Christopher Fowler - The Water Room

‘Visible victim status encourages domination and attracts sexual sadists, read your Krafft-Ebing, it’s not brain surgery. These ones were most likely victims of a drunken fight. North London Met is overloaded so they couldn’t wait for a chance to start palming us off with the extra, even though they’re no longer entitled to do so. I’m not working on common fatal assaults, it’s degrading. The key must be around here somewhere.’

‘What have you lost?’ May asked Longbright.

‘Mr Bryant’s rescued another cat.’ She rolled her thickly painted eyes. ‘He was taking it to the vet.’

‘We’ve got to get him free before he runs out of air.’ Bryant turned a drawer over the desk, cascading rubbish everywhere. ‘I’ve christened him Crippen, because we had that ginger tom named Lucan who disappeared after killing a bird.’

‘You’re not good with animals, Arthur. Look what happened to your parrot. That poor carpet-layer was distraught, hammering it flat in the underlay after you told him you couldn’t find your tobacco pouch. How on earth did the cat get shut in a filing cabinet?’

‘I thought he’d be safe there while I went out. I didn’t know the drawer was self-locking.’

‘Raymond’s still in the next room.’ Longbright pointed at the door. Raymond Land was allergic to cats. He had also tripped over Crippen’s litter tray and nearly fallen down the stairs, and had now begun to suspect that the others were hiding something.

‘If he starts sneezing I’ll tell him it’s the fresh paint,’ Bryant promised. He had discovered the tiny black and white stray dumped inside a bin-bag on Camden’s Chalcot Road at the weekend, and had brought it to work inside his jacket with the intention of overcoming its apprehensions about the cruelty of humans. Unfortunately, Crippen’s worst fears had now been confirmed. To add to the confusion, two men had arrived with a photocopier, and had started unpacking it in the middle of the floor, trapping everyone at the edges of the room, and now they were all getting wet paint on their clothes. From inside Bryant’s filing cabinet came a high feline whine.

‘Any tea going?’ asked John May, throwing his overcoat into a corner. ‘Did your doctor give you the all-clear after that crack on the nut?’

Bryant had sustained a head injury during the unit’s last investigation. ‘He made me read a couple of eye charts. I passed with flying colours.’

‘Really? You can’t usually see a hole in a ladder.’

‘I had crib sheets. See.’ Bryant held up miniature copies of the charts.

‘And you got away with it?’

‘No, he saw me looking up my sleeve and prescribed new reading glasses. Look.’ He donned the spectacles, his eyes swimming up like great blue moons.

‘My God, they make you look like Reginald Christie. Is that who I mean, the murderer who gassed his victims? Except you’re older, of course. Why is it so cold in here? What happened to summer? It’s going to pelt down any minute.’

‘We haven’t got any heaters yet, we can’t shut the windows because of the smell, and until this year summer in London only existed as a tentative concept. You should know, you’ve lived here for about a hundred years yourself.’ Bryant accepted a hot mug from Longbright, stirred it with the end of a paper-knife and passed it to his partner. ‘I’m afraid it’s bags until we can buy some decent stuff. The toilet doesn’t appear to have a door, we’re missing a couple of desks and part of a ceiling. Oh, and the electrics keep shorting out. It wasn’t me; I haven’t touched anything. It’s nearly half past three. Were you really all this time with a woman? You could have got so much done.’

‘Actually, I had a medical at lunchtime and was sent for a chest X-ray. Had to wait for ages. I tried calling you when I got out, but your mobile wasn’t answering.’

‘No, it wouldn’t. It got wet, so I tried to dry it out in Janice’s sandwich toaster. The toaster and the phone sort of- melded -into a single appliance, scientifically interesting as a new mechanical life-form but utterly useless for communication. Kershaw, you can bugger off now, there’s a chap, we’ll be fine.’

‘What do I tell Bayham Street?’ asked Kershaw with a faint air of desperation.

‘Tell them you’ll take a wander over with Mr Banbury after you’ve visited the crime scene, give them the kind of report they love-yards of statistics, no opinions. Not that you’ll find anything at the site after Camden’s gormless plods have trampled around in their size tens. And be careful near Finch, he bites.’

May looked up from his newspaper. ‘Do you know that’s the third mobile you’ve destroyed this year, not counting the one you lost when the unit blew up?’

‘Surely not. I quite fancy one of those video-phones. I’m surprised no one’s created a collective noun for them yet, or even any decent short-form generic terminology. I thought we were supposed to be an ingenious race, but I fear America has the edge on us when it comes to branding. Have we got any biscuits, Janice? Not Hobnobs, they get under my plate.’

The streets around Mornington Crescent station were quiet for a Monday afternoon. If you had been walking past, and had looked up at the arched first-floor windows above the Tube entrance, rebuilt in their original maroon tiles, you would have seen Arthur Bryant and John May in silhouette against the opaque grey glass beneath the station logo, Bryant seated under an ‘N’, May tilting his chair below the ‘S’, as sharply delineated as Balinese puppets.

‘Tell John about your old lady,’ Longbright suggested.

‘What old lady?’ asked May. ‘Have I missed something interesting?’

‘Do you remember a fellow called Benjamin Singh? Ah.’ Bryant found the keys and released a traumatized Crippen from his cabinet. A less appropriately named kitten was hard to visualize. ‘Expert on English occult literature and pagan mythology. I used him as a consultant a few times in the eighties. His sister died this morning, and he came here.’

There was a bang as DC Bimsley nearly went through the window with a box of stackable files. Everyone flinched except Bryant, whose deafness was highly selective.

‘He wanted her to be seen by someone he trusted, so I went round there and took a look.’ Bryant patted his pockets for a match. ‘She was in her late seventies. Body was in the basement on a very hard upright chair, and there was water in her throat. I’ve given Banbury the sample, and I’m waiting for a quick confirmation from the child Kershaw, but it would appear to have been a dry drowning.’

‘What’s a dry drowning?’ asked DC Bimsley, listening in.

‘No water in the lungs, death as a result of laryngospasm-constriction of the windpipe. Quite rare, but not unheard-of,’ May explained without thinking.

‘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.’