Barry Maitland: Dark Mirror

As she reached the main doors she felt her phone buzz in her pocket. It was Brock, sounding rushed. ‘Kathy, still tied up?’

A crisis was gripping Queen Anne’s Gate along with the rest of Homicide and Serious Crime Command, with the terrorist alert level newly raised to ‘severe specific’ at a time when an epidemic of spring flu had cut through the ranks. It had made her own inactivity all the more galling.

‘Just finished, hopefully for good. I’m leaving now.’

‘I’ve had a call from Sundeep, steamed up about something. Couldn’t get much out of him, except that it’s about an autopsy he’s doing. He said it was urgent. I’d go myself, but I’m due at a meeting in Broadway in ten minutes. Could you look after him?’

‘Sure.’

‘Good. I’ll get Pip to come and pick you up, shall I?’

That was another source of irritation: DC Philippa Gallagher, known as Pip, also as Flippa, on temporary rotation through the team, for whom Kathy was supposed to be acting as mentor. Too pretty and fragile-looking to be a police officer, Pip seemed oblivious to the stares of the male members of the team. She was very eager and had an annoying habit of asking questions to which Kathy didn’t know the answers, then staring with wide-eyed attentiveness as Kathy tried to improvise a reply. It was probably the same look she’d given her teachers in the school she hardly seemed old enough to have left.

But when Kathy stepped out into the fresh air, her mood lifted. It was a beautiful day, sunlight glittering on the golden figure of Justice on top of the dome of the Old Bailey against a brilliant blue sky. She made her way through the knots of the usual suspects huddled along the footpath and bought a coffee across the road, then stood in the sun, waiting, wondering what Brock’s favourite pathologist was in a panic about.

By the time the unmarked car slid to a stop at the kerb in front of her she felt ready even for DC Gallagher.

‘Hi, boss!’

As a sergeant Kathy had occasionally been called ‘skip’, but no one had ever called her ‘boss’ before. She rather liked it. The girl gave her a big grin, and Kathy smiled back; maybe she’d been unfair to her. Pip was so keen, and Kathy had a sudden vivid memory of herself on her first murder case after making sergeant. That was when she’d first met Brock, and, come to think of it, Sundeep Mehta. It seemed a long time ago.

When they arrived at the mortuary they saw the little doctor waiting for them by the front desk, chatting up the receptionist with a kind of extravagant bonhomie that Kathy thought, as she caught sight of him, looked rather forced. The woman turned away to answer a phone call, Sundeep frowned, glanced furtively at his watch, then wheeled around to see Kathy and Pip approaching. He brightened, slipping on the cavalier persona he liked people to see.

‘DS Kolla!’ he beamed, teasingly formal. ‘How nice to see you again.’

‘DI,’ she corrected. ‘I’ve been promoted.’

He raised his hands in mock horror at his gaffe. ‘Inspector! Of course, I did hear. And so very well deserved. I’ve told Brock often enough that you’re the only one to be trusted to do a decent job in that place. I’m so pleased he sent you. And who is this?’

‘Don’t flirt, Sundeep. This is DC Gallagher-Pip.’

‘How do you do, Pip.’ He shook her hand delicately, as if it might bruise easily, then gave them both visitors’ tags. ‘And why shouldn’t I flirt? Am I too old? Wouldn’t you call that discrimination, Pip?’

The usual patter, Kathy thought, but all the same she sensed his heart wasn’t in it. He was worried about something.

He led them over to the stairs and they descended to a corridor and an overpowering smell of fresh paint. It was sharply cooler down there, and somewhere up ahead a radio was playing tinny music. They reached a pair of double swing doors and Sundeep led the way into a brightly lit room in the centre of which was a series of stainless-steel tables. On the nearest a woman’s body was stretched out, naked and recently dissected, but not yet reassembled. Kathy sensed Pip’s stride falter at the sight. Her eyes moved from the woman’s opened abdomen to her scalp pulled forward over her face, the top of her skull neatly severed, the brain removed.

Kathy turned her attention to Sundeep, who offered her a photograph of a young woman, head and shoulders. Even without the stainless steel on which her red hair fanned, Kathy would have known that she was dead. Her green eyes were open but sightless, her flesh like yellow wax.

‘Her name is Marion Summers,’ Sundeep said. ‘She collapsed yesterday in the London Library in the West End. She was sick and passed out. When the ambulance arrived she was in a coma, from which she never woke. She was wearing a medical alert bracelet that said she suffered from type one diabetes, and a witness said she’d had fainting spells recently. The ambulance crew assumed this was the reason for her collapse, as did the doctor who treated her in A amp;E. They wondered if she might be in the early stages of a pregnancy, which can upset the insulin-sugar balance. She died ninety minutes after admission.

‘I performed the autopsy a couple of hours ago. The toxicology results aren’t back yet, of course, and I may be jumping the gun, but I’m sure I’m right. There were distinctive signs-severe haemorrhaging of the mucosa, for instance. Then when I opened her stomach I noticed the smell, quite faint, a bit like garlic. Here…’

He reached for a beaker containing some dark fluid and sniffed it like a connoisseur, wrinkling his nose, then offered it to Kathy. Reluctantly she did the same, then shook her head. ‘I don’t know.’ She turned to Pip, whose eyebrows rose in consternation, and Kathy handed the flask back to Sundeep.

‘No, well, anyone else probably wouldn’t have noticed, because this is so unusual now, in this country-the first case I’ve come across, to tell the truth. But I remember that smell so well from my student days, in India. We opened up a number of victims-well, the stuff was readily available, you see, in herbicides and pesticides and industrial processes and God knows what. And they say now that the whole Bengal basin is sitting on a vast layer of it, and people are sinking their wells into it and drawing it up-my God, they say millions may die.’

Kathy waited, but he seemed momentarily at a loss. ‘What are we talking about, Sundeep?’ she asked gently.

‘Arsenic, Kathy. I’m almost sure that she died of arsenic poisoning.’

He saw the sceptical lift of her eyebrow and nodded quickly. ‘Yes, yes, I know, arsenic in the library, all very Agatha Christie. A hundred years ago arsenic was the height of fashion in England. You could buy it over the counter at the chemist, freshen your complexion with it, treat your syphilis, kill your rats, poison your husband.. . but not now. Where would you get hold of arsenic today?’ He paused, then stressed, ‘It is very unusual, Kathy.’

‘It does seem unlikely, doesn’t it, Sundeep? Shouldn’t we wait for the test results?’ She suspected there was some agenda here that Sundeep was holding back. She waited.

He sighed. ‘A dear friend of mine, a very distinguished surgeon, has a son, fresh from medical school, newly launched in his profession, working twenty-eight hours a day in accident and emergency. He examined Marion when she was brought in yesterday. His initial tests supported the ambulance crew’s assumption-there was a marked insulin imbalance. He treated this and decided to wait-there was so much else crying for his attention yesterday. That was perhaps a mistake, but an understandable one. If it was arsenic, you see, time was very short-in fact it was probably already too late. You only have about an hour to try to get the stuff out of the victim before it’s absorbed. Once that happens there’s no antidote.’