The Water Room

by Christopher Fowler

  ‘You only just agreed that there is a case,’ May complained, chastened.

  ‘That’s because no one had bothered to point out the connection between their deaths.’

  ‘What connection?’ asked Bryant.

  ‘Four instances of suffocation, of course,’ Land all but shouted. ‘A common repeat method. Stone me, it’s not rocket science.’

  ‘Hardly a repeat method.’ Bryant waved the idea aside. ‘I mean, all the deaths have involved blockage of the lungs, but that’s not unusual. Life-traumas have to affect either the lungs, brain or heart. A drowning, a burial, an asphyxiation and now arson, it’s more a matter—Oh, Raymond, Raymond, you’re a genius!’ Bryant’s eyes widened excitedly. ‘Why didn’t I think of that?’

  ‘Think of what?’ asked Land, mystified.

  ‘Not now, there’s a chap—come back later once we’ve had a chance to go over this.’ Bryant waved him from the room. ‘I’m sorry we’re not getting into machine-gun battles with your posses, but perhaps we can make an advancement here after all. Go on, off you go.’

  ‘I will not be shooed out of my own unit,’ warned Land lamely.

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous, it’s not your unit, any more than Number Ten Downing Street belongs to the Prime Minister. I swear to you this will be sorted out in the next twenty-four hours, in time for your new Monday caseload. Now do us all a favour and bugger off.’

  ‘You’re really going too far, Arthur.’ Land trudged away as Bryant booted the door shut.

  ‘I’m getting senile, John, my synaptic responses aren’t what they used to be. I should have spotted this earlier.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘It’s blindingly obvious now. The four methods of death correspond to the four elements. Ruth Singh—water. Elliot Copeland—earth. Jake Avery—air. Tate—fire.’

  ‘Now wait a minute, Arthur, don’t go running off—’

  ‘Are we dealing with something pagan and elemental? London has always had strong connections with the four elements, you know. Look at the Ministry of Defence on Horseguards Avenue, framed by the elements: two stone naked ladies, symbols of earth and water. There were going to be two more statues, but fire and air were lost in spending cutbacks. More alarmingly, does that mean it’s now at an end? If the killer has successfully concluded his business, how will we ever discover the truth? Successful murderers know when to stop, John. Suppose he’s achieved his aim without us ever getting on the right track? We need some confirmation from old miseryguts. We have to go and see Finch.’

  ‘The only good thing about still having to work with you, Arthur,’ said Oswald Finch, carefully folding away something that looked like a body part in tin foil, but was in fact a liver-and-onion sandwich, ‘is that you’re now so fantastically old, you no longer have the energy to play disgusting practical jokes on me.’ Finch had been the butt of Bryant’s amusing cruelties for nearly half a century, and had thought—wrongly, as it turned out—that semi-retirement would protect him. Only last month, a whoopee cushion attached to a cadaver drawer had nearly given him a heart attack.

  ‘Oh, I wouldn’t bet on it,’ grinned Bryant. He usually only smiled when hearing of someone else’s misfortune. Consequently, most of his acquaintances had learned to dread the glimpse of his ill-fitting false teeth. ‘Look at you, though. Not in bad nick for an old fart. Exactly how old are you now?’

  He watched as the ancient pathologist, so pale and serious that permanent misery-lines had formed on either side of his mouth, eased himself from the counter to search the cadaver drawers. He still had the spiky hair and raw bony hands of his youth. Even in his twenties the sight of Finch, with his long death’s-head face, his creaking knees and lab coats that reeked of chemicals, caused all but the most optimistic people to avoid him. He still worked part-time at the Central Mortuary in Codrington Street, but was available to certain small, specialized branches of the Met because younger pathologists were considered more valuable employees, and therefore not a resource to be spared to such an esoteric, pointless unit as the PCU. And he wasn’t thrilled about being dragged over to the makeshift mortuary at Mornington Crescent on a Sunday morning.

  ‘I’m eighty-four,’ he said. ‘Or eighty-three. There were conflicting reports from my parents.’

  ‘Last time you told me there was coffee on your birth certificate,’ said Bryant. ‘You don’t have to lie about your age any more, Oswald, they can’t fire you now. You’re so far past retirement age nobody even remembers you’re still alive. Do you have a body for me? Fire victim, filed under Tate but we’ve no idea of his real name. Probably died of smoke inhalation.’

  ‘You might let me be the judge of that. I thought you were going to send over Kershaw. I liked him. Don’t tell me you’ve driven him from the unit already.’

  ‘Incredible as it may seem, he’s still with us. I’m just keeping him busy. He’s still getting used to the idea of having to work a seven-day week.’

  Finch grunted as he struggled with the drawer, then tugged back a slick grey sheet covering the corpse. ‘We’re testing this out—bloody clever stuff. Made of the same material they use to cover satellites. Stops the skin fragmenting in cases of extreme epidermal damage.’

  The body was charred as black as barbecue embers. Very little skin remained intact, and his eye sockets were empty. Only his feet had been spared the flames; his ankles were bizarrely still sheathed in trousers, his socks and shoes intact.

  ‘He would have been in better condition if the developers had insulated their floors properly. It’s the same old story: corners cut and lives lost. It’s all very well to spray the walls with fireproof resin, but not much good if you’re going to leave cavities under the carpets without any batt insulation. Protective foam or loose fill would have worked just as well. The residents sneak in booze, you see, usually high-proof spirits because they’re smaller to hide, then after a few drinks—’ He slapped his hand against the steel side of the drawer, ‘—whoosh—they knock over the bottle and it soaks between the floorboards. Not enough to start a fire from a falling match, you understand, but over time . . . sounds as though this was arson, though. The lovely Longbright informs me that there was white-spirit residue all over the place consistent with someone splashing it from a bottle. Not my field of expertise, of course, I’m better off with the dead. Where’s my poking stick?’ He searched around for the car antenna he used for demonstrations. ‘Look at this.’ He wiggled the antenna through the tramp’s gaping jaw and carefully retracted it. ‘See on the end there?’

  ‘I haven’t got my glasses,’ Bryant admitted. ‘What is it?’

  ‘Soot. Burning is a common form of accidental death, rare as a method of suicide because it’s far too slow and painful, virtually unheard-of as a means of homicide, despite what you see on the telly. My second question is always, was the victim alive or dead when the fire started? Soot in the air passages suggests he was alive. I ran a blood test, and the presence of carbon monoxide and cyanide from the armchair fabric proves it, not to mention the fact that his blood is fire-engine red, which indicates the presence of poison. So we know he wasn’t fatally injured before the fire.’

  ‘What about those?’ Bryant pointed to what appeared to be knife wounds on the corpse’s upper arms.

  ‘Actually, they’re heat ruptures. Third-degree burns, partial destruction of the skin using the old Glaister six-degree methodology. Feet left intact because he fell head-first toward the door with his shoes against the building’s outer wall, which didn’t burn. Hyperaemia, that’s the clustering of leukocytes—white blood cells sent to heal damage—around the ruptures, which suggests to me that he was dead drunk when the blaze started, and blistered while he was still breathing, poor bugger.’

  ‘Why are his arms up in a boxing pose?’ asked Bryant. ‘He looks like Henry Cooper.’

  ‘Heat stiffening,’ Finch explained, snapping the plastic sheet back in place. ‘The muscles tend to coagulate on the flexor surface of the limbs.’
<
br />   ‘Did you get a chance to check gut contents?’

  ‘Of course.’ Finch looked at him as if he was mad. ‘I know how to do my job. He’d hardly eaten in days, but the stomach lining had plenty of alcohol damage. His liver was little more than a meaty lace curtain. You could stick your fingers through it. I presume your lad can set the time of the fire pretty accurately.’

  ‘So what’s the cause of death?’

  ‘Well, technically poisoning, but you can say fire.’ Finch swept the cloth back over the body like a magician covering an assistant.

  ‘Four deaths, four elements.’ This is where the trail stops cold, thought Bryant. I promised Raymond we’d wrap this up, but what the hell do I do now?

  ‘Kettle’s nearly boiled,’ said Finch. ‘I’m making Madagascan Vanilla Pod.’

  ‘Do you have any PG Tips?’

  ‘No, I gave up dairy the year Chris Bonnington climbed Everest. You should too, a man of your age.’

  ‘I am not a man of my age,’ replied Bryant indignantly. ‘I’m more the age of someone much younger.’

  ‘You think that,’ Finch morosely dangled his teabag over the mug, ‘but a look at your insides would tell a different story.’

  ‘Wait a minute. You said confirming whether the victim was dead or alive is always your second question. What’s the first?’

  ‘Well, am I sure the body is who it’s supposed to be, obviously. Death removes so many human characteristics that identification can be hard even for a close relative, and in this case we have no relations, close or otherwise, only your frankly inadequate description and that of the hostel clerk. Running a height-and-weight match was easy enough—I didn’t have to allow for fat burning or being drawn off because you don’t find much excess baggage on homeless men—and that was consistent enough.’

  Bryant glanced at his old sparring partner with suspicion. ‘But what? You were heading for a “but” there, weren’t you?’

  ‘Well, it was the lack of positive identifiers,’ Finch complained. He suddenly looked uncomfortable, almost embarrassed. ‘We made the mistake with your false teeth after the unit blew up, didn’t we?’

  Bryant harrumphed. ‘So what did you look for?’

  ‘I checked for signs consistent with long-term crippling on the left side of the body, severe bone-wear in the hip-joint, damage to the femur, then I checked the radius and ulna. Nothing unusual, perfectly normal limbs, no ligature damage apparent to the naked eye. Scar tissue doesn’t burn so easily, so I checked all over. Either your fellow was faking his disabilities—and why on earth would he do that? Didn’t you say he limped when trying to get away from you?’

  ‘Or what?’

  ‘Or you have the wrong man.’

  ‘The body definitely came from his room.’

  Finch sighed with annoyance. ‘Then he switched rooms with someone else. Use your head. Maybe he even switched clothes and left the building. It means he’s not as daft as you thought. He was on to you, and now he’s got away.’

  39

  * * *

  GOING UNDER

  Kallie reread what she had written, then highlighted a sentence and deleted it. After three further deletions, there was virtually nothing left of the email, at which point she knew it would not be sent.

  She had no way of knowing whether Paul was still checking his hotmail account. Perhaps he had moved on, heading further south to the sun, only to become lost among the travellers who passed lifetimes searching for themselves in shadowless landscapes. She was already starting to forget certain things about him. If he decided to return, she would consider her plan of action, but nothing would ever be the same between them.

  At least the house was becoming more presentable. Fresh paint and paper had brightened the rooms, and with the fee from a new modelling contract she would be able to afford a new kitchen in the basement. An electrician had provided plans for a runway of halogen bulbs that would bring much-needed light into the lower-ground floor.

  The basement bathroom still needed work, but something stopped her from tackling the job. Dampness lived on in its corners like the shadows of a persistent illness. On some mornings, she could see her breath in the room’s cold spots. The spiders had returned, despite all her efforts to dislodge them, and a patch of parquet remained permanently slick with icy sweat. Until she could bring herself to tackle the problems, she would continue to stay out of the room as much as possible.

  The doorbell made her jump. As Kallie opened the front door, Heather pushed past her excitedly. ‘He’s back!’ she called. ‘Look in your garden, I saw him a moment ago.’

  ‘Who? The old man?’ For once, Kallie was almost glad to see her neighbour. At least she provided a distraction from her own problems.

  ‘Can you believe it? He’s right where he always stands, inside that bush—you should really cut it down.’ She peered from the back landing window, wiping the glass. ‘Damn, I can’t see him, but he was there. I was trimming shallots over the sink and looked up. Goes to show the police are telling us lies.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ Kallie asked, searching for signs that Tate had returned to the garden.

  ‘I immediately rang the Peculiar Crimes Unit and spoke to Sergeant Longbright. She told me the old tramp had died in a fire at his hostel. But if he’s dead he must have a twin—although I do think he’s wearing different clothes now. What could have happened?’

  Kallie was taken aback, less by the news than by Heather’s attitude. With little else to focus her energies on, she had lately become the eyes and ears of the street, watching and listening with a hysterical intensity that disturbed Kallie.

  ‘Either the police know and are lying to us for some reason, or he got out of the building somehow,’ said Heather. ‘This means we can’t rely on them for help, don’t you see? I’m sure that disgusting, sinister old man is behind it all. You could be in danger, and the police aren’t willing to do anything about it. They’ll see you murdered in your bed first, like poor Jake.’

  ‘We could all be in danger, Heather.’

  ‘He’s in your garden, don’t you understand? It’s you he wants. Why don’t they do something more to protect us?’

  ‘How can they unless they know what they’re dealing with?’ asked Kallie. ‘They haven’t a clue. It’s like when you report a burglary; you never expect to get your stuff back. I was just about to make some tea. Stay and have one.’

  ‘I can’t stop long.’ Heather reluctantly left the window.

  ‘Does he never come into your garden?’

  ‘Oh, I’ve seen him there once or twice, but he seems far more interested in you.’

  ‘That’s comforting.’

  ‘I’m sorry, I don’t mean to frighten you. I mean, this is having an effect on all of us. Randall Ayson’s wife is threatening to leave him, did you hear? Everyone says he’s been having an affair, and he’s supposed to be a born-again Christian. Which means that the only people down this street who are still in stable relationships are Omar and Fatima, despite the fact that she can’t have kids and he’s desperate to be a father, and that horrible property developer, Mark Garrett, and his girlfriend, who of course will never get a wedding ring out of him, and the Wiltons, although I wouldn’t be surprised if Oliver wasn’t playing away. Brewer’s been telling his father he wants to be a policeman, but Oliver wants him to become a lawyer.’ She paused for a breath. ‘Have you heard anything more from Paul?’

  ‘Nothing. He seems to have vanished off the face of the earth.’

  ‘Men! What is it that requires them to turn into teenagers for the whole of their thirties? Nobody ages gracefully any more. Whatever happened to pipes?’

  ‘Mr Bryant smokes one.’

  ‘Well, there’s a limit. He’s short enough to be my grandfather. I honestly believe that if women could learn to read an A-Z in a moving vehicle we’d have no need of men at all. Have you thought of moving out?’

  The question, tacked into part of Heather’s random
thought process, caught Kallie by surprise.

  ‘No, of course not. What do you mean?’

  ‘Only that with all the trouble in the street, and Paul taking off, you might prefer something in a smarter, safer area. I mean, the attacker is clearly someone who lives in the neighbourhood, and he’s still at large, isn’t he? So there’s no telling who might be at risk.’

  ‘You’re the one who thought this would be a good idea in the first place.’