charles and Bhupinder were waiting outside in the street, and he followed them to the maintenance rooms where they were holding Ali Farooz.
THE ROOM IN question was just behind the carpark. Oates knew he would only have one chance to decide whether or not Ali Farooz was an Eddy, and he stood in the shadow of the arch to smoke a cigarette and collect his thoughts. He had memorised the facts spat out by the Oracle, and he had spoken to Charles and the head porter about Ali. Bhupinder had already searched Ali’s quarters, and the only item of any interest was a diary in several volumes. These had been brought to the schoolroom in the headmaster’s lodge, turned into an ops room for the night. Bhu
pinder’s dismay as each fresh item of physical evidence was brought in and set out on the desks was so comical that by comparison Oates felt himself positively cheery about their prospects.
A constable was thumbing the first volume of the diary, others were interviewing guests and checking registers and CCTV (almost non-existent inside the Great Spa, for reasons of period fidelity), but so far there was nothing either to implicate or exonerate the cleaner beyond the testimony of the head groundsman and Ali’s own confession. He was an immigrant from Kenya who had come to the country stuck between two fridges in the back of a truck. The amnesty had brought him back into the white market, and he had been working at Avalon for about three years. He kept himself to himself and had no family or friends, so far as anyone knew. The SOCOs had found no traces of Prudence Egwu’s blood on his clothes or his skin, but he claimed to have washed before he was caught.
In theory, of course, there would be many opportunities to interview the suspect, right up to the point at which the decision was made whether or not to charge him. In practice, you only got one shot.
In part, it was the fault of the press. Once the name of a suspect started to appear on the net, events began to gravitate towards the named individual. In part, it was the fault of the Met’s reaction to the press. Once that name was out there, the pressure was on for a conviction, and any subsequent attempt to move the investigation in another direction would invoke the intense skepticism of senior colleagues. Oates had even heard of investigations involving alleged Eddies where evidence contradicting the initial line had been concealed to avoid embarrassment, the logic being that it was less of a crime to fit up an innocent man if he connived at his own incarceration.