Bryant & May 04; Ten Second Staircase b&m-4

by Christopher Fowler

  “You’re wrong there, Oswald. Nobody at all will come near you.”

  “That’s it, laugh at my expense while you still can. My job is about accumulating facts. One inaccurate detail compounds itself until the entire case collapses. It’s not possible to be accurate about anything in here. And without factual evidence, everything else is just conjecture. It’s all right for you to play arcane guessing games, but my reputation is on the line. I’ve tendered my resignation to Raymond Land. I’ve had enough. I’m buying a smallholding in Hastings and will see out my days there alone, an embittered untouchable.”

  “If you have to pick a leper colony, I suppose Hastings is as good as any.” Bryant stuck an exploratory finger in his ear and wiggled it, thinking. “Will you have a leaving party?”

  “What’s the point? I hate chocolate cake, and I don’t suppose there’s anyone left to even buy me a card. All my friends are either dead or not feeling very well.” He stared gloomily into his dissecting tray.

  Bryant checked his finger, then dug in his pocket for a sherbet lemon. The smell of the room was starting to get to him. “What can I do to perk you up?”

  “Find me an assistant. I’m not supposed to leave an unpacked body unattended. My bladder’s a colander. What if I need to go for a wee?”

  “I didn’t realise you’d become incontinent as well. Every minute we’re getting older. Flesh falls, hairs turn grey, we crumble to pieces as the world regenerates, so why not be happy in the knowledge that we’ll all inevitably fall to bits? Why do you always see the gloomy side of everything?”

  “Oh, I don’t know, it’s probably a side effect of spending the last half-century surrounded by dead people.”

  Bryant squeezed his eyebrows together in concentration, racking his brain for something cheerful to say. “I know. I’ve been meaning to mention this for ages. You remember Nugent?”

  “Your ostracod?” Finch’s eyes strayed to the corner of his workspace, where for a period of four years a tall glass of water had stood untouched. One day, Bryant had turned up with an object that looked like a hairy yellow oyster sitting in a tumbler of liquid. He had explained that it was a rare bivalve, a primitive form of mollusk taken from deep within the banks of the Thames, and that they needed to keep it alive for an experiment the unit was conducting. Finch had named it, and assiduously fed the creature from an eyedropper containing a nutrient solution every day for four years, until one morning he had come in to find the glass empty, whereupon he was informed by Bryant that he had overdosed it and ruined the experiment. Finch had carried the guilt with him ever since.

  “What about it?” he asked.

  “Nugent didn’t die,” said Bryant airily. “It wasn’t an ostracod. It was a mango seed.”

  “You are utterly impossible,” sputtered the pathologist.

  “Oh, don’t be such a spoilsport. I’ve done worse things. I switched Raymond Land’s verucca cream for superglue last month; it took him several hours to get his shoes off. There you are, you’re more like your old self already.”

  “I suppose it was you who unscrewed the handle of my brain knife as well. I was taking the lid off an Archway Bridge jumper and the damned thing nearly took my eye out.”

  “Not my suicide from last week? Why were you examining his skull?”

  “One of your lads discovered that he’d stopped in the street to complain of a headache just before he made the leap. I wondered what sort of pain would drive a man to jump from a bridge, and looked for a tumor. He had a morbid fear of hospitals and hadn’t been near one in years. There was a growth on his brain the size of a duck egg, large enough to re-open a suture in his skull. It had been caused by a rare parasite, cysticercus, caught on a business trip to Mexico.”

  Finch’s great strength, even at his advanced age, was an enquiring, restless mind. He liked tidy endings and sought resolutions in everything, which was why Bryant’s unfathomable moods annoyed him so much. “You play these ridiculously childish tricks on me without any sense of risk or responsibility,” he complained.

  “You shouldn’t take life so seriously,” said Bryant. “Think of it like pipe tobacco. It’s dark, it’s bitter, and it finally destroys you, but it provides a few moments of heaven on the tongue.”

  “And it can make you ill,” snapped Finch. “There’s a woman on my table who died in her late twenties for no good reason I can think of. If I don’t take her seriously, who will?” Finch did not appreciate that the detectives took death very seriously indeed.

  “All right,” conceded Bryant. “Let’s see what you’ve got.”

  Finch unwrapped the corpse from a foil bag that gave it the unfortunate appearance of a giant Marks & Spencer ready meal. “Well, it wasn’t technically drowning,” he told Bryant, “although there’s liquid in her air passages and the lungs are swollen. She was poisoned by the liquid in the tank. It sent her into laryngeal spasms the moment she swallowed it. I couldn’t wait around for the preliminary composite breakdown to come back, so I knocked up a couple of my own tests. It’s a mixture of synthetic preservative, water, vegetable dye, and some form of antibacterial weed-killer that was meant to keep the tank clean but reacted with the objects in it, causing the clouding and increasing the potency of the poison. It’s also flammable.”

  Finch stepped back from the body tray with his head on one side. “Getting her into the tank, though, that’s the thing, isn’t it? No defence marks on her hands, arms, or shins, and your man Kershaw tells me there were no scuffs on the glass, so she went over cleanly and without a fuss. I don’t have to tell you this is very unlikely in any circumstance. I understand there were no ladders or chairs, nothing for the killer to stand on.”

  Bryant scratched the end of his bulbous nose, thinking. “Therefore we have three options. One, she went willingly into the liquid, which we have to rule out for the simple reason that she knew its potentially lethal composition. Two, she was hurled into the tank during some kind of argument, which at least a dozen visitors to the gallery would have overheard. Three, she was knocked unconscious or sedated first. So what have you checked for?” Bryant always knew when Finch was holding something back.

  “Puncture marks. I agree that sedation has to be the answer, something fast-acting. It would have made her a dead weight, of course, harder for someone to lift and throw, but at least she wouldn’t have been fighting. I was hoping to find evidence that she was injected prior to immersion, but there’s nothing.”

  “What do you mean, nothing?” Bryant was appalled. There was always something to discover. That’s what pathologists were for.

  “You’re expecting me to find a grain of sand stuck in her earhole and match it up to one on the killer’s boot. I’m afraid it doesn’t happen like that. I’m sorry, this isn’t some Hollywood police show, you know.”

  Bryant cast his eyes around at the dated equipment and waterstained walls. “I’m painfully aware of that.”

  “I know it’s boring for you, but there’s nothing of interest here. I checked for wrist bruising, something to show she’d been hoisted by her extremities, but there’s nothing at all.”

  “Are you absolutely sure?” asked Bryant. “She doesn’t look right.”

  “Of course she doesn’t look right, she’s brown bread. Dead people rarely look like themselves. What they look like is what they’ve been lying on; thanks to hypostasis I can give you the death position and the contact surface, providing the body is Caucasian and hasn’t been moved for a while, but this one’s a floater, so she doesn’t even look like that.”

  “You think she was lifted kicking and screaming, then chucked bodily into the tank? The killer must have had at least one hand over her mouth, otherwise the whole gallery would have heard her, even with the electronic sound-dampers.”

  “I suppose she could have been chloroformed, but if she had time to draw breath you’d have to be strong in order to hold her until she was forced to breathe. I’ve known struggling time to last anything up to a min
ute.”

  “What about the physical strength required? What are we looking for, a Russian shot-putter?”

  “I heard you’re after a man on a horse.” Finch’s disconcerting smirk reminded Bryant of Lon Chaney trying out a new look in his make-up mirror.

  “We have a small child who’s an unreliable witness. Like most imaginative children, he probably has a history of telling fabulous lies.”

  “All I know is that she became immersed in the tank, drew a breath, swallowed, and died. How your man did it is a mystery I’ve no interest in solving. What more can I do? I’ll need to send away liver and lung samples, as well as ingestion residue for toxicology analysis, they can run some immunoassay and chromatography tests. There might have been an allergic reaction, I suppose. Obviously, it’s not something I can handle in this dump. I hate to admit it, but I’m as out of my depth as she was.”

  “Perhaps we both are,” agreed Bryant. He was usually forming some kind of opinion by now, no matter how ridiculous or bizarre it seemed, but today he felt utterly lost.

  “One other thing I should mention,” said Finch, “it doesn’t impinge on the circumstances of her death, but you should know she was pregnant.”

  “You’re joking.”

  “I’m not the kind of man who jokes,” Finch reminded him.

  “She was dead set against having children at this time, campaigning in favour of abortion. How far gone?”

  “It was a late-developing foetus, but I’d say about fourteen weeks.”

  “We have one of the most restrictive abortion laws in Europe. The current legal time limit is twenty-four weeks, and they’re reducing that to twenty-two.” Bryant knew that women required signatures from two doctors before they could access abortion services. “I’ll see if she made any enquiries.”

  “I don’t suppose it would have been difficult for her to obtain one,” said Finch, snapping off his gloves and binning them. “She’d been there before.”

  Bryant uncovered Saralla White’s face. Usually, he did not care to see features from which life had fled, but he was hoping to find some clue from any remaining shred of spirit. “In the notes on her artwork, Saralla White was pushing for abortion on request up to a minimum of fourteen weeks. Most take place before thirteen weeks. Suppose she fought over the termination with her boyfriend? That would give us a suspect.”

  “There’s the difference between us,” said Finch. “You think about suspects. I think about the victim. There’s more to life than finding who to blame.”

  “This isn’t about life, Oswald,” Bryant reminded him.

  Finch did not take kindly to being challenged. “You might have a word with your man Banbury,” he said, changing the subject. “I do bodies, not clothes.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “He delivered her corpse fully dressed. I thought we’d agreed that it’s not my job to undress them.”

  “Why did he do that?”

  “Oh, something about her outfit. She was wearing a sort of bandsman’s tunic, silver buttons all the way down the front. Banbury thought if the killer had been forced to manhandle her over the wall of the tank, he might be able to lift partials from them.”

  “I hope he took prints from everyone who was in the gallery.” Bryant covered White’s face once more, disappointed by what he saw. “There’s nothing here.”

  “What did you expect to find? Strands of ectoplasm wending heavenward as the soul departs?” asked Finch sarcastically.

  “We once believed the eyes caught the last image seen in life,” said Bryant sadly. “It’s natural to seek answers in the face.”

  “Then it was a waste of time looking.” Finch started to cover the rest of the body.

  “It’s never a waste of time,” said Bryant. “Even taking into account that her facial muscles have relaxed, I would have thought there’d be some indication of stress in the features. She looks calm. She was caught by surprise and died quickly, without undue pain. That’s all any of us can ask.”

  “That’s unusually morbid of you,” Finch sniffed. “You were due to have your first intimation of mortality about forty years ago. Don’t tell me it’s finally caught up with you.”

  He expected the elderly detective to come back with a stinging rejoinder, and was amazed when Bryant walked quietly and thoughtfully from the room.

  ∨ Ten Second Staircase ∧

  12

  The Barrier of Youth

  John May stood on the worn steps of St Crispin’s Boys’ School, St John Street, Clerkenwell, and studied the building’s façade: a fuss of railings and crenellations, stone urns, wreaths, garlands, ‘improving’ mottoes, and blunted statuary depicting Christian martyrs. Above the door, letters cut into a single block of white Portland stone read ‘Founded In The Year Of Our Lord 1685’. Through one of the double-height central windows, May could see a dozen pupils hunched in the pale light of their computer terminals.

  “Hard to believe it’s been here for so long,” said Elliot Mason, echoing his thoughts. The teacher was still wearing his knitted beanie, and looked out of place. “Not on this site, of course – this building’s late Victorian. The coping stone was moved from the original site somewhere further east. For three centuries St Crispin’s was open to all devout Christians who had the will to learn. Now it’s reserved for the paying elite. There’s a five-year waiting list to attend. So much for progress. Sorry, I saw you at the art gallery this morning. Your sergeant interviewed me.” Mason introduced himself with a faint handshake.

  May had been educated at a good grammar school in Vauxhall, a step above his partner’s experience in Whitechapel. He had reached maturity in a world of crow-black gowns and mortarboards. Consequently, the young teacher’s relaxed clothes and attitude came as a surprise to him. “Why do you choose to teach here?” he asked, surveying the exterior.

  “The pay’s better than working in a state school, and there’s slightly less chance of getting stabbed. Sorry, there’s a limit to my altruism. In my book you can have a vocation and still meet your mortgage payments. It looks like it’s going to rain. The kids will be off soon. Are you coming in?”

  “I wanted to talk to the class that visited the gallery yesterday,” said May. “I know they gave statements, but I wondered if we’d missed something. We’ve had trouble getting hold of your head teacher, Dr Westingham.”

  “He likes the school to keep a low profile. Apparently he had kittens when he saw the afternoon news report. He’s an utter slave to parental demands, lives in fear of losing his exclusive status.”

  “He has no reason to worry. We’re just gathering information.”

  They climbed the worn steps together.

  “He fears guilt by association. God forbid the idea of the big bad world intruding into these sepulchral halls, staining the innocence of his children. They might have fee-paying parents, but they’re the same as every other hormonal delinquent in the neighbourhood.

  They nick stuff from a better class of store, and lie more professionally, but apart from that it’s business as usual: skinning up doobies in the kiln room, playing hockey with frozen mice in the biology lab, hanging around the girls’ school in Roseberry Avenue, shoving each other into strip clubs – they can get into Soho during their lunch hour and still be back in time for the first module of the afternoon.

  Come on, I’ll dig them out for you. They won’t take any orders from me, of course, a lapsed socialist with a persecution complex and artistic aspirations. They smell my fear and play on it mercilessly.”

  “Why were you taking the class?”

  “I already explained to your sergeant. Their teacher, Mr Kingsmere, had an upset stomach and stayed home yesterday, so I had to take his place.”

  “You were inside the County Hall Gallery while it happened – you didn’t see or hear anything unusual?”

  “I walked through the main chamber a few minutes before the alarm was raised, then went to the café.”

  “Why didn
’t you stay with your class?”

  “I needed to change into trainers. I was breaking in new shoes and they were killing me. Here we are. The element of surprise is the only weapon I have against them.”

  Mason led the way through corridors built in the time of James II that had now been relaid for computer wiring, and stopped before a wide mahogany door, flinging it wide.

  The pupils within were all working at their terminals, and barely bothered to look up. May had expected them to react by becoming statues, freezing in a variety of violent postures, their internecine cruelties caught in mid-brutalisation. It was what teenagers would have done in his day, had the demographic category been invented, but back then lessons had been focussed on blackboards and rote-learning, and any diversion had been welcomed.

  “Would all of those boys in Mr Kingsmere’s art class please make themselves known?” asked Mason. A number of hands were desultorily raised. “Come on – Gosling, Parfitt, I know you were both there. You too, Jezzard, Tarkington, Billings, and the rest of you.”

  Further hands crept up like unfurling ferns. Nobody was pleased about being drawn away from their screens. Adults – especially ones involved in law enforcement – would only ask pedantic, irrelevant questions, and would take ages doing so. “Outside, please; the remainder get on with your work.”

  The boys might have been moving underwater. Their pantomimic exertions as they left the room suggested that they held little respect for the relief teacher.

  “These are all Kingsmere’s lads,” explained Mason. “He’s the only teacher in the school who gets to pick his own pupils, and he takes the brightest ones for a single year for extracurricular activities.

  Puts them through hell and they love him for it. Funny how some teachers can’t put a foot wrong. Of course, private all-male schools tend to become a trifle Hellenic when you’re dealing with this age group, too many hormones flying about, although these days the subject is avoided in case the parents come after us with burning torches.”