Simon Beckett - The Scent of Death

‘We’re not unsympathetic, Mr Jessop, but it’s out of our hands. Now, if you wouldn’t mind going with the PC and waiting in the trailer until—’

‘Yeah, more fucking waiting! Like I’ve not had to do enough of that already!’

Turning his back on Whelan, he stomped off, followed by the stony-faced PC. I moved aside as he swept towards me, grubby yellow jacket flapping as he marched past. Something fell from it and clattered to the floor as he went. I looked down and saw a pair of spectacles lying there, one lens fallen out and lying on the gritty tarmac.

‘You dropped these,’ I called, picking them up.

He looked round, glaring at me as though unable to process the words. Then, leaving the PC to wait, he came back.

‘Thanks,’ he muttered, snatching the glasses from me.

‘There’s this as well,’ I said, holding out the lens.

A stale smell of sweat, cigarettes and unmetabolized alcohol came off him as he stood blinking, looking down at the broken glasses in his hands. For a bizarre second I thought he was going to cry. Then he turned on his heel and strode off, leaving the unimpressed PC to follow after him.

I went over to Whelan. ‘He didn’t seem happy.’

‘Noticed that, did you? That’s Keith Jessop, the demolitions contractor hired to level this place. What with the planning protests and bats, he’s been waiting months already, so he’s not a happy bunny at the moment.’ He gave a cheery smile. ‘The good news is we might be seeing more of him. He knows as much about the structural side of St Jude’s as anyone, so we’ve asked him to help locate any more hidden rooms there might be. As you saw, he’s only too happy to assist.’

‘You think there might be more?’ It was a stupid question: I’d been so busy thinking about the pregnant woman and the other two victims that it hadn’t occurred to me there could be others.

Whelan considered the dark face of St Jude’s, blackened walls looming above us with their blind windows. ‘We’ve found three bodies already without even trying. The size of this place, God knows what else is in there.’

He motioned with his head for me to follow him.

‘Come on. Before you start on the recovery there’s something else you need to see.’

The ward was in the paediatric wing. It was on the top floor, some way further along the corridor from the loft hatch I’d used before. I’d forgotten how cold it was inside the hospital, and the odour of damp and mould was heavy in the breezeless air. A daisy chain of floodlights had been rigged up along the corridor here as well, spaced out to show the way but creating pools of shadows in the corners. The floor was littered with rubble and broken plaster that crunched underfoot, the larger pieces big enough to turn an ankle. Posters warning against tobacco, alcohol and drugs hung from the walls, while others forbade the use of mobile phones. We passed a large area of curtained cubicles, where a sign declared X-ray: Do not enter when light is on next to a cobwebbed red bulb.

The ward was a little way past that. Its double doors had been propped open and more floodlights set up inside. They cast a harsh, ethereal light on the dingy walls, where faded murals of cartoon characters capered to an empty room. The smell of mould was even more overpowering in here. Dangling sockets for oxygen cylinders protruded from the walls, and an assortment of broken junk was scattered about: a rusted bed frame lacking a mattress, a bedside cabinet missing both cupboard door and drawer, even a pair of old car batteries. A worn teddy bear slumped tiredly against the skirting board, next to a broken abacus whose colourful beads had spilled off the wires.

‘I know. Gets you, doesn’t it?’ Whelan said, seeing me looking round.

‘Can’t you take some of the boards off the windows?’ I said, sobered by the atmosphere in the dank ward. Some of the windows still had ragged curtains hanging over them, but all were boarded up so that not a chink of daylight penetrated the darkness.

‘We could, but then we’d be letting any nosy bastard with a drone or telephoto lens get a good look inside as well. At least this way we know what we’re doing isn’t going to be on the front pages tomorrow.’

He continued to the far end of the ward, where bigger floodlights illuminated a group of anonymous figures in blue coveralls. They were working in front of what at first appeared to be an ordinary wall. Four yards long and three high, it was made of breezeblocks painted a close match to the pale green of the other walls. It was easy to see how the police officers searching for Conrad had overlooked it. Completely featureless, there was nothing about it to attract a second glance.

Not unless you knew what lay behind it.

It was only when you looked more closely that the false notes began to sound. Whereas the interlocking rectangles of the individual blocks were clearly visible on this area of wall, the rest of the walls had been finished in plaster. And instead of the blocks being keyed into the walls on either side, they’d been crudely butted up to them, as though there’d been an opening here that had been filled in.

‘How’s it coming along?’ Whelan asked, stopping by an assortment of heavy-duty electric power tools, lump hammers and chisels assembled nearby. His voice echoed in the empty room.

One of the figures working on the wall paused to answer. ‘Not far off now. We’ve been in the other side and rigged up a plastic sheet to keep down the dust and stop any fragments flying into the room. It’s about as good as we’re going to get.’

‘It better be. We can do without any more mishaps.’

Whelan didn’t make it a threat, but it didn’t sound like a joke either. As the hammering started up again, I noticed an empty paint tin and plastic decorator’s tray in the corner. Both were smeared with the same colour emulsion as the breezeblock wall. Next to them was a large paint roller, its sponge caked with green paint and set rock hard.

‘Are they what I think they are?’ I asked.

‘Yep,’ Whelan said. ‘Somebody went to all this trouble to camouflage the wall, then left their tools behind. We lifted some nice sets of fingerprints off them, too. Even left a thumbprint in the mortar, which was considerate. Big bugger, if the size is anything to go by.’

‘Seems a bit of an oversight, doesn’t it?’

He shrugged. ‘It happens. People try to be clever and then cock up something obvious. Anyway, let’s leave them to it. We’re back out here.’

We went into the corridor again. The floodlights continued past the ward and around a corner, ending at a doorway. Beyond it was a flight of wooden stairs, rising out of sight. We stood aside to let a SOCO come out, her coveralls blackened and grubby, then went through.

‘This leads to the clock tower,’ Whelan told me, as we climbed up the narrow stairway. There was a peppery smell of dust, and the wood creaked drily under our weight. ‘Nothing much up there any more. All the clock mechanism was taken for scrap, but we’re not going that far. This is us.’

We’d reached a small landing. A floodlight shone on a low doorway in the wall, no more than five feet high. The plaster on the walls around it had crumbled to expose the wooden laths underneath. The small door was open, smudges of talc-like fingerprint powder dusting the doorframe and edges. There was a sturdy catch on the outside to hold the door shut, a simple metal bar that swung down to sit in a bracket fixed to the frame.

‘There’s about a dozen hatches and access doors like this scattered around,’ Whelan said. ‘Apart from the one we used last time, this one’s closest to where we found the body. Mind your head.’

He ducked through the low doorway. I did likewise, straightening once I was inside. We were in a different part of the loft to where the pregnant woman’s remains had been found. The brick wall of the clock tower rose up at our backs, while in front of us the supporting timbers of the roof disappeared into darkness like the ribcage of a dead whale. The air in here was different to the rest of the building, closer and seeming to have more weight. It would be easy to give in to claustrophobia, I thought, turning to where Whelan was waiting.