Ten Second Staircase (21 page)

'There was nothing in the room, Oswald,' Bryant insisted.

'Then I'm afraid there's something you've missed,' replied the pathologist. 'How are you getting on with White?'

'It seems increasingly likely that Calvin Burroughs was the father of her child, but it's too early to say for sure.' Bryant sniffed the air. 'If you let me smoke my pipe in here, it would get rid of the ghastly smell.'

'This is meant to be a sealed sterile area. You are not allowed to smoke your disgusting Old Navy Rough Cut Sailors' Shag in here. I found fag ash in my body tray last week and knew it was you.'

'I mix it with eucalyptus leaves. It's medicinal.' Bryant picked up a pair of steel rib-cutters. 'Can I borrow these? I'm thinking of having a barbeque at the weekend.'

'Just leave things alone.' Finch snatched the instrument from him. 'If you really want to help, get me Giles Kershaw as an assistant.'

Bryant smiled slyly. 'Will you stay if I do?'

The ancient pathologist went to wash his hands at the sink. 'I'll think about it,' he said, making a bear-catching-salmon motion that told Bryant the water was too hot. 'But things will have to improve around here,' he added, shaking off water.

'Then I'll have a word with Raymond.' Bryant tipped his head back at Martell's corpse. 'The zips on his tracksuit top were welded shut, by the way.'

'They were?' Finch looked up, amazed. 'Why didn't anyone tell me this?'

'You complained about bodies arriving with their clothes on.'

'You remember those two Japanese ladies who sheltered under a tree in Hyde Park during a thunderstorm? They were struck by lightning, and their zip fasteners melted. Judging from the marks on Martell's wrists, it sounds like the same thing. That changes everything. All you have to do now is find out how it was done.'

'On the case, old sausage,' said Bryant, slipping the rib-cutters into his overcoat pocket and sauntering from the room.

20

ANCIENT BLOOD

Dan Banbury and Giles Kershaw had so little in common that they were ideally suited to work together.

There were some similarities: Both were in their late twenties, both had been high scorers at university, neither had much field experience. Despite their intelligence and enthusiasm, the unit was able to buy them cheaply, because each possessed a flaw; Banbury had spent his entire childhood in his bedroom in Bow operating increasingly sophisticated computer networks while his parents explored new methods of destroying each other downstairs, and the period had taken its toll by leaving him with no social skills. He assumed everyone was interested in crime scene technology, and bored civilians into submission at the slightest provocation. Years of junk food and immobility had left him with the unprepossessing air of a root vegetable, a turnip in shape, a parsnip in colouring. Women made a special effort to avoid him. Lately he had dieted, exercised, and taken advice on a haircut, most of which had rendered him the approximation of a normal human being, but he still fell short in the area of normal conversation, and women still avoided him.

Giles Kershaw came from a posh, impoverished family whose country home had been sold to the government in 1976 and turned into the National Museum of Farming Implements. His speech was so strangled that his tongue fell over in conversation, and hardly anyone in London could understand him. The police force is no place for the upper classes. He was the first person in his family ever to have a job or buy his own furniture. As a consequence, he had suffered snubs from his friends and ridicule from his colleagues. At least he had social skills—rather too many, in fact—and was prepared to teach Banbury the basics. It was no secret that Bryant and May saw the duo as potential counterparts to themselves who might one day come to inherit the unit, should it miraculously survive that long.

Still, Banbury and Kershaw had never worked closely on a case together before, and bets were being taken in the unit staff room as to whether they would prove a successful combination or end up conducting a class war. The PCU's new independence meant that its component parts had to fit as tightly as members of a football squad. That meant no stars, no upstaging, no missed passes. Their first test came the following morning, in the sealed-off gym behind Farringdon Road, as the pair unpacked their equipment: bags, pots, sacks, swab kits, water bottles, tape, labels, print powders, flatpacked boxes, cameras, and a mobile Smartwater Index tracer that Banbury was dying to try out.

'Perspiration stains,' Giles Kershaw indicated, walking around the exercise equipment. 'Looks like there are plenty of them on the machine Martell was using.'

'A man of that size should have been leaving pools of sweat,' said Banbury. 'Never see the point of exercise myself. The patches must have dried fast, but we can still get a residue match. Maybe it wasn't all his.'

'Don't get into the glands, old sausage, they're too unreliable.' Sweat contained amino acids, fats, chlorides, urea, and sugar in varying amounts, but its construction varied in the body from one day to the next. 'I take it you're assuming his attacker managed to slip under the door with his portable lightning conductor, then leave the same way.'

'I don't know; maybe he killed Martell by remote control.'

'Perverse but possible, I suppose.'

Banbury dropped to his knees, then shimmied under the seat of the exercise machine, examining its base. 'He certainly didn't come in through the main door.'

'You can't be sure of that.'

'Martell left pristine prints on both inner and outer handles. You can't open a door without touching the handle. The prints should be smudged, otherwise we must assume no-one else came in via the entrance. Forget the windows, they're barred and dead-bolted.' Banbury wriggled back out and rose to inspect the grip bars. 'There's no other access, so there has to be something here you've missed.'

'Something
I've
missed? You're the crime scene manager, lovey. I don't know why you're examining those; Martell never touched bare metal. Both the grips have rubber slipcovers.'

Banbury pulled at the foot-long grips, but they fitted tightly over the steel arms of the machine. 'You're right, he shouldn't have come into contact with metal. There's no way to get these off. Give me a hand.' Between them, they managed to move the machine out and check beneath it. 'If you were going to electrocute someone here, you'd have to assume your victim would be wearing rubber-soled trainers, so I guess the current would need to pass through his hands. Martell wasn't wearing workout gloves.'

They tore up four carpet tiles and exposed a red rubberised layer coating the concrete floor. Banbury climbed behind the machine and examined the white ceramic wall tiles. 'Hang on a minute, take a look at this.' He shone a penlight into a centimetre-wide hole between the tiles.

'Clutching at straws,' said Kershaw, disappointed. 'It's just an air bubble in the grout. What's behind there?'

'A private apartment; I don't know who it belongs to. The hole looks like it might go all the way, though.'

'Not big enough to pass anything through.'

'Yes, it is. Let's get the keys.'

They found the caretaker and had themselves admitted to a narrow flat, thickly perfumed and decorated in claustrophobic seventies' paisley patterns of green, yellow, and brown.

'Madame Briquet divides her time between here and her villa in Menton,' explained the caretaker. 'She wouldn't like me letting strange men into her flat.'

'We're not strange,' said Kershaw. 'We're from the Peculiar Crimes Unit.'

'All right.' The caretaker regarded him uncertainly. 'Just don't disturb anything.'

'That depends on what we find, mate.' Banbury bridled. 'We might have to tear the place to bits.'

Kershaw silenced his partner with a look. 'We'll be terribly careful,' he promised. 'This will only take a moment.'

They located the connecting wall to the gymnasium. Banbury tapped on it experimentally. 'Kitchen,' he said. 'Look at the cooker. Interesting.'

Kershaw couldn't see what was interesting about an ancient upright electric Canon but held his tongue. Banbury knelt and felt around in the gloom. 'Blimey, there's some muck behind here,' he complained.

After a few minutes, he heaved himself to his feet dragging a coil of fine copper wire from behind the stove. 'He's a clever sod, but we've got him.' He waved the roll in a chubby fist. 'Did you ever have a home physics kit when you were a kid?'

'Certainly not.'

'So what did you do for fun?'

'I went shooting on the estate.'

'Yeah, there were a few shootings on our estate, too. Better warn the caretaker this apartment's part of a crime scene now. His tenant's going to have a fit.' Banbury scratched himself thoughtfully while studying the wire. 'I won't get prints off this, but I might be able to lift a palm heel from the cooker front. He had to push it back into place.' He produced a Zephyr brush from his kit and twirled it experimentally. 'You know, the Met have put more technology on the street than any other force in Europe. They're outside my flat monitoring radio waves from fake ice cream vans, and still couldn't stop my car from being nicked. They'd be useless at something like this. This is the kind of crime I joined the unit for. It requires belief in the absurd. Even in death, you can be given proof of the desperate ingenuity of human nature.'

'I'm pleased you approve of the killers we attract,' said Kershaw, nonplussed. 'Go and get the rest of your kit. It's time we scored one for the unit.'

Arthur Bryant found himself back at The Street, the dingy, litterstrewn concrete corridor running beneath the central block of the Roland Plumbe Community Estate. His route took him through a flooded concrete stairwell where a smouldering mattress slumped beside stacks of broken Argos kitchen furniture. He shook his head in wonder, unable to imagine why anyone would deliberately despoil their home territory.

Bryant's parents had conformed to the wartime London cliché about East End pride and poverty. In Bethnal Green, it was common for a wife to embarrass her old man by taking his Sunday lunch down to the pub. His mother aired the family's bed linen but never her emotions. Whenever she was angry she cleaned the house, and the house was always spotless. Women of whom she didn't approve were accused of keeping a dirty home. He wondered what she would make of the estate.

Lorraine Bonner, the leader of the Residents' Association, was waiting for him. She had called the unit an hour earlier to tell him that the Highwayman had been sighted again. 'Mr Bryant, this is getting to be a habit,' she smiled, passing him a plastic cup. Word of Bryant's heroinlike addiction to strong tea had obviously got about. 'The girls are over here.'

She led the way beneath an arch to a mesh-glassed stairwell door. Inside, two teenagers sat on the steps. Bryant recognised the look they shared: pale scraped-back hair tied into a short ponytail in a style derogatively referred to as a Croydon facelift, hoop earrings, Puffa jackets, studded jeans, charm bracelets, baby-pink shoes over white socks. One was smoking, both were chewing gum. They appeared to be soured, sullen, and battle-hardened at thirteen, and perhaps they were, but Bryant wondered how far he had to scratch beneath the brittle surface before discovering girls with ordinary hopes and insecurities. Such youngsters had been referred to as chavs for decades, but this mysterious term had only recently passed into universal use.

'Danielle, Sheree, this is Mr Bryant. I want you to tell him what you told me.'

'I'm not a policeman, strictly speaking,' he quickly explained. 'I'm trying to find out if the man you saw is—'

'We seen him on the telly,' said Danielle suddenly. 'The Highwayman. It's the same bloke. We all know who he is 'cause he's in like a gang and that. We seen you and all. What you going to give us if we tell you?'

Bryant had been hoping they had not seen him before. The testimony of his witnesses would now be tainted by previous exposure. 'Where did you see the Highwayman?' he asked.

'Third-floor bridge.' Danielle looked at her friend for confirmation.

'You mean the balcony that runs along the front of the block?' asked Bryant.

'The bridges connect the two newer wings to the central block,' Lorraine explained. 'There's one on the third floor, and one on the sixth.'

'He was standing there like come on then come and get me like he was disrespecting and fronting out being so hard,' said Sheree in a sudden rush.

'Can you describe him to me?'

'He was wearing these raw leathers, you know, like a biker, only a black mask over his eyes and this cap thing and boots and whatever.'

Bryant knew it would be a struggle getting the girls to articulate clearly enough for a witness statement; they had rarely been challenged to describe anything in detail. How much of what they saw was culled from artists' impressions on TV and in newspapers? Perhaps they simply wanted attention, and had invented the sighting.

Sheree launched another assault on the English language. 'St C is blatantly taxin' us saying it's someone on this estate just 'cause we got the Saladins and they're Yahs and they diss us and saying we're slack and that, so when they come here sharkin' us we're gonna bust 'em up.'