George Barnabas - 04 - Fourth Attempt (31 page)

‘It has been known,’ she said. ‘Or maybe it would be relevant if there’s an unexpected death, hmm? Anyway, it means we can get in now without any fuss. I could go and find Bittacy,
I suppose, but to tell you the truth he’s a bit of a little Hitler — you know, one of those guys who like to show they’re in charge. He can’t stop me going in any more than he can stop me going anywhere the card is valid for. I suppose if we’re really security-minded we would make sure he knows.’

‘You mean you’re supposed to tell him, as head of security, if you use these facilities outside normal working hours, is that it?’ he said shrewdly.

She had the grace to redden a little. ‘Oh, come on, Gus. You know what it’s like when you get these self-important fusspots! And you said you were hungry, didn’t you? If we have to go and look for him it’ll add a half-hour at least to the job. But if you insist, of course …’

He wavered; she grinned at him; and he fell. ‘OK, OK. You win. We don’t tell security and just go in. Where?’

‘This way.’

The Medical Records department was stuffy to the point of being smelly: dust and the lingering wraiths of human sweat and tired feet and dying vegetation were the keynotes. George felt her spirits droop a little as she quietly closed the door behind Gus and repocketed her swipe card.

‘Someone’s forgotten to water their potted plants,’ Gus said loudly. Absurdly, she wanted to shush him. There was no need of course; as she had assured Gus, she had as much right to be here as anyone. But for all that she felt a twinge of guilt as though she were prying into other people’s property. Which, of course, she told herself as she moved forwards to find the light switches, is precisely what I am doing. But with impeccable motives.

‘Not too many lights,’ Gus said mildly. ‘Unless you want someone, i.e. Bittacy, spotting them and wondering if the place is being burgled.’

‘Mmm.’ She sounded a little abstracted, but she obeyed him all the same, switching on one of the desk lamps that threw just a low glow on the surface of the piles of papers that had been left on the desk.

‘As far as I know, the staff have their own rest room here. Let’s see.’ She squinted into the dimness, seeing more easily now as her eyes became accustomed to the gloom, and then led the way across the big space and through the ranks of desks. ‘Over here. The main records rooms are on the sides, that I do know, so I imagine that the door here leads through — Ah!’ She stopped in triumph as she pushed open the door and peered in. ‘Black as the tomb, so there’s no windows. Great.’ She fumbled for a light switch and the room sprang into life.

The air in here was even more exhausted, with a powerful smell of unwashed clothing and old shoes. Gus wrinkled his nose a little as he closed the door behind him and looked around. ‘I hope they keep the records in a better state than they keep their own stuff,’ he said with strong disapproval. ‘How can people be so messy?’ The look of distress on his face was almost comical.

‘Maybe it’s because of having to be so organized with their work,’ George said. ‘Always making sure everything is exactly where it’s supposed to be must be desperately boring, but they have to do it because all hell breaks loose if notes go missing because they’re misfiled. But never mind the untidiness. It’s the lockers I’m interested in.’

‘First things first.’ He came forward and set her to one side. ‘Let me do a recce first.’ He searched with swift deftness through the piles of magazines that littered a battered sofa in one corner, and picked over the assorted items such as old raincoats and umbrellas which hung on a row of hooks alongside it. Then he turned his attention to a little cluster of plastic bags on a table; these contained assorted detritus including biscuits which shed crumbs everywhere and assorted packets of tea bags and sugar. In another bag there were apples and a third contained curled and stale sandwiches which looked, George told him, like the best culture medium for toxic bacteria she’d seen since she got to Old East.

‘Never mind,’ he said. ‘That’s their business. I’m just looking
for anything that might seem to point to Lally Lamark.’ He stopped and looked again at the sandwiches. They had been in transparent plastic packs, clearly; the wreckage of them still lay in the white plastic bag. The sandwiches had been taken out, but not bitten into; staring at the one he set gingerly on the plastic bag, he said to George, ‘How old d’you reckon that is?’

‘Hard to say’ She peered at it. ‘Several weeks, perhaps. Look, the bread is rock hard.’ She poked a forefinger at it. ‘And the mould appears to have stopped growing because there’s no real nutrition left there. You can’t even see what sort of sandwich it was. I’d say it was very old indeed. I dare say I could find out more if I took it to the lab and set to work on it. Why?’

‘Didn’t you say that Lally had perhaps suffered not so much from an overdose of insulin as the reverse? An underdose of sugar, maybe? Food, that is?’

She blinked at him, her eyes wide. ‘You think these could be the sandwiches Lally should have eaten and didn’t? You could be right. She might have given herself her insulin and meant to eat her supper at the right time afterwards.’

‘And for some reason didn’t,’ Gus finished. ‘I did wonder if it were that. In which case she did have an overdose of insulin.’

‘If you’re right, and this is her uneaten supper… I suppose it’s possible. How can we be sure?’

‘We can’t. Not till we have more concrete evidence.’ He became businesslike. ‘I suppose we could take the plastic sandwich wrappers and see if there are any latent prints there, but it is a very long shot. I wish she’d bought them at Marks & Spencer’s or Boots. Then they’d be labelled with a date. As it is there is no information here.’ He turned the packs with fastidious care. ‘So latent prints are the only hope. But not much, as I say. What would we use to match them? I don’t suppose Lally’s notes had her fingerprints on them?’

‘Of course not,’ George said. ‘But if we find her locker,
won’t we be able to check her prints from that? The things inside, I mean? People don’t usually let strangers into their lockers, so any prints on objects in there have to be hers.’

‘I wouldn’t like to count on evidence like that,’ he said. ‘Would you? But let’s look. This is getting more and more interesting.’

He seemed to have forgotten his doubts about breaking and entering; he had pulled from his pocket a small bunch of slender copper-coloured rods, his skeleton keys. ‘Old-fashioned, these,’ he said cheerfully, ‘but these look like old-fashioned lockers. Come on.’

He moved systematically from one to the next, peering at them closely. None had labels on the doors bearing names; clearly the users knew their own lockers. But Gus was looking with beady concentration at each lock as he went and, at last, stopped and grunted happily.

‘Here we are,’ he said. ‘See? That lock’s full o’ dust. The others have been opened recently, so this is probably hers. But I’d better check the others first to see if there are any other unused ones.’

There were. Of the thirty-two lockers the room possessed, five had dusty locks. Gus grunted and looked over his shoulder at George. ‘They’ve got spare capacity, dammit. Settle down, kid. This could take a while.’

He moved with great delicacy, inserting one after the other of his skeleton keys into the first lock he’d found filled with dust, and twirling it gently, and after a few minutes (which seemed interminable to George, watching) he produced a soft satisfied snort and the door swung open.

The locker was empty, the upper shelf veiled in dust and only a couple of torn pieces of paper screwed into small balls left on its floor.

‘Not to fret,’ Gus said, seeing her disappointed expression. ‘At least I know what sort of locks these buggers have. The chances are the lockers are a job lot and there’d only be half a dozen key designs between ’em, if that. I’ll find it soon.’

He did. It was the third locker he opened. The door swung wide and George, staring, felt her throat constrict a little as some of the personality of its owner seemed to emerge from it. It was tidy in a way that was in startling contrast to the room in which it stood. A brown cloth coat set on a neat folding hanger depended crossways from the central rod, and had clearly been arranged carefully, for the collar and shoulders were precisely set in the wooden arms of the hanger. Beneath it, there was a pair of well-patched street shoes in worn brown leather, severe in cut rather than stylish in design, and alongside them a pair of old-fashioned plimsolls. There was also a pair of Wellington-style boots in startlingly bright red plastic. Clearly the owner of the locker tried to be prepared for all eventualities. On the top shelf, George could see bottles of shampoo and hair conditioner and tubes of body cream, and she thought; I ought to keep my locker as tidy as this. It’d save so much time looking for things.

Gus was wasting no time. He had at some point pulled a pair of cotton gloves from his pocket — George hadn’t seen him do it — and now, with his hands carefully shrouded, he picked amongst the things on the shelf ‘Nothing here that appears to be an insulin pen,’ he said. ‘You say they look like fountain pens?’

‘Exactly,’ she said. She came and crouched beside the locker, close to his side so that she could look at the lower part of it. ‘Maybe it’s down here — if, of course, this is her locker. We can’t be sure yet, can we?’

‘No,’ he said. ‘It seems likely, though. What living person would leave good clothes in a locker for so long — several days at the very least, I’d say from the dust — do you think? Has to be her.’

‘Probably,’ George said. ‘Look, there’s a sort of extra shelf down there, at the back, in my locker. I think it’s meant to be used to increase shoe-storage space so that they don’t get piled up. Yes, see?’

She had reached forwards and lifted the skirts of the coat and pointed.

Gus crouched beside her and peered in. ‘A handy little hiding place.’

‘Not really. All the lockers have them, so everyone knows they’re there, I use mine to store changes of underwear in plastic bags, because there’s no room for the things up top. I imagine other people have their own special uses too.’ She reached her hand forwards and at once his clamped down over her wrist.

‘Naughty, naughty,’ he murmured. ‘Gloves.’

‘I can’t imagine prints’ll come into this,’ she protested. ‘You can’t even be sure of identifying her own prints anyway, you said, so what’s the point?’

‘Sometime we might be looking for other people’s prints.’ He reached in himself and pulled out the soft leather handbag George had spotted. ‘And they could be very important. Not that this would matter, after all.’ He looked at it ruefully. ‘I never saw this sort of material show prints worth looking at. Oh, well, let’s have a dekko.’

He straightened up and carried the bag over to the table. Pushing aside the plastic bags and stale food, he looked around for a moment and then reached for one of the old newspapers. ‘This’ll have to do,’ he muttered and opened it, a little awkwardly as he was one-handed, and then spread it on the table. ‘I’d rather have something a little more suitable like a sheet of plastic but needs must when the devil drives. Here we go.’

He moved carefully and neatly, and one by one removed the contents of the bag. Again George felt the constriction in her throat. The woman who had owned these things was dead; and the poignancy of her small possessions spread out by another’s hands was intense.

A change purse containing around five pounds’ worth of coins. A wallet, containing twenty pounds in banknotes and the usual range of credit cards which clinched their diagnosis, since the name L. Lamark was clear on all of them. A small make-up bag with eyebrow pencil, eye shadow, and
mascara and lipstick. A separate powder compact of the old-fashioned sort, rather a nice one, George thought, with an Art Deco design. A comb, a small hairbrush and a small can of hair spray. A set of keys. A little pseudo-leather case, oblong, measuring around seven by two inches, with a zip fastening, a side pocket and, sticking out of the top of the pocket, a plastic clip like those on a fountain pen, marked in black letters against a grey background: ‘BD PEN’.

They actually argued over it, standing there with the pen in its case, staring at each other mulishly. Gus wanted to take it back to the nick and have it examined under official conditions with properly accredited witnesses, so that the chain of evidence, if it should turn out to be a piece of material evidence, was ensured. George wanted to examine it right away, pointing out that it’d be a very strange thing if a court refused to acknowledge the sworn assurances of a superintendent of police and a police pathologist regarding the finding of the object, and telling him that he was being unbelievably fussy for a man who had just used his own private skeleton key to get hold of the damned thing in the first place.

She won. ‘It’s the old business of in for a penny in for a pound, I reckon,’ he complained, but suddenly grinned. ‘And I have to say I’m as eager as you are to have my curiosity satisfied. OK …’ He reached forwards.

‘Not this time,’ she said firmly. She pulled the cotton glove off his hand, then imperiously demanded its mate. ‘My turn.’

He made a face but didn’t argue. ‘Since you’re more used to this sort of syringe than I am, it makes sense, I suppose.’ He took a step back and let her get on with it. She didn’t mention that she had had very little to do with this sort of insulin syringe, but bent her head and carefully withdrew the pen from its little compartment. Then she unzipped the side of the case and took out the contents.

Beneath the zip there were three further little pockets, and in two of them were conical plastic containers, each
surmounted by a printed paper cover, complete with a tear-off tab.

‘Needles,’ George said and picked one out of its holder. ‘See?’

He squinted at the printing.
‘BD Microfine’
he read. ‘
296 × 12.7mm. Sterile
, and on the tab,
Needle.
Yup. It’s a needle. No need to open it. It’s obviously not been opened before.’

‘Right,’ she said. ‘But this is different.’ Carefully she withdrew a slender glass tube from the other pocket. It had a brassy-coloured cap with a tiny pink cushion of rubber in the centre and black printing on its opaque side. Again she showed it to him and he read it aloud.