Ten Second Staircase

by Christopher Fowler

  And you're more ashamed than ever now, thought Meera. She died before you could find a way to call a truce. 'Can you think of anyone who might have wanted to harm her? A former boyfriend? Someone who hated her work? Perhaps even someone who felt jealous of her fame?'

  'There were plenty of boyfriends. The artist, and her supposed mentor. She left the first one when she started to make sales.'

  'Do you remember his name?'

  'Oh, it was something strange and made up, the way they do.' Mrs White stopped. 'Don't give me that disapproving look, young lady. You think I'm just one of those undemonstrative Englishwomen who never showed her daughter love. But it wasn't like that. We only ever wanted her to be happy. Of course we hoped she would share our values, even if she considered them old-fashioned. We believe in dignity, honesty, and Christian kindness—there's nothing so unusual in that, is there? Some emotions require privacy. Why would she want to throw it all up in our faces? I don't understand.' Her fingers traced the outline of a photograph on the side table. 'I still can't believe our sweet little girl changed into such a monstrous person. This is a terribly poisonous time to be young.'

  Meera realised she was ashamed to be seen crying, and watched with a softening heart. 'We'll talk to everyone who knew her,' she promised. 'We have every hope that her killer will be found. We'll try to give you back your little girl.'

  But she wondered if such comforting words were true. It was the lonely who left themselves open to attack. Eleanor White's daughter had been insulated by a public life and a large circle of friends. It made her death all the more unlikely, and the chance of discovering its cause almost impossible. They left Eleanor White sitting in her floral lounge, bewildered and diminished, surrounded by the silverframed memories of a daughter she now realised she had never tried to understand.

  11

  DEPARTING SOUL

  'Ah, there you are,' said Arthur Bryant, strolling into the damp converted school gymnasium in Bayham Street that passed for an autopsy room. To combat the falling temperature, he had swiped a shapeless brown roll-neck sweater from the unit's evidence room that made him look even more like a deshelled tortoise.

  'Where else would I be, seeing as my rehousing request has been declined?' Oswald Finch, the unit's pathologist and the only man on the force older than Bryant, straightened his bony back with a series of audible clicks, scowling at the covered body in his aluminium trough. His permanent look of disdain had left him with a face like a sepia photograph that had been crumpled up and flattened out again.

  'Yes, I heard about the refusal. I'm afraid it's the new Home Office chap, Leslie Faraday. He's been appointed to oversee the operation of all specialist units, and isn't happy about our meagre budget rise. The usual story: He's never been too ambitious, but now he fancies making a name for himself. I daresay he thinks he can do so by getting us closed down in the ruthless drive for efficiency. It's the unsolved cases; we've too many on our books. It makes him look bad.'

  'Of course it does,' Finch barked. 'Good God, look at your resources, they're embarrassing. You've no crime lab of your own, you're forever cadging equipment downtime from the Met. We live in an era of mitochondrial DNA matches, environmental signature indices, and psychological profiling, and you're still sullying crime scenes with your sausage fingers and poking about in filthy old books on Wiccan mythology. You're a living anachronism, Bryant. The only grant you're likely to get will be from the National Trust: Upkeep of Ancient Monuments.'

  Coming from a man who swore he was present at the first demonstration of television, this was a bit rich. Finch fluttered his long, delicate fingers at the walls. 'Look at this place. I could go to the police about the ventilation, except we are the police. The extractors are the same ones they used when it was still a prep school. If it got too hot they simply opened the windows, but we can't do that with decomposing bodies around. Human fat sticks to everything, you know, and the smell lingers forever. No woman will come near me.'

  '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 minute.'

  '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 makeup 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.

  12

  THE B ARRIER OF YOUTH

  John May stood on the worn steps of St Crispin's Boy
s' 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.