White Corridor Part 7

MIGRATION The train had been too crowded to risk talking to her. All he wanted to do was talk, and hear that she had understood his pain. She had left his satchel behind, the one that contained his own pa.s.sport, so he could continue travelling, but in his confusion he had given her a head start.

It wasn't hard to predict where she was headed; her complaints about her flat in South London were tinged with a longing to return there. She would either catch the ferry from Calais or use the Channel Tunnel service, then find the fastest train to the city centre.

He imagined watching from the end of the carriage as she slept in her seat, her head tilting with the sway of the tracks, jean-clad thighs s.h.i.+fting with the roll of the train as it pa.s.sed across points, and knew that he had to make her understand. The thought of never touching her again, or never finding anyone else to share his secrets, made him sick with fear. She was the woman who held the key to his continued survival. How had it come to this? Everything had been going so well between them. He was overcome with the need to explain himself. He had earned the right to do that, at least. Even now he felt safe and protected by her, knowing that she was unlikely to go to the police. He needed to watch her from a distance, until he could be sure. He would clear the path for the three of them, get rid of the stupid ex-husband and his brother, help her to see that he could build a happy life for them, because he had a strength few other men possessed, born from the day he had taken another's life. He had faced the evil within himself and overcome it.

She was a tourist, but he knew the system. He ran across the tracks and caught a fast train to Calais just as it was leaving, knowing she would miss it because the boy slowed her down. He arrived forty minutes before her train pulled in. As they alighted onto the platform and set off to purchase tickets for the P&O boat, he followed at a discreet pace, ready to intervene if she decided to find a police officer.

'It's too cold to be out here,' Madeline complained, gripping her son's hand tightly as he stood at the rail of the ferry. 'Let's go back inside.'

'Why did you leave my Spider-Man bag behind?' asked Ryan. His scarf and her warmest jacket had been folded away in it, but the bag had been left in their room during the rush to leave the hotel. He looked back out at the ice-grey channel and pointed to the sickly amber mist forming close to the water. Snow had begun to fall in thick flakes that stuck to his eyelids.

A steward tacked his way towards them. 'Can you go back inside, please? The deck's too slippery to be walking on. We'll be docking in twenty minutes.'

As she pushed Ryan towards the doors, Madeline glanced back at the sea and wondered if there was time to throw the incriminating envelope overboard. She no longer wanted to take it to the police; it tainted her, pulling them both back, a harmful omen that reminded her of the mariner's albatross.

She wanted to be home in Waterloo Road, where even her husband posed a smaller threat than the disturbing stranger who had invaded their life in France. She tried to imagine any circ.u.mstances that would present her discovery in a different light, but knew the truth in her heart; that he had killed and robbed and gone undiscovered, and would do so again if he felt threatened. She had learned to recognise the poisons that could fester and ripen inside him, knew it was her duty to warn the authorities, but feared they would bully and perhaps even implicate her. She could not find the energy within herself to set the process in motion. Instead, she was taking the coward's way out and running away. There would be no more confrontations with violent men. She had to think of her son's safety.

As the ferry lowered its great steel doors on the snowswept dock, she waited with her hands on Ryan's shoulders, preventing the impatient boy from charging forward.

'Are we going to catch another train?' he asked, looking up at her. 'Can't we get a car?'

Suddenly driving seemed a better option; she would be able to hire a vehicle and take Ryan to the Southwest. She had relatives there, and it would be a way of making up for her lack of judgement with Johann, to let him enjoy some of the wonderful places she had never been able to see as a child. They could drive back to London before the money ran out. 'All right,' she told him. 'We'll visit your aunt in Cornwall. We'll hire a car.'

At customs, her fingers closed around the packet containing Johann's other ident.i.ty. Its secrets were burning her hand. She wanted to speak out, but the sour-faced young officer who checked her pa.s.sport and waved her through showed no inclination to even acknowledge her presence.

As she made her way to the EasyCar kiosk, she had the sensation that she was being watched. Most likely there were CCTV cameras trained on them, checking for aberrant behaviour patterns and warning signs among the new arrivals. Surely he would never come here, where so much public life was monitored by security systems? Yet he had seemed entirely comfortable in Monaco, the most heavily policed country in the world. He was so convinced that no-one would ever be able to catch him that he had tested himself there.

She recalled the way he kept looking for the cameras in each street they entered, almost daring them to pick him out. How close had she come to placing herself and Ryan in danger? His victims were chosen for the sake of expedience, to gain their ident.i.ties. This fact alone made him mystifyingly complex; he was no serial killer, attacking for gratification. Instead, he seemed to view his actions as the mere removal of obstacles standing in his way. The pattern, she had learned, was cla.s.sic.

'Mum, she's talking to you.' Ryan tugged at her arm, pointing to the car hire lady.

'Did you want a manual saloon or an automatic?' asked the counter girl.

'Automatic. I need to drop it off in London.' While she filled in the forms, Ryan wandered to the gla.s.s wall and looked out at the falling snow. He was making patterns in the condensation when he saw Johann walking across the slush-scabbed forecourt towards the truck park. Opening the door, he slipped outside.

'Johann!' he called, running after the man he had started to consider his new father. 'Wait, we're over here!'

Johann stopped in mid-stride and looked back. When he recognised the boy, he waved back unsmilingly.

'Can you come with us?'

'I'll be with you soon, Ryan, I promise.'

'Mum's taking me to Cornwall. She's in there hiring a car. Let me get her.'

'No, don't do that.'

'But you don't know where we'll be.' He hung on to Johann's arm.

'Don't worry, Ryan, I'll find you.'

Madeline was coming out of the car hire kiosk, studying her receipt as she walked. He caught up with her in the snowy shadows of the dockside, the treacherous swell of ice-grey waves rising and plunging beside them.

'I don't understand you,' he said, seizing her arms, holding her close. 'You run away from me before I can explain, so I have to come after you. I know I am bad, I know what I have done, but you can save me, Madeline, you can make me good.'

'Leave me alone.' She was forced to shout because the wind was so strong in their ears. 'You're a murderer.' There were other words, but they were lost to the whirling sky.

'Yes, it is true, I cannot deny what I have done. But you-'

As she crushed Ryan to her side and ran from the quay, slipping on sea-wet concrete, she thought, He means to kill us both. I'll never let him near Ryan, never. Whatever I do, no matter how terrible, it will be for the sake of my son He means to kill us both. I'll never let him near Ryan, never. Whatever I do, no matter how terrible, it will be for the sake of my son.

19

INTIMATIONS DS Janice Longbright closed her mobile and perched on the edge of the desk, crossing her legs in a slither of caramel nylon. It was now 5:45 P.M P.M., and Giles Kershaw had returned with his preliminary notes on the examination of Oswald Finch's body. The sh.e.l.l-shocked members of the PCU had been gathered in Longbright's office, although no-one had yet managed to contact Raymond Land, who had last been seen tottering back from an extended Masonic luncheon with his Home Office liaison man, Leslie Faraday, in Covent Garden.

'Have you spoken to John and Mr Bryant?' asked Dan Banbury, following the unit's odd tradition of referring to May by his first name and Arthur by his last.

'It's not necessary to raise your hand, Dan, you're not in school. No, I thought I'd call them in a minute, with all of us here. Giles, have you got a time line for us?'

'Hang on a mo.' Kershaw unfolded his spindly legs and rose to the blackboard he had erected under the window. 'I'd usually PowerPoint my notes to you all, but we have no network.' He glanced accusingly at Banbury, who seemed not to mind. Bimsley had chosen to sit next to Mangeshkar, who had moved her legs as far as possible away from him. April sat at the back, watching intently, her arms folded protectively across her chest.

'The bruise on Oswald's neck wasn't the only one,' Kershaw explained. 'I found another, identical in shape and discolouring, on the left side of his chest. It would appear he suffered a thrombotic attack after getting thumped on the opening of his pulmonary artery and aortic valve, which prevents blood from reversing its flow back into the left ventricle of the heart. The convulsion interrupted the rhythm of his heart and stopped it. The whole thing happened very quickly, and was over in a few seconds. He was standing when this happened, and immediately fell down beneath the counter.'

'How do you know that?' asked Mangeshkar. 'How can you be sure he didn't simply suffer a traumatic episode due to the weakness of his heart? Why does it have to be linked to his bruises?'

'The marks go deep, Meera; they were made with great force. The one on his chest has actually torn several layers of the epidermis. They weren't caused by just b.u.mping into the furniture, and they're fresh enough to have occurred at his time of death. There's a secondary contusion on his skull where he glanced against the table edge as he fell. His right shoe twisted, causing a faint spiral pattern on the flooring, and he instinctively put out his left hand to break the fall, so he still had consciousness at that point. Dan lifted a partial palm print from the floor.

'No instruments of any kind have been removed from the wall cases, and there are no prints on the blades of the broken fan, even though I had my money on it having been used as a weapon. It couldn't have simply spun down, striking him twice in succession. It's not a boomerang. But as a weapon it would have carried prints easily, so I was surprised that none showed up. However, when I examined the clean edges of one of the blades, I found a tiny sweat mark that suggests it might have come into contact with Finch's neck.'

'If you're telling us that someone else was there-leaving aside that impossibility for a moment-and chose to hit him with a ceiling fan, surely you can run a DNA match on his sweat marks, and separate them out from any other prints in the room?' asked Banbury, whose love of technical wizardry made him want to press the human genome into service in the form of computer code.

'Dan, we have Finch's prints on file, and I promise you, there are no outsider prints at all. I dusted the place from top to bottom, and all we have are finger marks from other members of the PCU. I know that because you're all on file. So, our time line.' He produced a piece of chalk and began scratching away on the board, oblivious to the teeth-gritting noise it made. 'Finch arrived for work this morning at eight A.M A.M. There was nothing booked on his schedule for the day, so it's hard to be totally accurate what he got up to. Dan, you checked the phone log.'

'No outgoings in that time, and the internals don't register, but we know he called Land to talk about his position here at the unit, because Land called Mr Bryant to discuss the matter further.'

'Then Sergeant Renfield came over from Albany Street station with a docket for the body that was delivered to the Bayham Street Morgue.'

'Finch had a case?'

'He'd agreed to help Renfield out. Young unidentified female, probably living rough on the streets of Camden, found dead in a doorway of the Office shoe shop this morning, corner of Inverness Street and Camden High Street, exposure combined with a drug intake. Colin, you rang around the hostels, didn't you?'

'No obvious candidates yet, Sarge. I'm waiting for the Eversholt Street Women's Refuge to call me back.'

'Did Oswald carry out an autopsy on her?' asked Meera.

'He's supposed to wait for hospital notes,' said Banbury, 'but he'd started some preliminary exploration, then locked her back in the body drawer. I just took a quick look at her, and now the cadaver can't be moved anyway, at least until Giles and I have finished in there. No-one's come forward to claim her, and I don't suppose they will straightaway.'

'Did Oswald leave any notes?'

'Just an estimated time of death on the report form, which he set at five-thirty A.M A.M., an external description and some basic observations about her condition.'

'No other appointments or personal notes to himself?'

'Nothing that I can find,' said Banbury. 'There's no obvious point of entry for an intruder, and no way of gaining access. Giles, you checked Finch's body for long-term defects, didn't you?'

'He shows some symptoms of having had a weak heart,' said Kershaw. 'I took a look at an artery and found it pretty furred up. I don't suppose he'd have lasted very long in retirement, but I don't think he killed himself. There's a two-centimetre cut on the palm of his left hand, fresh and very fine. It looks like it was made with the point of a scalpel. He'd put a new blade in this morning and dropped the wrapper in his bin. I have to say that the position of his body suggests an attack. What if he was surprised, raised his hand in defence, was jabbed, and the attacker struck again with the handle? Of course, that raises more questions than it answers. Anyway, here's your time line.' He tapped the blackboard with his chalk.

'Finch enters the morgue at eight A.M A.M. and locks the door on the inside, returning the key to its hook. He gets an immediate call from Renfield saying that he's on the way over with a case. Renfield turns up ten minutes later with someone, presumably a paramedic, drops off the body and they leave. Finch starts work, then stops when he realises he won't get the hospital notes until later in the day-there's a bit of confusion about this at the moment-so he locks the corpse in one of the drawers and starts to write up his notes. We know that at around eight-thirty A.M A.M. he calls Land and tries to get him to rescind his resignation. Apparently he began to have doubts about leaving after talking to Mr Bryant yesterday. At nine forty-five A.M A.M. I go to see him about his refusal to recommend me for the position of unit pathologist, and I admit it, we have a bit of a contretemps. While we're arguing, Meera turns up, wanting to sit in on the rest of the autopsy.'

'It couldn't have been very comfortable for you,' said Longbright, 'having to confront the man who had just destroyed your chances of promotion.'

'I don't much care for your implication,' Kershaw said, bridling. 'I'll admit I wasn't comfortable comfortable about seeing him, but I'm a professional. I didn't let my true feelings show.' about seeing him, but I'm a professional. I didn't let my true feelings show.'

'How long did you stay?'

'Only a few minutes. Oswald told me he was waiting for doc.u.mentation to come through before continuing his casework, so I left him to it. I don't think he's legally bound to wait for it, but that's what he told me.'

'We know he was in an argumentative mood. Did he seem different in any other way?'

'It's hard to remember.' Kershaw seemed so uncomfortable with the question that Longbright had the distinct impression he was holding something back.

'And to your knowledge he had no further visitors.'

'No, but we have no way of being sure because no-one has to get signed in at Bayham Street. You can walk in from outside without being seen so long as you have the access code to the front door. The morgue is cold, and his body temperature may have fallen sharply, I say may may because the thermostat's on the fritz and I can't tell if the heaters were on the whole time, but I a.s.sume he died between ten because the thermostat's on the fritz and I can't tell if the heaters were on the whole time, but I a.s.sume he died between ten A.M. A.M. and eleven and eleven A.M. A.M.'

'By which time it was already snowing hard,' Longbright added, making a note.

'Yes, that's an odd thing,' Kershaw admitted. 'The morgue lights were off, and given the size of the windows it means that Finch must have been sitting in virtual darkness, which means that his killer-if a killer it was-attacked without needing much light. There's a street lamp outside, but the bulb is broken. And as I say, the key to the morgue door was still hanging on the hook.'

'I don't suppose we have a way of checking how many other keys were still in place at any time through the day.'

'I know they were there before, because I had to borrow one, and the remaining keys were all there when I returned mine an hour later.'

'There must be absolute secrecy about this while we conduct an internal investigation,' Longbright warned. 'If that Home Office hit man Kasavian finds out what's happened here, we're dead.'

'We won't be able to let John and Uncle Arthur know yet,' said April. 'They're only contactable on their mobiles until they get to their hotel, and the lines of communication won't be secure.'

'Then we'll have to work by ourselves for the time being,' Longbright told her. 'We have the only keys to Bayham Street, and we daren't admit anyone else to the investigation, so I'm afraid we have to consider ourselves all under house arrest here at the unit until we can get to the truth.'

20

SNOW-BLIND 'Qanugglir.' Bryant enunciated so carefully that his dental plate nearly fell out. 'Snowy weather. Bryant enunciated so carefully that his dental plate nearly fell out. 'Snowy weather. Kanevcir Kanevcir. First snowfall. Kanut. Kanut. Crusty snow. Crusty snow. Anymanya Anymanya. A snowstorm. Igadug Igadug. A blizzard. Qaniit Qaniit. Feathery-'

'All right,' May interrupted. 'I know you know all of the Inuit words for snow-'

'Sixty-seven,' said Bryant absently, staring out of the windscreen.

'-but it's really not very helpful. In fact it's rather annoying.'

The blizzard showed no sign of abating. The wind had risen to a roar, lifting the snow that had already fallen, swirling it into bleached dunes. The high hedges were buried beneath sculpted white plumes, the sides of the roadway banking into an immense channel, its centre half mile packed with marooned vehicles, anch.o.r.ed in undulating spines of snow. A nearby tree appeared to have been hung with crystal pendants.

Visibility had fallen to around six metres. The vehicle in front of them, a green designer SUV sold on its ability to bounce bounty hunters across rugged terrain but generally owned by middle-cla.s.s mothers who insisted on driving their fragile darlings to school, had been hastily abandoned, and was subsumed to the top of its wheel arches. The Spar truck behind was starting to look like a Rachel Whiteread sculpture. Looking in his rearview mirror, May could see the driver arguing with his mobile phone. In the last few minutes, one or two pa.s.sengers had attempted to alight from their vehicles, only to be driven back by the pounding winds.

'How long can this keep up?' asked Bryant, smudging a clear patch on the windscreen with the back of his woolly mitten.

'It's Dartmoor,' replied his partner. 'Normal weather rules don't apply out here. We have a full tank, but we'll be in trouble if the engine dies. We can't stay in this cabin without heat.'

'It's a marvellous thing, snow,' said Bryant wistfully, appearing not to hear his partner's concerns. 'As much as six feet can fall in a single day, and the volume is ten times that of the equivalent moisture in rainfall. I remember snowfalls in the East End that were so heavy they pulled down the overhead telegraph lines, temperatures so low that sheets of ice slid like guillotine blades from the roofs of cornering taxis.'

In the last few years, Bryant seemed not to concern himself with common fears. He made his way through the world in a state of blithe cheerfulness, leaving a trail of concern and distress behind him. Others fretted for his welfare far more than he did himself, and May had been pressed into service as a professional worrier for everyone's well-being.

'We cannot stay here,' May reiterated. 'People die stranded on Dartmoor, Arthur. It happens almost every winter.'

'Can I light my pipe?' Bryant's watery blue eyes rolled up at him beseechingly. 'It would help me think.'

'No, you cannot. I daren't open the windows. We'll freeze to death.'

'A lot of mysterious goings-on on Dartmoor, you know,' said Bryant, digging in the glove compartment. 'I was reading about them in my guide book. Hound Tor is haunted by the spirit of a hanged woman, and Okehampton Castle is positively alive with the ghosts of slaughtered n.o.bles. And apparently you should never drive on the B3212 between Postbridge and Two Bridges after dark because a pair of dismembered hairy hands are liable to wrench the steering wheel away from you, sending you careening into a bog. Then there are the Piskies, who are the unbathed children of Eve, exiled by G.o.d from the Garden of Eden and sent to Devon, who are said to contain the souls of dead babies, and of course witchcraft is still practised today across Dartmoor, especially near Ringastan. That's a stone circle excavated in 1903 that was found to have had a false floor in it, filled with coils of human hair.'

'Really, Arthur-'

'Oh, I know all this seems like old hat, but during the winter solstice of 2005 the police at Moortown found half a dozen sheep with their necks broken and their eyes torn out. Their corpses were arranged in occult patterns. Seven more dead sheep were found arranged in the shape of a heptagram at an ancient pagan sacrificial altar in the shadow of Vixen Tor. Perhaps we've been stranded here for a reason.' Bryant rolled his blue eyes meaningfully as the wind moaned around the van.

'This is ridiculous. I'm going to call Janice and see if she can find out what's happening with the emergency services.' May speed-dialled her number on his mobile and listened.

But Bryant had started having morbid thoughts; he looked out at the ferociously blank landscape and wondered what it would be like to die outside, a painless numbing of the senses accompanied by a shutting out of light, kinder than drowning or even fading in a hospital bed; a sort of suspended animation that held the possibility of being reversed. Snow White and Sleeping Beauty had both slipped into comas, only to be revived by the heat of another human life. He felt something-a faint tremor, a flutter of the heart, a fleeting premonition that beat overhead like a death's-head moth and vanished with the intrusion of May's voice.

'Well, what are they suggesting? Of course we're going to stay put, we don't have much of a choice. Call me back, then.'

May was staring oddly at the disconnection, as if trying to understand what he had heard. 'What's the matter?' asked Bryant, suddenly concerned about what he had missed.

'I don't know. She sounded very strange. I think she wanted to tell me-I don't know, exactly.' He shook the idea from his head. After working for so many years with each other, they had developed certain intuitions that ran against their voiced opinions. 'She says the whole of Southwest England has been hit by blizzards. They're trying to mobilise snow clearers and marine emergency helicopters, but all rescue vehicles have been grounded until the high winds abate. Traffic's at a standstill everywhere, and there's worse weather to come. Even the ploughs have been caught out. We have no choice but to stay put here.'

'I wouldn't worry; it won't take long to clear the roads, and meanwhile we have food and water and heat. Apart from Alma's surplus sandwich mountain, there's a hamper in the back. I was taking it down for the raffle.'

'We should check on the other drivers, warn them to stay in their vehicles, try to make sure they're all right.' May opened his window and peered out, trying to see, but the blast of icy snow that burst into the van cab forced him to quickly reseal it. He dropped back in his seat, frustrated. 'I knew I shouldn't have left London.'