Bryant & May and the Invisible Code (Bryant & May 10)

by Christopher Fowler

  Maggie gripped his arm more tightly. ‘I’m feeling something now. Yes, a definite sensation. We must be over the site. Something’s pulling me back. I’m rooted to the spot.’

  Bryant looked down. ‘You’ve trodden in chewing gum.’

  ‘Oh.’ She looked for somewhere to scrape it off. ‘Did you know there were once two great statues over the entrance of Bedlam, Acute Mania and Dementia? Can you imagine how that made arriving patients feel? Half of the problem with madness is its definition. Tell someone they’re crazy and they soon start acting crazy. Look at the way they dose children up these days for merely exhibiting normal healthy high spirits. What signal does that send to them? We’ve always thought that the human body has to be balanced in order to work properly. It was said to be made up of four humours that matched the seasons and elements: yellow bile and fire for summer, black bile and earth for autumn, phlegm and water for winter, blood and air for spring. A lot of alternative therapies still conform to those rules.’

  ‘I’ve been trying to understand why Amy O’Connor died in St Bride’s Church,’ said Bryant. ‘It has to mean something.’

  ‘You know, there’s hardly a church in the whole of London that doesn’t have something unusual about it. St Bartholomew the Great in West Smithfield has the ghost of a monk who’s said to haunt the church looking for a sandal stolen from his tomb.’

  ‘They must have been very good quality sandals.’

  ‘And there are wonderful puzzles in churches. St Martin-within-Ludgate has a seventeenth-century font with a Greek palindrome inscribed on it. Nipson anomemata me monan opsin.3 “Cleanse my sin and not just my face.” And I suppose you know about the devils of St Peter-upon-Cornhill? In the nineteenth century its vicar noticed that plans for the building next door extended one foot on to church territory. He bullied the architect into adding three leering devils to frighten his neighbours. You can still see them.’

  They threaded their way past WH Smith and Accessorize, two senior citizens discussing esoterica in the most mundane of settings.

  ‘Churches have become almost invisible in London,’ Maggie said with a sigh, ‘but they hide their own secret codes. There are compositions of hymns hidden in stonework and all sorts of runic curses, but it all comes down to man’s clumsy attempts at balancing good and evil. Madness is always seen as evil. So perhaps someone was just trying to blacken your victim’s name. Did you search the church?’

  ‘Yes. There was nothing,’ said Bryant. ‘Sabira’s husband is about to transform Europe’s attitude to policing its borders. But after a week of psychological torture, culminating in the death of his wife, it’s possible he won’t have the strength to succeed in pushing through our government’s demands. I think Sabira knew a hawk from a handsaw. Behaving strangely allowed her to say what she felt more easily, but that isn’t why she died.’

  ‘Perhaps she was taking revenge for the way she’d been treated, and went mad in the process, like Hamlet.’

  ‘I wish I knew. I followed the red thread and it led me to Bedlam.’

  ‘But madness has no logic, Arthur, and you don’t have a cause of death,’ said Maggie.

  ‘If anyone can find one, Giles Kershaw can,’ said Bryant. ‘And when it comes to being irrational you’re the perfect person to talk to, so keep talking.’

  ‘I suppose I’ll have to take that as a compliment,’ said Maggie, holding on to his arm. ‘Let’s walk a little while and go a little mad.’

  3 As the Greek ‘ps’ is represented by a single letter, this is a correct palindrome.

  29

  CAUSE OF DEATH

  BRYANT MET HIS partner at the St Pancras Mortuary and Coroner’s Office, housed in the diseased gingerbread cottage that lurked behind the cemetery of St Pancras Old Church. He was always cheered by its connection to both Frankenstein and Dracula; in the adjoining graveyard were the tombs of Dr Polidori and Mary Wollstonecraft.

  Rosa Lysandrou, Giles Kershaw’s dour housekeeper, admitted them. Rosa was a natural Greek mourner. Her features appeared to have spent at least two-thirds of their life streaked with tears. She eyed the detectives warily.

  ‘Is that a new perfume you’re wearing, Rosa?’ asked Bryant, sniffing the air.

  ‘It’s incense from the chapel,’ Rosa replied. ‘For the dead. Their spirits are all around us.’

  ‘That’s nice. I suppose it’s company for you. All in black again, I see. Did somebody just die?’

  ‘It’s a morgue,’ said Rosa. ‘Somebody has always just died.’

  ‘I thought perhaps you were dressed out of respect for your country’s economy. Is Giles in?’

  She led them along the hall to the main autopsy room and pushed open the door.

  Giles was excited to see them. ‘Just in time,’ he said, pulling off his hairnet and releasing a mop-head of glossy blond locks. An unnerving array of body-opening tools had been rolled out behind him like a car-repair kit. ‘I started as soon as Mr Kasavian emailed back his consent form, and I have a result for you. I can explain why no one else was found near her in the Soane Museum, and can probably account for the fact that Amy O’Connor died alone in St Bride’s Church.’

  He was standing beside a silver Mylar sheet ominously concealing a human shape on one of the steel tables. ‘You heard the EMT thought she might have had difficulty breathing?’

  ‘That suggested a poison to me,’ said Bryant. ‘Nobody came near her in the building, but if she’d ingested something harmful it would have taken time to work, which means Sabira took it before reaching the museum.’

  ‘Exactly so. The problem was administration. She didn’t eat breakfast yesterday morning. Her stomach was empty, so how could she have ingested anything?’

  ‘A tablet and water,’ said May. ‘That would indicate suicide.’

  ‘Unless a doctored tablet was disguised as something harmless, say an aspirin,’ said Bryant.

  ‘Come on, who knows when they’re going to need an aspirin? Are you suggesting the killer gave her a headache first? I examined the stomach lining for residue,’ said Kershaw. ‘There was nothing. Obviously poisons have other ways of entering the body: gas, spray, liquid administered via an injection, so I looked for a break in the epidermis but found nothing. Until I looked here.’

  He folded back the bottom of the sheet to reveal Sabira’s bare feet.

  ‘Look at the sole of the left foot. It’s easy to miss because there’s some hard skin, but there is a very tiny puncture mark here, near the heel.’ Kershaw indicated the spot with the collapsible antenna he had inherited from the PCU’s last coroner.

  ‘I can’t see anything,’ said Bryant.

  ‘No, but that’s because you can’t see anything,’ said Giles. ‘You need to put your glasses on. Trust me, it’s an entry mark. Something entering the body here would have taken longer to feed into the main circulatory system, so by timing it back—’

  ‘The mosque,’ said Bryant. ‘She took her shoes off to enter it and left them by the door.’

  Giles removed a bag from beneath the table and carried it over to his desk. Opening it, he lifted out Sabira’s shoes. ‘Take a look at this.’ He slipped on plastic gloves and carefully removed the inner sole of the left shoe. ‘Don’t touch, but if you look very closely you should be able to see it.’

  They could make out a tiny indentation in the rear of the inner sole. ‘This is what caused the mark,’ said Kershaw, tweezering a crystalline sliver of glass from a microscope plate. ‘She tried to kick off the left shoe because by the time the toxin started to take effect her foot would have been itching.’

  ‘So Sabira was right,’ said May. ‘Someone was watching her at the clinic. They followed her to the mosque. She put her shoes in the rack, and while she was inside, they inserted a sliver of glass into the inner sole. She came out, put the shoe on—’

  ‘Probably didn’t notice anything beyond a faint irritation, because there are very few nerve endings there,’ Kershaw added, ‘and she continu
ed to the museum, where she would have started to feel sick and disoriented, collapsing in the room upstairs.’

  ‘Do you have any idea about the kind of poison that could do such a thing?’ asked May.

  ‘It was obvious to me that we weren’t dealing with some street amateur,’ Kershaw explained, ‘so I started thinking about professional toxins, and immediately came up with TTX. Tetrodotoxin. It’s an incredibly lethal neurotoxin that blocks the nerves by binding to the sodium channels in the cell membranes. There’s currently no known antidote and, more interestingly, there are no biological markers to indicate that a sufferer has been exposed to it, which is why it proved so difficult to diagnose a cause of death. It occurs naturally in nature, and can be found in newts, octopi and those Japanese puffer fish people insist on trying to eat. Fugu.’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’ said Bryant.

  ‘It means “river pig”. The poisonous fish.’

  ‘How much would you need?’

  ‘If it’s injected, you’d only have to use half a milligram to kill a normal-sized person.’

  ‘What are the symptoms?’

  ‘The victims experience numbness, shortness of breath, then complete respiratory collapse.’

  ‘And how long would that take?’

  ‘Could be anything between fifteen minutes and three hours, depending on various health factors and conditions. It’s diagnosable in blood and urine, but that would involve mass spectrometric detection after liquid or gas chromatographic separation. In other words, not your average high-street cause of death. It’s not easy to get hold of, but it’s very much the sort of trick the Russians pull on foreign agents these days, using toxins that go undetected or remain misdiagnosed. In the last few years they’ve pioneered this method of assassination.’

  ‘But if the same murder method was used on Amy O’Connor, why weren’t there any puncture marks on her body?’ asked Bryant.

  ‘Are you sure there weren’t?’

  ‘I’ll go back and talk to Ben Fenchurch again.’

  ‘Toxins,’ May repeated. ‘Sabira Kasavian’s mood swings had an irregular pattern, but it was a pattern all the same. She seemed perfectly fine some days, confused and angry on others. You think she was being slowly poisoned? Is there something that could have made her display symptoms commonly associated with mental imbalance?’

  ‘You’re talking about the administration of a drug cocktail on different days,’ said Kershaw. ‘She was in a variety of locations, at home, in restaurants, in the clinic …’

  ‘Any number of people could have got close enough to her to do it, but for one person to administer a toxin on a regular basis – wouldn’t she have noticed?’ asked May.

  ‘That depends on the method of administration,’ said Kershaw. ‘There are some highly sophisticated ways to deliver drugs to the system.’

  Bryant was following the thought. ‘Jeff Waters was killed by someone dressed as a motorcycle courier. If his killer was hired to do the job, why couldn’t others have been bribed or blackmailed into giving Sabira medication?’

  ‘That would imply a sizeable conspiracy,’ said May.

  ‘But that’s exactly what she told us she was afraid of, isn’t it? Something so big that she couldn’t trust anyone, least of all us because we were connected to the Home Office.’

  ‘Well, you said you wanted to go up against the government,’ said May. ‘It looks like you’ve got your wish. What do we do now?’

  ‘Giles, perform whatever tests you have to do to find out if Sabira Kasavian was being slowly poisoned. John, can you get Janice to try Tom Penry, the boy who was with the little girl at St Bride’s Church? He should be back from his holiday shortly. I’m going to find out why Fenchurch failed to find a cause of death for O’Connor.’

  As the trio set off on their tasks, Rosa Lysandrou looked at them and shook her head sadly, wondering why they couldn’t leave the dead in peace.

  30

  THE WITCH TEST

  JENNIFER PENRY KNELT beside her son and smoothed his sun-blond hair in place. ‘I don’t see why you can’t ask his friend about this,’ she said. ‘Lucy is older, and seems to have led him on.’

  ‘Lucy won’t tell us the truth,’ Longbright explained. ‘It’s difficult with children.’

  ‘Do you have children of your own?’ Mrs Penry asked defensively.

  ‘No,’ said Longbright. ‘My hours would never have suited motherhood.’

  ‘That’s your choice, of course.’

  Longbright decided not to argue. She had never felt it was a matter of choice. Her mother had been a police sergeant, and so had her former partner. Public service was in her blood; there had never been a question of giving it up. ‘Tom, how well do you know your friend Lucy?’ she asked, kneeling down to bring herself to his level.

  ‘We have to wait for our dads,’ said Tom, ‘so we play.’

  ‘Witch Hunter looks like a very exciting game. Did you make up your own rules?’

  ‘No, course not. It’s an online game and a card game. There are rules you have to obey.’

  Longbright had spent a fruitless hour attempting to play the game with other online players, but had given up after realizing that she had no enthusiasm for absorbing hundreds of arcane rules and updates. It had been like spending the afternoon with Arthur and his books.

  ‘Do you always follow the rules? Are you sure you didn’t make some up?’

  ‘Lucy makes things up ’cause she says she knows them all and I don’t. But I think she cheats.’

  ‘That’s not very fair, is it? Did she cheat before you went on holiday, when you were waiting for your fathers?’

  ‘Yes, she said the lady was a witch but I knew she wasn’t.’

  ‘How did you know that?’

  ‘Because there are ways of finding out.’

  ‘What ways did you use to try and find out if she was a witch?’

  ‘One way is to tie them up and drop them in a pond and if they sink they’re not a witch and if they float they are a witch, but we didn’t have a pond.’

  ‘So what did you do?’ Longbright kept her tone chatty and light. It was important not to put the boy on his guard.

  Thomas squirmed a little. ‘There’s another test. You can stick a pin in them and if they don’t feel anything or make any noise they’re a witch.’

  ‘And Lucy knew about this?’

  ‘Yes, but she didn’t remember it until the man said it.’

  ‘What man, Tom?’

  ‘The one who came up to us. He asked us what we were playing and we said witches, and he said you can tell who’s a witch by sticking a pin in them. And Lucy said she didn’t have a pin but the man did, and he gave it to us.’

  ‘What did it look like?’

  ‘It had a bit of red plastic over the end. He took the plastic off and handed it to her.’

  ‘Then what happened?’

  ‘Lucy ran around behind the bench and crawled underneath it, and she stuck the pin in the back of the lady’s leg.’

  Longbright glanced at Tom’s mother. ‘The lady must have been very angry with her.’

  ‘No, she was angry with the wasps. She thought it was a wasp. But she felt it so I knew she wasn’t a witch. We ran away.’

  ‘What happened to the man?’

  ‘I don’t know. He went away.’

  ‘And what about the pin? What happened to that?’

  ‘Lucy dropped it. And then the lady went off towards the church, and we waited a bit longer to see if she was a witch because Lucy still thought she was, but then I went upstairs to see my dad.’

  ‘This man – can you remember what he looked like?’

  ‘He was a motorbike man with a helmet.’

  ‘Can I show you a picture?’ She unfolded a printed frame from the CCTV camera that had caught Jeff Waters’s attacker at Coram’s Fields, and showed it to him.

  ‘Yes,’ said the boy without any shade of uncertainty. ‘There’s supposed to be a bike badge.
Triumph. There.’ He tapped the courier’s right shoulder.

  ‘How did he give Lucy the pin? Was it in his hand?’

  ‘He took it from his pocket. It was in the plastic thing.’

  ‘What is this all about?’ asked Tom’s mother, concerned.

  ‘The children had a lucky escape, Mrs Penry,’ said Longbright. ‘You should be very thankful.’

  On the way back to the unit, she took a detour to the courtyard of St Bride’s and searched the pavement, but a receptionist in one of the offices told her it was swept every evening, and there was no sign of the toxic needle or its plastic cover.

  ‘I had an idea,’ said May, seeking out Bryant at his desk. ‘The algorithm – you’ve got the means of solving the code but not the code itself, right?’

  ‘I don’t know where else to look,’ Bryant admitted.

  ‘I think Sabira posted you the Cardano grille as a precaution. Have you looked in her belongings? It would have appeared innocuous without the grille to complete it.’

  ‘She had a case of clothes at the clinic,’ said Bryant. ‘Dan will need to search her flat. It would help if we knew what we were looking for.’

  ‘Maybe she left it with someone she could trust. How about Edona Lescowitz? She might not even know she has it.’

  ‘I’ll call Colin and Meera and get them to check with her,’ said May. ‘They’re still keeping a watch on her flat.’

  ‘I feel a fool,’ said Bryant suddenly. ‘I think I was wrong. I jumped in as usual.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Sabira and the Hogarth painting. She died under a depiction of a madhouse. I assumed she was trying to tell me something about her mental state, that somebody drove her to it. But it was you who figured out that the madness might have been chemically induced, which means that Sabira wasn’t aware of the cause. So that wasn’t the message she was trying to leave.’

  ‘Then why did she go to the museum? It makes no sense.’

  ‘I don’t know. Maybe she really was having some kind of relapse. I’m not sure I can rely on my instincts any more.’