Visibility (2 page)

The biggest excitement in the Hyde Park police station was locking the park gates every night. Herbert was sure Elkington wouldn’t be there long; he would get himself transferred as soon as possible, treating every case as a possible key to the door which led out and up.

Herbert considered a moment. Neither Bradley nor Tulloch would want the case. They had wives and children, and they needed a new case this late in the day like a hole in the head. At best, it would be a false alarm; at worst, a serious drain on their Friday, possibly their weekend, too.

A cold, foggy night; a warm room for once mercifully quiet.

No contest.

“Where’s the body?” Herbert asked.

“By the Peter Pan statue,” Elkington said.

*  *  *

Herbert told Bradley and Tulloch where he was going, and promised to call in the moment he had something concrete. “Any time after ten,” Tulloch said; meaning he could call as much as he liked, once the night shift had come on. He wasn’t joking.

Herbert took a car from the pool and almost immediately regretted it. The fog was already thick enough to make driving difficult, and Herbert lost his way twice, even on roads he was sure he knew like the back of his hand. Headlights were little use; they simply bounced back off the thick particles of mist.

Eventually, he parked round the back of the Albert Hall and completed the journey on foot, his breath billowing in lung-shaped plumes around his head as he hurried forward against the cold.

Elkington had ensured that the scene was lit by flaming torches, as though it were some sort of pagan funeral. The edge of the water was blotched with ice, and covered in what looked like a thin film of powdered graphite. Herbert wondered for a moment where this film could have come from, and realized with a start that it must have settled there from the fog. What other particles the mist was carrying, and what was settling inside his lungs every time he inhaled, scarcely bore consideration.

The Long Water was a dammed river; effectively a lake, therefore, without a current. The floater was a few yards from shore. It was lying facedown, as corpses tended to, with its limbs and head hanging lower than its torso. Perfectly motionless, it could have been a jellyfish.

Elkington looked even younger than he sounded,
cold-reddened cheeks smooth beneath a pile of dirty blond hair.

“I’ve touched nothing, sir,” Elkington said. “All I’ve done is call you and seal the scene; twenty yards in every direction.” Twenty yards was already beyond the limits of visibility; Elkington’s gestures indicated nothing but fog. “That’s correct procedure, isn’t it, sir?”

Herbert had been dead right about the kind of person Elkington was. His initial deduction now seemed less inspired guesswork than impeccable snap judgment. Still, he reflected, at least it was a pleasant change to have someone look up to him, after the stonewalling indifference he faced back at the Yard.

“That is indeed,” Herbert said.

“The way you would have done it?”

“Don’t tell me—you’ve always wanted to work in the Murder Squad.”

“As a matter of fact, sir, I have.”

“Then you can start by telling me who found the body.”

“I did.” If Elkington had put his hand up and started shouting Me, sir, me, me, it would not have surprised Herbert in the slightest. “When I was doing my rounds.”

“You were alone?”

“No, sir. I was with Flew and Hare. Here, sir.”

He indicated the constables either side of him. Flew had a neat, slightly effete face framed by a mass of curly black hair. Hare’s nose kinked halfway down and set off at a tangent; broken and badly reset, Herbert thought. Like Elkington, neither looked old enough to be shaving yet, let alone policing.

Herbert nodded at Flew and Hare, and they waded
into the water with a synchronicity of which twins would have been proud.

Elkington made a sign of the cross, which Herbert might have found touching had Elkington not checked first to see whether he was watching.

There was an autopsy unit at Imperial College, less than a mile away on Exhibition Road. The pathologist, a small man whose glasses were as round and shiny as the top of his head, was waiting for Herbert in the foyer.

“Rathbone,” he said simply.

Rathbone, Elkington, Flew, Hare; didn’t these people have Christian names?

Herbert and Rathbone shook hands.

“Right then, right then.” Rathbone’s voice rose and fell in twittering ululations. “Let’s get on with it, yes?”

There would soon be a backlog, he explained en route to the autopsy room; pedestrians hit by cars traveling too fast in the murk, elderly people for whom the extra pollution would prove too much.

Herbert supposed it lucky that the body had been found before the rush.

It could not have been in the water long, for it was still recognizably human, more than enough for Herbert to imagine what the man must have been like in life.

He rattled through the alphabetical checklist that had been drummed into him during Five’s surveillance training. A for age: mid-twenties. B for build: medium, as far as he could tell under the man’s dark suit, which took him neatly on to C for clothes—white shirt, crimson tie, dapper black shoes, no hat. No surprise in any of that; men invariably wore a jacket and tie, whatever they
were doing and wherever they were going. Strange not to have been wearing a coat in this weather, though.

No Distinguishing marks. Ethnic origin: Caucasian. F for face, in this case somewhat cherubic, even through the postmortem swelling. No Glasses, at least none still hooked over the ears; and, since he was dead, no chance to ascertain his Gait. His Hair was blond and floppy. He carried no Items.

All this had gone through Herbert’s head in less than a second.

Rathbone stripped the body quickly and efficiently until it was laid out in inglorious nudity on the examination table. Herbert supposed that pathology, with all its emphasis on the clinical and chemical, was intended to sanitize death. Here, it seemed to have exactly the opposite effect, making it even more revolting than Herbert had thought possible.

“You understand,” Rathbone said, “that drownings are usually suicides or accidents, yes? There are plenty of easier ways to murder someone.”

“I understand.”

“And it’s very difficult to tell whether someone was drowned at all, as opposed to being immersed in water postmortem, yes? Let alone whether they were drowned voluntarily or against their will.”

“All I’d like you to do is to tell me how he died, and who he was.”

“Well, ha-ha, I’m no alchemist, Detective Inspector…?”

“Smith.”

“First things first, yes? Let’s find out how long it’s been there.”

It’s
, Herbert noticed, not
he’s.
Well, that was only
to be expected. If he had had corpses coming across his table as though on a conveyor belt, he would probably have tried to regard them as objects rather than human too.

Rathbone took a thermometer and rolled the body onto its side. It stared at Herbert with bulbous eyes in which he read accusing disappointment. The corpse’s cheeks were swollen and its skin wrinkled, like a washerwoman’s hands. Drained of color, its face seemed to leach into the air.

Rathbone pushed the thermometer towards the rectum, and stopped.

“What?” Herbert said.

Rathbone placed a hand on each of the dead man’s buttocks, pulled them apart, and nodded for Herbert to come closer.

Herbert thought of several snappy replies, all of them inappropriate.

He stepped forward, looked, and winced.

The man’s backside was a disaster zone; red raw, swollen into puffy ridges of flesh, and crisscrossed with scratch marks.

“Raped?” Herbert said.

Rathbone shook his head. “Not tonight. Many of these marks are several days old.”

“Homosexual, then. And practicing.”

“Very.”

All things being equal, Herbert would rather this particular can of worms had remained unopened. Homosexuality was illegal—“gross indecency contrary to Section 11 of the Criminal Law Amendment Act 1885,” as the law had it. Like most things illicit, it was also widespread, albeit necessarily furtive.

Every queer therefore lived with the same question: who knew? Among their own, they were usually safe; but, if caught, they faced chemical castration, the introduction of female hormones for what the law saw as their abnormal and uncontrollable sexual urges. Estrogen would make them impotent and obese, their looks suffocated in a welter of fat, their touting reduced to receiver status only.

As King George V had famously, or infamously, said about homosexuals: “I thought men like that shot themselves.”

Herbert had no particular beef against homosexuals, certainly not by prevailing standards of intolerance. He simply did not relish the prospect of poking around a closed community trying to find a truth that was liable, like many deaths, to end up being petty and sordid.

Rathbone busied himself around the man’s rear end for a few moments.

“No trace evidence,” he announced at length. “No bodily fluids.”

“You mean he’d taken a bath since his last, er, last…”

“Encounter?”

“Exactly.”

“Probably. But the water in the park could have washed such evidence off, yes?”

“The Long Water has no current. It’s like a millpond tonight.”

Rathbone pursed his lips and nodded. “Unlikely, then.”

He inserted the thermometer into the corpse’s rectum, waited a few moments, extracted it, and read off the digits.

“Eighty-eight degrees.” He looked at his watch. “It’s half past nine now. Normal body temperature is ninety-eight degrees. Bodies in water cool at about five or six degrees an hour, twice as fast as they do in air, yes? But these measures are approximate. Very generally, therefore, I would estimate the time of death at between half past six and eight o’clock this evening.”

In other words, not long before the body had been found; eight o’clock was when Elkington had phoned.

“You might want to go outside for this next part, yes?” Rathbone said.

“I’m not squeamish.”

Rathbone shrugged—
suit yourself
—took a small handsaw, and began to slice at the cadaver’s right shoulder.

He was right. Herbert did want to go outside.

After a small eternity while Herbert waited in the corridor, Rathbone popped his head round the door and beckoned him back inside.

Herbert followed him through, and almost immediately went straight back out again. The subject—see, Herbert was already beginning to think like Rathbone; hard not to, when they were in a glorified butcher’s shop—had been sliced open in three neat cuts, a perfect Y from shoulders to sternum and sternum to waist.

Rathbone picked up a lung. Patterned in marbles of gray and crimson, it shifted over the inside of his forearms, an outsize bladder which gave the disconcerting impression of being alive. It looked far too big to have ever fitted inside the dead man.

Rathbone placed the lung in a metal tray, picked up a knife, and sliced into it. Dirty water spurted from the gash.

How Herbert managed not to vomit, he had no idea.

“As I thought.” Rathbone seemed pleased. “Fluid.”

“I can see that.”

“No, no. Fluid, which you get only when air and water have been actively inspired. Passive flooding of lungs with water—in other words, postmortem—looks quite different, yes? And see”—he indicated above and around the dead man’s mouth—“the froth? Fine and white? Must still have been breathing, yes?”

Rathbone tripped over to a set of scales and lifted a small bag from the bowl. “The stomach. Pretty full.”

“He had just eaten, then?”

“A few hours before. Perhaps a late lunch. Shepherd’s pie and cabbage, at a guess. Also weeds, silt, and dirty water. Lake water. Not the kind of thing you get even in the most disreputable of restaurants, yes?” By the time Herbert realized that Rathbone had, in his own way, cracked a joke, the pathologist had moved on. “When the victim’s dead before entering the water, very little matter gets as far as the stomach. What you find is usually confined to the pharynx, trachea, and larger airways, yes?”

So the corpse, whoever he was, had drowned, rather than being placed in the water after his death.

Accident, suicide, or murder?

He had drowned in shallow water, at a point where it was easy to enter the water, but equally easy to walk out again. It was therefore unlikely to have been an accident, unless he was dead drunk, which seemed improbable given the time frame involved; drunks tended to die later in the evening.

Rathbone would test for alcohol, of course, but
both he and Herbert were thinking the same thing: the corpse did not have the look of a drinker.

Suicide was always a possibility, especially in the winter, when long nights and unremitting gloom could drive the heartiest of fellows to despair. Every suicide involved a great deal of resolve—Herbert had no truck with those who glibly dismissed it as the coward’s way out, as he imagined that few things involved more courage than the decision to kill oneself—but drowning oneself in a still, shallow body of water took more determination than most. There were many easier methods, especially for men, who tended to prefer the more violent methods of exit.

Which left only murder.

Rathbone wanted to run more tests, so Herbert found a phone and rang the Yard.

“Yes?” Tulloch’s voice was even more loaded with rage than usual, and when Herbert glanced at his watch he saw why; it was ten to ten.

He batted away a pang of childish pleasure at inconveniencing Tulloch. “It’s Smith.”

“What do you want?”

“To tell you about the dead man.”

“Couldn’t you have waited? He’s not going anywhere, is he?”

“No, but I am.”

Tulloch sighed. “Right. Tell me what you’ve got. And keep it short. Name?”

“Unknown.”

“Cause of death?”

“Drowning. Probably forcible.”

“Probably?”

“The pathologist’s running tests as we speak.”

“Is there anything you
do
know?”

“He was a homosexual.”