The Water Room (4 page)

‘The problem is, it’s an unprovable method of death. Most drownings are accidental, often because the victim is pissed. A deep breath is taken in shock, and the lungs inflate like balloons. There was a small contusion on the back of her head, might have been an old mark but I’m inclined not to think so.’ Bryant, ignoring the newly installed No Smoking signs, poked about in his coat and produced his pipe. He started to light it but Longbright snatched it out of his mouth with a tut. ‘I got Oswald in to take a quick look at her.’

‘No wonder Kershaw’s upset with you,’ said May. ‘Oswald Finch is retired, you can’t just call him in over the new boy’s head.’

‘I can do what I like,’ Bryant reminded him. ‘I don’t trust someone whose surname sounds like a sneeze. I was going to use him, but Finch is an expert on drowning. You know how instinctive he is about such deaths. He reckons there’s no mucus in her air passages, nothing agitated by an attempt to breathe, no real distension in the lungs, no broken blood vessels in the nostrils. He’s opening her up tonight but doesn’t think he’ll find diatomic particles in the heart ventricles because she went into spasm almost at once.’

‘Could she have drowned at her sink?’

‘It’s possible, except that we found her bone-dry and fully dressed for going out, seated in a chair. She could have drowned in half an inch of water if she’d been unable to get up, but not in a chair.’

‘Did she have swollen ankles, bare feet?’ asked May suddenly.

‘Not bare—old-lady bootees, the non-slip kind—but swollen.’

‘I was thinking footbath. You know what old ladies are like. Was the floor wet?’

‘Yes, a little. There’s a rug over parquet.’

‘You didn’t ask the brother if he’d moved anything?’

‘I’m losing my touch, John, forgive me, I’ll call him right now.’ He turned to Longbright. ‘Why is everyone else’s phone connected except mine?’

‘Forgive me for pointing this out,’ said Longbright, ‘but Mrs Singh’s case hardly falls within our official jurisdiction.’

‘I do recall the tenet under which this unit was set up, Janice.
“Taking pressure off the Metropolitan service by dealing with those cases deemed too problematic or sensitive for traditional channels”—
they’ll hardly have time to give something like this more than a cursory glance, will they? Besides, I have no other work at the present time. I don’t count eviscerated drunks.’

Bryant had an offensive way of dismissing what he called ‘ordinary crime’. He looked from one face to the other with such an air of childish enthusiasm that both Longbright and May wanted to slap him, even though they realized that he was simply happy to be back. Today he was alive with a restless excitement. For decades, he and his partner had divided their workload along the lines of their personalities. May followed the ingrained rules of Metropolitan Police detection, handling the groundwork, chasing up the most obvious and logical leads, interviewing family members, appealing for witnesses, covering tracks, proud of being thorough. His skills were technical because he enjoyed working with new technology, and observational because he liked people. Arthur had never exhibited sociability. He preferred to be left alone, taking off at tangents, following lateral hunches and sensations, enjoying the jolt of unlikely synaptic responses. Bryant did the heavy thinking, May did the heavy lifting. ‘Come on,’ he nudged. ‘Aren’t you even a little curious?’

‘Well, yes,’ May admitted. ‘But it can’t take precedence over the caseload Raymond’s handing us.’

Bryant knew he had won. ‘Fine. I thought I might work late tonight. My new kitchen’s not connected up and the plumber’s behaving like the last of the Romanovs, refusing to visit until Wednesday. You’re the only one with a dependent, Janice, you should go home. There’s nothing more you can do until tomorrow.’ Most of the new computers had yet to have their software installed, and the only items to survive the blast undamaged were still packed in boxes.

‘Ian’s going to leave me if I go back on regular shifts,’ the detective sergeant agreed. ‘But I should make myself useful. Now that you’re both here, perhaps I’ll stay a little while longer, just to get things shipshape.’ She looked around the partially painted room. ‘I must say it’s good to be back.’

‘Excellent, you can give me a hand unpacking my reference books. I don’t do manual work with my back.’ Bryant slapped his hands on the desk. ‘Lend me your phone. I won’t break it.’

‘Yes you will. I thought you lost all your books.’ Longbright examined the flyleaf of
Witchcraft through the Ages
. ‘You’ve stolen these from the library.’

‘Incoming email marked urgent,’ warned Meera Mangeshkar, getting wet paint down her sleeve as she looked in. ‘Do you know anything about a Christian Right minister from Alabama whose legs were found in a bin-bag behind Camden Stables?’

‘Is his name Butterworth?’ asked Bryant.

Mangeshkar ducked back and checked her screen. ‘No, Henderson.’

‘Wait, I’m thinking of a Baptist, torso in a bin-bag behind Sainsbury’s.’

‘Home Office wants a unit representative to go up there this evening. Angry Republicans placing phone calls to Westminster, doesn’t look good.’

‘Ah, Arthur, John.’ Raymond Land squeezed past Mangeshkar and hailed them with patently false bonhomie, which faded as he tried to climb around the partially assembled photocopier. ‘I’m glad you’re both here. The Home Secretary would like to see you for a brief chat tomorrow. He’s very upset that you’ve been rude to his brother-in-law.’

‘I have no idea what you’re talking about,’ Bryant told him. ‘Who the hell is his brother-in-law?’

‘Your new chap, Giles Kershaw. Apparently you’re refusing to use him.’

‘His
brother-in-law
? You’re joking. What a total Quisling. I didn’t like the cut of his jib the moment I saw him.
Quel crapaud
.’

‘Well, no doubt you’ll use your legendary diplomatic skills to sort the whole mess out,’ Land smirked. ‘I mustn’t keep you, I’m sure you have plenty of work to do.’ He turned to leave, and stood on the cat’s tail. One of the workmen putting a partition across the office dropped his circular saw. It shot across the floor, making everyone scream.

The Peculiar Crimes Unit at Mornington Crescent was open for business once more.

4

OPENING DOORS

By Tuesday morning, the irradiation of the long dry summer had already faded to a memory as the temperature tumbled and a translucent caul of rain returned the city to silvered shadows. Cracked earth softened between paving stones. Pale London dust was rinsed from leaves and car roofs. Back gardens lost their parched grey aridity, returning to rich moist greens and browns. The air humidified as wood stretched and mortar relaxed, the city’s houses pleasurably settling into their natural damp state. Rain seeped through split tarmac, down into uneven beds of London clay, through gravel and pebbles and Thanet sand, through an immense depth of chalk, to the flinted core and layers of fossils that crusted the depression formed by the city’s six great hills.

London’s workforce barely registered this mantic transformation. It certainly didn’t take long for DC Bimsley and DS Longbright to cover the ten houses in Balaklava Street and the properties backing on to Mrs Singh’s house. Longbright came along because her flatpacked desk was still being assembled—too few dowelling pieces had been provided. While her colleagues bickered amiably, she armed herself with May’s newly programmed electronic interview-pad and headed for the street. She still liked footwork because meeting the public kept her connected, and it did her good to get out. The rain was scouring the acidic urban air, making it fresh once more.

She had worked with the bull-necked Bimsley before, and enjoyed his company. He was an extremely able officer, but also one of the clumsiest, lacking coordination and spatial awareness while retaining the grace of a falling tree. It had seemed an endearing trait the first few times they had met. His baseball cap usually covered a bruise.

It occurred to Longbright that everyone who ended up working with Bryant and May had some kind of physical or mental flaw that prevented them from functioning normally with fellow officers. Oswald Finch, for example, had been the unit’s pathologist since its foundation. He was a man not given to delegation. He trusted his instincts, was rational and cautious and prone to calm understatement, but everybody hated dealing with him except Bryant, because he looked like a Victorian mourner and reeked of cheap aftershave, which he used to cover up the cloying smell of death.

‘That last woman, Colin, was it really necessary to listen to her talking about shopping trips?’ asked Longbright, who had never known the pleasure of spending because she was always broke. Most of the clothes she owned had been bought at thrift shops and dated back to the 1960s, lending her the air of a disreputable Rank starlet. She was smart and tough, and scared men with a kind of carnality that she had never learned to turn off.

‘You have to listen to them, Sarge. Mr Bryant taught me that. You get more out of them after they think you’ve stopped taking notes.’

‘All right, but I’ll do this one, speed things up a bit.’ She ticked off the ninth house and climbed the steps to the next on the list. May’s notepad translated her handwriting to text and emailed it to his terminal for appraisal.

‘I like this street, sort of cosy and old-fashioned,’ said Bimsley, tipping rain from the collar of his jacket. ‘Like my grandma’s old house in Deptford before they pulled it down. Council said it was a slum just ’cause it had an outside lav, but she was happier there. Odd the way the numbers are laid out, though. Thirties and forties on one side, three to seven on the other.’

‘One side probably continued the numbers in the street joining it. The other side was built at a later date and had to start over. You see it all the time.’ Longbright rang the doorbell of number 43. ‘How many are we missing?’

‘Only three not at home so far, that’s pretty good.’

‘They’re starter-plus-ones, that’s why.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Your first purchased home is probably a flat, right? These are the houses you buy after selling your first place—something with a garden to remind you of childhood, but the rooms are small, best for a couple with one young child, husband’s on the career ladder so the mum’s usually at home. Next stop after this is something bigger, a bit further out, where your family can grow.’

‘You don’t think the wife’s out working as well?’ Bimsley asked.

‘Depends. The area’s Irish Catholic, they’re not much given to childminders.’

‘I don’t know where you get your facts from, Janice.’

‘Knowing the terrain. Call yourself a detective.’

The door opened, and an orderly blond woman in her late twenties smiled coldly at them. She wiped her hands dry on faded jeans, waiting for an explanation. In the background a loud television cartoon was keeping a child amused.

Longbright pointed to the plastic-laminated ID card on her jacket. ‘I’m sorry to disturb you. We’re checking the street to see if anybody knew the elderly lady who died at number
5,
Mrs Ruth Singh.’

‘I didn’t know she’d passed away.’

‘Perhaps I can take your name, for elimination purposes?’

‘Mrs Wilton—Tamsin. My husband is Oliver Wilton. When did she die?’

‘Sunday evening. Were you at home?’

‘Yes, but I didn’t hear or see anything.’

Longbright made a dismissive mental note. This was the type of woman who recognized her neighbours but never spoke to them. An implicit class barrier, faint but quite implacable, would prevent her from getting involved.

‘No unusual vehicles in the street, no one hanging around outside the house between the hours of eight and ten?’

‘Not to my knowledge.’

‘Perhaps you could ask your husband.’

‘I don’t see that he would be able to—’

Longbright checked her pad. ‘He was doing something to his car last night, wasn’t he?’

Mrs Wilton looked affronted. ‘Actually, it’s my car. And he was just cleaning off some leaves and emptying the boot.’

‘Is he at home today?’

‘No, it’s a workday, he’s at his office.’ Mrs Wilton stared at Longbright as though amazed by her stupidity. If the look was intended to intimidate, it didn’t wash. Like so many of the old movie stars she admired, the detective sergeant’s glamorous aura was constructed over the epidermis of a rhinoceros. She handed over the unit’s contact card. ‘You can freephone me at this number, or email us if either of you think of anything.’

‘Did Mr Bryant do door-to-doors when he was younger?’ asked Bimsley as they walked away.

‘He still does occasionally, although he’s supposed to use his cane for distances. John bought him a beautiful silver-topped stick from James Smith & Sons in New Oxford Street, and he’s finally been forced to use it. He’s very good at doorstep interviews because he has so much local knowledge. Although of course he’s appallingly rude to people, but witnesses put up with it because he’s elderly. He doesn’t mean to be so vile, it just comes out that way. Politeness used to be one of law enforcement’s greatest tools. We just outsmiled the opposition. Now it’s liable to get you shot at. Let’s do the other next-door neighbour.’

They had called at number 4 and introduced themselves to a shy Egyptian woman, Fatima Karneshi, who lived with her husband Omar, a railway guard currently posted at Archway Tube station. It seemed that Fatima had brought the traditions of her country to England; her reluctance to leave the house during the day prevented her from bumping into her neighbour, and chores kept her from socializing. She had seen Mrs Singh once or twice in the garden, but they had not spoken. Longbright had wondered if her husband was the kind of man who liked his women subservient. She readily acknowledged the importance of domesticity in the hierarchy of Egyptian marriage, but dealing with so many different cultures made her job more demanding.

The door on the other side, number 6, was opened by a woman in a lime-green face-pack and towel-turban. ‘I’m sorry, this is absolutely the only thing that helps a hangover,’ the woman explained in a muscular, penetrating voice. ‘You’re the police, aren’t you? You’ve been going door to door and you don’t look like Jehovah’s Witnesses. If you come in, are you going to get water everywhere? I’m waiting for a little man to come and revarnish the hall floor, and it does stain. I’m Heather Allen.’ She offered her hand and withdrew it, blowing on her nails as she beckoned them in. ‘Your polish is a wonderful colour, I don’t think I’ve seen that shade before.’