Christopher Fowler - The Water Room

‘I wanted to get the back of his head open before you arrived,’ Finch complained, ‘but the caterers upstairs keep borrowing my tools. They used my cranium chisel to take the top off a jar of piccalilli yesterday. I’m not meant to be alone in here. I’ve got a part-time technician and no exhibits officer. No notes, no video, nothing. I’m having to share the photographer and police witness with the Met, and all this after promises of increased personnel.’ He gave the corpse a desultory flick with his forefinger. ‘Jack the Ripper’s pathologist had more technical expertise at his disposal. I have to tell you, Arthur, I’ve lost a lot of faith in the system in the past few years. We define a few addled souls as being worthy of removal from society, and everyone’s under such pressure that we consider the job done when we’re lucky enough to find a court that will shut them away. You know, doctors look for five main signs of mental disturbance in prisoners: personality disorder, psychosis, neurosis, drug dependence and alcohol misuse, and less than one in ten inmates is clean of all five. The prison population stands somewhere above 70,000, which means that over 5,000 of them are functionally psychotic. And all you do, every time you catch someone, is add to the problem.’

‘You’re right, Oswald, we should just leave them out on the street to slaughter each other. Have you seen the headline of this week’s Camden New Journal ? “YARDIES TORCH TOT.” I’m surprised mothers don’t do the school run in armoured cars.’

‘There’s no need for sarcasm.’ With a quick slip of the scalpel, Finch exposed the back of Elliot Copeland’s neck to reveal damage at the base of his skull. ‘Take a look at that. A nasty crack, wouldn’t you say? It’s a large area. First and second cervical vertebrae have copped it, anterior and posterior tubercles crushed, so it came at him from the left side. Plenty of myofibril rupture, pretty straightforward. Was he hit with a large flat-edged rock?’

‘In a way,’ Bryant explained. ‘It was part of a paving slab, among other things.’

‘Hm. I assume the weight of it slammed him forward. Broken nose. You see this sort of thing in industrial accidents, except that there’s no bruising to his shins, so he had a soft landing. A manual worker, obviously, judging by the state of his hands. John phoned me and explained about the bruising. At first I thought the single blow had killed him, but that was before I cleaned him up. Mouth and nostrils blocked solid with earth.’

‘Hardly surprising. He fell face-down in a mud-filled ditch.’

‘Not the point, old fruit. He took a deep breath after he was hit. Do you remember the Aberfan disaster-ghastly business of the coal tip sliding on to the Welsh school? The nightmarish part of that was the coal dust, very fine. It poured in like water, suffocating those who had survived the collapse of the building. This is the same. Basically earth-fine particles of soot, clay, grit, vegetable matter and non-biodegradable stuff like polystyrene granules, held in a suspension of water-straight down into his throat. He couldn’t get up because of the weight on his back, so he choked to death. Nasty way to go, but at least it was fast. I ran a standard internal; judging by the state of his liver he was an alcoholic, which reduced his resistance to blood-vessel rupture. His stomach’s full of half-digested pizza, high sodium-heavy drinkers eat salt. What puzzles me is why he’s here. You usually only get me out of bed for murders.’

‘That’s exactly what it was,’ said Bryant, looking for something to put in his mouth. He finally located a tube of Love Hearts in his raincoat. ‘He was standing behind a truck that shed its load. Do you see anything contradictory to that?’

‘No, I suppose not. Except-’ He thought for a minute, resting his hand disconcertingly on Elliot’s waxy back. ‘It’s rather an inexact method of execution, isn’t it? I mean, ensuring that your target is standing exactly where you want him.’

‘I thought that,’ Bryant admitted. ‘The biggest problem it poses for me is the matter of premeditation. As far as we can tell, he had nothing stolen. Longbright’s conducting a search of his house, and has found his wallet. This isn’t the sort of crime you plan in advance. Which means it had to be committed by someone waiting to cause him injury.’

‘Rough neighbourhood, is it?’

‘Not really. The street doesn’t get much foot traffic. With the exception of the residents, hardly anyone uses it.’

‘Then I would suggest they’re your first port of call,’ said Finch, wiping his hands and stepping back to admire his handiwork.

The following morning, Balaklava Street was anaemic with mist as May knocked on the Aysons’ door.

The front room had been aggressively polished, and was clearly reserved for guests; it was an old-fashioned notion but appropriate to the street, and to the Aysons, a third-generation Caribbean family who honoured the attitudes of their grandparents. Kayla Ayson prepared breakfast while her children dextrously thrashed each other in a lurid Nintendo race, ignoring calls to the table. With Randall’s entrance, the atmosphere subtly shifted; the children became more subdued, and Kayla found something to occupy her attention in the kitchen. May appreciated that Randall Ayson took a dim view of the detective visiting his house, but he was required to check out witness statements as quickly as possible, and Heather Allen was adamant about having seen him on the edge of the waste ground.

‘You think they’re connected, don’t you?’ asked Randall. ‘Copeland and the Singh woman.’

‘We have no reason to think that, Mr Randall.’

‘She was of Indian extraction. Tamsin Wilton told us she’d been receiving offensive notes. You should be looking for a racist, not wasting your time picking on the black man.’

‘In case you haven’t noticed, Mr Randall, you have an Egyptian lady across the road from you, a large Ethiopian family next door, a same-sex couple on your other side and several South African medical students in the end house. This is an ordinary London street, and I don’t appreciate you playing the race card. My visit has nothing to do with your ethnicity. I’m here because a neighbour identified you last night at the crime scene.’

The room was enveloped in a tomb-like silence. May could feel the temperature drop. Bryant’s bluntness is starting to rub off on me, he warned himself.

‘What do you mean, identified me?’

‘They say you had an argument, or at least a conversation, with the deceased.’

‘That’s a lie. I don’t have to listen to this. It’s that damned estate agent over the road, isn’t it? He has no right to tell people-’

‘Think about this rationally, Mr Randall, and you’ll help me to disprove the possibility. First, forget about who saw you, it doesn’t matter. When you take into account the distance and the weather conditions, it’s obvious to me that they’ve made a false assumption. All you have to do is provide me with details of your whereabouts to have the statement discounted.’

When Ayson glanced at his wife, May knew he was in trouble. ‘What is it?’ he asked.

‘I was here.’ Another flick of the eyes, as if Ayson was seeking tacit support from his wife. ‘But I did talk to him.’

‘While he was working in the rain?’

‘Well, yes. I was coming home from work and saw him digging, but we didn’t argue. I just asked him why he was working in such lousy weather.’

‘What did he say?’

‘That the men in the builders’ yard were paying him extra to finish quickly.’

The Bondini brothers wore matching blue boiler suits, and looked like Italian acrobats. May half expected one to back-flip on to the other’s shoulders with a cry of ‘Hop-La!’ They came out of the shop wiping their hands on rags in unconscious mimicry of one another.