Simon Beckett - The Scent of Death

There was a faint lightening of dawn in the sky as I pulled up outside Ballard Court. I waited for the automatic gates to open, the hum of their motor a bass accompaniment to the morning birdsong. Driving through, I parked in the subterranean car park and switched off the engine. The lift doors chimed open, revealing my neighbour from across the hall. His eyes passed disapprovingly over my rumpled state before he gave a cursory nod as he walked straight past me.

‘And good morning to you, too,’ I said to the empty lift.

My footsteps clipped out a tattoo on the marble floor as I walked down the hallway to the apartment. I let myself in as quietly as I could, but the smell of bacon told me I was wasting my time. Rachel was at the hob, slicing mushrooms next to a sizzling frying pan. She was already dressed, looking lovely and a lot fresher than I did.

‘Hi,’ she said, taking the pan off the heat. She came over and put her arms around me, tilting her face up for a kiss. ‘Good timing.’

I breathed in the scent of her hair, still slightly damp from the shower. ‘There was no need for you to get up yet.’

‘Yes, there was. I wanted to cook breakfast. I knew you wouldn’t bother if I didn’t. Have you even eaten anything since yesterday’s lunch?’

I thought back to the over-stewed tea a PC had brought for me earlier.

‘I had something.’

Rachel arched a sceptical eyebrow at me before turning back to the hob. ‘You’ve time for a shower.’

I smiled at the unsubtle hint: after hours sweating inside my coveralls I needed one.

But my smile faded as I went into the bedroom and saw the packed suitcase standing by the door. Rachel’s flight wasn’t until late morning, but she’d have to allow for traffic and delays in getting to the airport. I felt a hollowness under my ribs at the thought.

It wasn’t how I’d wanted our last night to be.

The paramedics hadn’t taken long to arrive, but it had seemed an endless few minutes. I was grateful to hand over to one of them, a young woman who quickly took over applying pressure to Conrad’s wound while her colleague ripped open packets of dressings. I stood back to give them room, holding my bloodied hands away from me. No longer crouched over the pathologist, I was better able to take in my surroundings. The extra light from the paramedics’ torches revealed three beds in the shadows. The furthest one was empty, but the other two had motionless figures lying on them. I didn’t attempt to go over, knowing better than to contaminate the scene any more than it had been already. But any hopes I’d had that this might have been some sort of hoax, a pair of shop mannequins left in beds by pranksters when the hospital closed, soon disappeared. There was an odour in the air I’d been too busy to notice before. Faint and masked by the smell of dust and plaster from the collapsed ceiling, it was the foully sweet scent of decay. From what I could make out, both bodies were fully clothed, and I could distinguish dark bands across their chests and legs. At first I couldn’t think what they could be, but then I realized.

They’d been strapped to the beds.

There was a nudge on my arm. ‘Let’s give them some room,’ Whelan said. ‘Here.’

He held out a pair of clean nitrile gloves. Having peeled the soiled ones off, I put them on as the paramedics worked on Conrad, and then went back to the ladder. I paused at the bottom, taking one last look across the shadowed chamber. No doors or any way in or out, as Whelan had said. Only the blank face of the unplastered wall, indistinct in the darkness.

I was ushered out of the loft and back downstairs. I passed the fire crews on the stairs, standing aside to let them past with their equipment. It was a relief to step outside into the cool night. I was sweaty and itching from the loft insulation, glad to be able to take off the filthy and bloodstained protective gear. A sickle moon hung low in the sky, ringed by a milky penumbra, as I accepted a cup of tea from a friendly PC. I stood on the steps outside the doorway to drink it, and hadn’t finished when the paramedics emerged from inside. They were carrying Conrad on a rigid stretcher. The pathologist looked in a bad way. His face was bloodied and he was still unconscious, secured by straps and with a cervical collar immobilizing his head and neck.

As soon as he was on board, the ambulance set off in a blare of sirens and blue lights.

Ward appeared not long afterwards. She spoke to several other people, gesticulating angrily at one point, before heading over to where I stood. She’d pulled off her mask and hood and gave a heartfelt sigh as she leaned against one of the stone pillars that flanked the steps.

‘Jesus, what a night.’ She began peeling off her gloves. ‘Thanks for what you did in there for Conrad.’

‘How is he?’

She blew a strand of sweat-damp hair from her eyes. ‘Too soon to say. The paramedics were able to stabilize him while the fire crew set up the lifting gear. His pupils are responsive, which is a good sign, but until they get him X-rayed and scanned they won’t know how serious it is.’

‘They brought him out through the loft?’

‘It was quicker than knocking through the wall.’ She bent and began tugging off her overshoes. ‘Took us a while to find the bloody thing, even knowing what we were looking for. It’s been built across a sort of anteroom at the end of a ward and painted on the outside to match the rest of it. If you didn’t know it was there you wouldn’t give it a second glance. Someone went to an awful lot of trouble so it wouldn’t be found.’

There was an obvious question waiting to be asked. ‘Do you think it’s connected with the woman in the loft?’

‘Honestly? I haven’t a clue.’ She threw a wadded-up overshoe at a plastic bin. ‘Hell of a coincidence if not, but until we can take a better look at what’s in that bricked-up room I’m not jumping to any conclusions.’

I nodded up at a boxy camera fixed high up in the hospital wall, its lens pointing at the pillared entrance. ‘What about the CCTV?’

Whoever bricked up the ward had to go in and out, but Ward shook her head. ‘They’re dummy cameras. Apparently, the developers decided it wasn’t worth the expense of real ones. Not that they’d be much help anyway. Recordings are usually erased after a few weeks, and we’re looking a lot further back than that.’

‘So there was no security here at all?’

‘There were security guards to start with, but that was more to keep the protesters out than anything. The office development’s caused a lot of ill feeling locally. Social activists think the land should be used for housing, and conservation groups want to have St Jude’s listed and a protection order slapped on the entire site. The grounds back on to woodland where there’s a ruined Norman church or something. There’s been a campaign to have it declared an area of special scientific interest, like Lesnes Abbey Woods in Bexley. Except that’s got an abbey and fossils going for it, so they’re probably on a hiding to nothing.’

Ward unzipped her coveralls and began wrestling her way out of them. I noticed she seemed to have put on a little weight but didn’t think anything of it.

‘Once the developers realized it was going to be a long haul, they cut back on security,’ she went on, tugging an arm free. ‘Usual story. Made do with fences and “keep out” signs and left the place to fall down by itself until they got the green light to demolish it.’

‘Until the bats.’

She gave a wry smile. ‘Until the bats.’

I looked up at the boarded-up building. ‘You think this could have anything to do with the protests?’

‘It’s somewhere to start. First off, though, we’ll need to make sure the building’s safe before we send anyone else inside. I’m not risking any more injuries, and we’ve already contaminated enough crime scenes for one day. Whatever’s in that room we found, I don’t want any more ceilings dropping on it.’ She yanked at one of the coverall sleeves that had become stuck. ‘God, I’d forgotten how much I hate these bloody things.’