Full Dark House (11 page)

‘Resume rehearsals,’ said Bryant, taking his partner’s cue. ‘Behave as if nothing untoward has happened.’

‘You could make an announcement to the effect that Capistrania has been taken ill and has been placed in quarantine,’ added May. ‘Scarlet fever perhaps.’

‘Thank heaven someone around here is ready to take charge.’ Helena gave May a reassuring smile. ‘I already feel safer in your capable hands.’

Bryant made a face behind Helena’s back, and was caught in the act when she turned round. He transformed his grimace into a cough as, somewhere far below, an oboe hit a warning note.

‘I thought you were jolly impressive with La Parole back there,’ said Bryant, bouncing along the corridor to the box office as they left. ‘We make a bloody good double act. Perhaps we should take to the stage: Bryant and May, detective duo, some juggling, a patter song and a sand dance, what do you think?’

‘I think you’re completely loopy,’ answered May truthfully. ‘It’s a murder investigation. I don’t have the training for this.’

‘You’re young enough still to have an open mind,’ said Bryant, laughing. ‘That’s all the training you need.’

15

SOMETHING POISONOUS

‘Hello, Oswald, something’s different in here, have you had the place decorated? I’m rather partial to the smell of new paint.’

‘Very funny, Mr Bryant.’

Oswald Finch, the pathologist, sat back from his desk notes and cracked the bones in his wrists. His team had been forced to disinfect the department at West End Central after Arthur had presented him with a cadaver so slippery with infesting bacteria that it had reacted with their usual chemical neutralizers, causing the entire floor to reek of ammonia and rotting fish. This was no problem for Finch, who had the occupational advantage of being born without a sense of smell, but Westminster’s health officer had threatened to shut them down unless they did something about it.

Apart from the nuisance factor of dealing with council officials, Finch couldn’t see what all the fuss was about. He found the process of bodily decay fascinating. Bryant had suggested that, as a longtime supporter of Tottenham Hotspur, he was used to seeing things slowly fall apart.

‘At least we got you a nice fresh one this time,’ May pointed out cheerfully. There was something so depressing about being in Finch’s presence that people adopted an air of forced jollity around him. He had the suicidal expression of a Norwegian painter and the posture of a unstuffed rag doll. No one in the unit had been surprised when Oswald’s glamorous wife had left him for a dashing RAF officer. Rather, they were amazed that he had managed to marry anyone at all.

‘She’s been dead since Monday evening. Come and take a look.’ He rose and led the detectives through to a windowless green-tiled chamber behind his office. Scrubbed wooden workbenches and ceramic sinks alternated along opposite walls. One table was in use, its occupant covered with a white sheet more to reduce temperature change than to spare feelings.

Unlike most autopsy rooms, this one had variable light settings instead of bright overhead panels. The reason became apparent when May studied the laboratory’s centrepiece, a mass of counterbalanced mechanics so advanced for the time that, as yet, the results it yielded could not be considered as admissible evidence. Having developed the system exclusively for the unusual demands of the PCU, Finch was now testing the prototype in the hope that it would become the new industry standard. The unit was so close to the discovery of computer technology that, years later, John May wondered how they had not managed to stumble upon the invention of binary code. But on that day, he had been so fascinated and horrified by the sight of a dead body that he saw little else.

‘I assume you’ve definitely ruled out some kind of bizarre accident?’ asked Bryant.

‘I’m not so sure. According to your man Runcorn, she didn’t fall down in the lift, she passed out. No fibre snags on the lift wall or something; you’ll have to speak to him about it. And I don’t think loss of consciousness was caused by anything natural like a narcoleptic fit. Her medical files indicate that she was in perfect health.’

‘You’ve already raised her records?’ asked Bryant. ‘I’m impressed. We don’t even have a typist.’

‘We don’t hang about here, Arthur,’ said Finch pointedly, ‘not when you can lose half an afternoon from an air raid.’

‘Do we now have a formal identification of the body?’

‘The theatre’s registered doctor knew her. She has no family living here. We think her father’s in Vienna. We’re trying to notify him now. Look at this.’ Finch drew back the sheet to expose the body’s right shoulder, then pressed the end of a nail file against the inside of Capistrania’s upper arm. ‘Ignore the lividity. The flesh clearly retains any indentation marks you make on it. In my book that’s a sign of infected tissue. The introduction of something poisonous. My first reaction was to check for evidence of a narcotic, stuff a dancer might possibly use to improve her performance.’

‘Is that what they do?’

‘I don’t know,’ Finch admitted. ‘I don’t know any dancers.’

‘You go to that hoochie-coochie place in Clerkenwell. Forthright used to see you queuing up outside as she was going home. Anything come up in the blood samples?’

‘This equipment’s faster than most, but there’s an awful lot to test for. I started by looking at cardiac glycosides, oldendrin, nerioside, toxic carbohydrate groups, but there’s no evidence of vascular distress, no common signs of poisoning.’

‘How can you be sure?’

‘I can’t, but convulsions in such a confined space would cause bruising on the limbs and some kind of organic material deposit at the site, which Runcorn has yet to find. There’s no indication of haemorrhage, diarrhoea or vomiting. I checked the stomach contents. She’d eaten a sandwich about three-quarters of an hour before death, some kind of poultry in the filling, nothing unusual, and a type of chocolate bar, something with nuts in—don’t Barker and Dobson do one? I don’t think it’s an allergic reaction of any kind. Still, the gastric juices are disturbed, and if we assume that assimilation was rapid, causing her to fall down shortly after she’d entered the lift, I’d say we were looking at something that paralysed her muscles. There’s a lot of clenched tissue in her limbs.’

‘So you know what she didn’t die of. What’s your initial reaction?’ Bryant had come to trust Finch’s instincts, even though they were unlikely to find their way into official reports until the appearance of corroborative evidence.

‘There’s some slight inflammation and discoloration on her right knee. Dancers bruise all the time, of course, but this one’s very fresh, consistent with falling in the lift. I think she just dropped suddenly in her tracks, which suggests a fast fall in the supply of blood to the brain or some kind of synaptic disruption, but I’d still expect more electrical activity.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Limbic convulsion. Aberrant behaviour from the nerve endings. Cuts on the hands, something to indicate a bit of thrashing about.’

‘You realize what you’re saying—it’s possible that she collapsed and got her feet caught.’

‘I have to say that because of the trace evidence.’ Finch moved down to the base of the table and rolled back the sheet. ‘You can see the avulsive trauma here in tissue dragged right from bone, separated from all of its connective materials. That’s how we know the skin and musculature around the ankles have been torn, not cut. These parallel scrape marks are actually scored deep into the cartilage, and the bones are severely compacted to a depth of an eighth of an inch. That’s consistent with the concrete ledge hitting the feet and breaking them off. You can get Runcorn to look along the ledge for vertical striations that include bone particles. Obviously the pain must have been appalling, and for a young lady to remain still while something like this happened, I just think it’s unlikely that she would have been conscious. There’s another thing. She’s very short, slender, very small-boned, virtually no body fat.’

‘A lot of dancers are tiny,’ May pointed out.

‘Small people are easier to poison, although there are exceptions to the rule. Women get drunk more quickly than men because they carry more fat. Dancers are a different kettle of fish, though. A fast-acting muscular poison, possibly something naturally occurring, would have taken care of her. I just ran tests for a substance called coniine, which paralyses the body in pretty much the same way as curare.’

‘Curare? I thought that caused heart failure. One has images of blowpipes being aimed in the jungle.’

‘That’s because it was used by Orinoco Indians. A plant resin. But I believe there’s a prescribed clinical version available in America. It’s not unheard of for doctors to inject it into pre-op patients in order to reduce the amount of anaesthesia needed. The point is, we’ve got a positive match for coniine, but not for curare. Something was definitely introduced into her body, but I’m at a loss to understand how. There are no visible puncture marks of any kind.’

‘What about in the feet?’

‘Obviously I’ve yet to examine those.’

‘But you don’t think it likely that she was injected.’

‘I didn’t say that. I said there are no
visible
signs so far. Hypodermic injection sites can heal very quickly and disappear completely within two days.’ He tapped a pencil against his long yellow teeth. ‘There is something here, though. Take a look at this.’ He pointed to the small radiophonic monitor angled above the cadaver. ‘One of our new gadgets. I’m not sure how reliable it is yet. It’s taking subcutaneous readings from different levels in her body tissue. This is the balance of acids that occurs at cellular level. They should all be about the same height.’ The screen showed a number of bright green lines, but some were much taller than others.

‘And what does that mean?’ asked May, looking up at the chartreuse-tinged face of the pathologist.

‘That’s rather the problem.’ Finch narrowed his eyes as he studied the drifting pulsations. ‘I haven’t the faintest idea.’

16

OFF THE RADAR

Janice Longbright was seated on a stack of Tampax boxes trying to type with two fingers. Outside, on the steps of Kentish Town police station, a gang of teenagers were screaming at each other. The former detective sergeant forced herself to block out the noise and concentrate. With the Mornington Crescent offices blown to smithereens, the unit’s surviving personnel had been evacuated to the nearest annexe, but with the force on full alert, no chairs or desks were available for them to work from. The Tampax boxes had been found in the boot of a boy’s car, cushioning a number of rifles and stolen army pistols, and made a passably comfortable seat.

The sounds in the street were becoming more confrontational. Longbright looked around the overcrowded office at men and women barking into phones, and was unsurprised that no one had the energy to go outside and stop the fight before someone got hurt. The gang members would be at each other again the second the police departed. Trying to help them was like sticking a plaster on a cut throat.

With John May still off on leave, Longbright had reluctantly agreed to return to the unit for a few weeks. Balancing the telephone on her knee, she tried Sam Biddle’s number. This time she got through to him. The Home Office’s new police liaison officer was supposed to be providing them with relocation plans and news of emergency funding, but was proving evasive.

‘I can’t give you anything concrete at the moment,’ he insisted. ‘There are too many other priorities.’

‘So I keep being told,’ replied Longbright impatiently. ‘Presumably we all have to be firebombed before we get your attention.’

‘We have to make sure the police can protect civilians first. Yesterday we had tourists getting caught in crossfire at Stockwell tube station. Once this situation is under control we can take a look at the unit’s future.’

‘What’s happening in this city isn’t a “situation”, it’s an epidemic, things are out of control. And who said the unit’s future was in question?’

‘Your building is gone, Longbright.’

‘We still have our staff.’

‘No, you have one of your two directors left alive, and he’s beyond retirement age.’

‘We have DuCaine and the other new recruits.’ Longbright was stung by Biddle’s reversal of attitude. Only days ago he had been talking about recruiting amateurs, in accordance with the Scarman Centre’s findings.

‘The minister’s position on this is that Mr Bryant was caught up in some kind of internecine feud that resulted in his demise. We don’t have the manpower or the money to investigate all of the surrounding circumstances. Obviously what happened is unfortunate, but it’s our position that Bryant was acting alone and knew the hazards of doing so. We’re concerned about the dangers to the public posed by the collapse of the building, but as mishaps go these days, it’s pretty much off our radar.’

‘Your grandfather was a great friend of Arthur Bryant’s. He would be ashamed of you now, Mr Biddle.’ Longbright slammed down the receiver just as the stack of boxes slid away beneath her.

To calm herself she went to her car for a cigarette. A young girl with a sharp face and scraped-back blond hair challenged her.

‘This your motor? You gonna give me a tenner for saving your stereo?’ Her hands were thrust defiantly into the cheap cotton of her jacket. Longbright presumed she was carrying a knife.

‘I’m a police officer. Fuck off before I arrest you.’

‘You can’t arrest me, bitch.’ The girl stuck out her chin. She was all of fifteen. Longbright knew without looking that she had track marks on the backs of her legs.

‘I’ll think of a reason if I have to.’ Longbright moved her aside and climbed into the car, quickly locking the door. She watched the girl walk back to her mates, feeling almost sorry for her.

A cigarette soothed her nerves. She exhaled smoke and sat back in the seat as sirens started up in the police station car park. Poor John, she thought. Wherever he is, he’ll have to figure this one out by himself.

17

IMPRESSIONS

‘There is no precedent for what we’re trying to create here, Mr Biddle,’ explained Bryant. ‘There are no superior officers correcting our mistakes. The last thing I need is you going to Davenport and informing him of our progress.’