Peter Lovesey - Stagestruck

‘Back to Bath now?’ Inge said, to jog him out of his silence.

‘Not yet. Call Bristol police and ask them to supply a roundthe-clock guard for her.’

‘She has her own guard, guv.’

He gave her a look that said all she needed to know about the competence of private security guards.

She took out her phone.

‘And now we’ll find the pathology lab,’ he said.

‘We’d better ask.’ She stopped a porter wheeling an oxygen cylinder along the main pathway and they were soon heading in the right direction.

The technician who greeted them inside the door was clearly a junior, but he showed them in to the scientist in charge, a large, bearded man called Pinch, who was sitting on a bench eating a banana. He eyed them as if they’d come to ask for money. When they showed their IDs he jumped to attention, tossed the peel into a bin, wiped his hands and offered them coffee.

All Diamond wanted was the test result, but Ingeborg accepted for them both. The kettle was hot and the coffee was instant, so it shouldn’t delay them long.

Pinch explained that his staff supplied their own mugs and there weren’t any spares. ‘Hope you don’t mind drinking from a glass beaker. I promise you, they’re clean. Haven’t contained anything of human origin. Not today, anyway.’

Diamond wouldn’t touch his, he decided.

‘So how can I help?’

They asked about Clarion’s towel.

‘That’s been tested, yes.’

‘With what result?’

‘Traces of glycerine-based make-up, for sure, and face powder, but also a corrosive I wouldn’t recommend putting anywhere near your face.’

‘Acid?’

‘Alkali, in fact, but no less dangerous. Sodium hydroxide.’

‘Caustic soda,’ Ingeborg said with a sharp intake of breath.

A shocked silence followed.

Finally Diamond, appalled, said, ‘Isn’t that what they use to unblock drains?’

‘Right. We didn’t believe it at first, so we repeated the tests. That’s why we took so long.’ Pinch poured the coffee. ‘Help yourselves to sugar.’

Neither reached for the spoon. Ingeborg’s face had drained of colour.

‘There’s no question, then?’ Diamond said.

‘It’s caustic soda for sure, available from your friendly, neighbourhood hardware store. As you doubtless know, it comes in powder form as tiny flakes or granules. Add a solvent such as water and you’ll remove most blockages.’

‘And most of your skin.’

‘If you come in contact with it. In these safety-conscious times it’s a wonder the public is still allowed to buy the stuff.’

‘How does it work?’

‘It’s inert until added to water.’

‘So it could be mixed with something dry, such as face powder, and it wouldn’t react?’

‘Correct.’

‘And being white in colour it would blend in with powder,’ Ingeborg added. Horrible as it was, the presence of caustic soda on the towel had to be fitted into a scenario.

‘What would have activated it?’ Diamond asked.

‘Assuming it was applied to her skin?’ Pinch said. ‘The surface moisture may have been enough. If she was wearing a moisturiser, that would certainly have done it.’

‘She had another layer over that, the glycerine-based cream you mentioned,’ Ingeborg said. ‘If it was mixed with that -’

‘I’m not sure it was,’ the scientist said. ‘We recovered a number of dry particles from the towel. Actors powder their faces, don’t they?’

‘If they do, it’s over some layers of make-up.’

‘Okay,’ he said. ‘I understand it gets warm under the theatre lights. If she started sweating, the process would begin for sure and she might not be aware at first. It forms a slime on the surface and the action can take out the nerve endings as well as the skin tissue. By the time she became aware, it would already have been well advanced.’

‘This may explain the delay we’ve all been puzzling over,’ Diamond said. ‘Nasty.’

‘Worse than nasty,’ Ingeborg said. ‘It’s fiendish.’

‘Does she know yet?’ Diamond asked.

Pinch shook his head. ‘We needed to confirm the results. This is tricky territory. We report to the medics, not the patient or her representatives. We informed the doctor treating her after we ran the first tests, but when there’s likely to be legal action, you have to be certain.’

‘The medics will tell her?’

‘Have to.’

‘And it can’t have been an accident,’ Diamond said. ‘The lawyers will be aware of that. You don’t add caustic soda to face powder through carelessness. This was deliberate.’

‘And vicious,’ Ingeborg added, her voice thick with emotion.

When they left, they took the towel with them in a sterile box that served as an evidence bag. It would go to the forensics lab at Chepstow for them to run their own tests.

In the car, Diamond said, ‘Are you okay?’

‘I thought I was going to throw up when he told us,’ Ingeborg said. ‘I can handle a murder scene, but this is worse, considering we just spoke to the victim. What a thing to come to terms with, learning you were hated this much by somebody.’

‘I know. It’s repulsive and impossible to justify. But our job is to find out why it was done and who is responsible.’

‘Okay, guv. I won’t let it do my head in. What do we do about this?’

‘We’ve got enough now for a search warrant to get into Denise’s house and seize her make-up kit. And we need to know a whole lot more about her.’

‘Do you want to call Keith?’

He called CID on Ingeborg’s phone and got Dawkins, that windbag, announcing that the department was at his service, as if it was menswear in Jolly’s.

‘Diamond here. Is Keith in the office?’

‘Keith?’ From the bemused way Dawkins repeated the name, it could have been Julius Caesar.

‘DI Halliwell.’

‘Would he be the gentleman with sideburns?’

Diamond gripped the phone harder. What could have possessed Georgina to dump such a nutcase in CID? ‘That’s Leaman. If he’s there, hand the phone to him.’

‘He is not.’

‘This is urgent, Fred. Is anyone with you?’

‘There is another officer with a more restrained haircut and by what you said I can only deduce he is DI Halliwell.’

‘Put me onto him, for God’s sake.’

Halliwell was on message at once. He said he’d organise the warrant directly. There was no shortage of local magistrates to contact.

‘Any success tracing her car?’

‘She owns a silver Vauxhall Corsa. It’s not on the street right now. The neighbours say that’s where she parks it when she’s at home. They’re pretty sure it wasn’t there overnight. I’ve got the registration and put out an all units as agreed.’

‘What’s the address?’

‘Excelsior Street in Dolemeads. By the time you get back here, the warrant should be ready.’

‘We’ll join you as soon as we can.’

He updated Ingeborg.

She said, ‘I can’t think why Denise would do something as dumb as this. She’d know we’ll soon catch up with her.’

‘We’ve yet to find out the background,’ he said. ‘I sense a history of ill-will behind this. You get people with a grudge and they lose all sense of proportion. This could have been a personal spat with Clarion, or something quite different, like a grievance against the theatre.’

‘So she scars Clarion for life?’ she said on an angry, rising note.

‘Stay cool, Inge. Up to now, nobody has said a word against Denise.’

‘Because she’s only known to us as a functionary. The dresser. We’ll find out a whole lot more shortly.’

They got to the end of the Keynsham by-pass and started the Bath Road stretch of the A4. Ingeborg was driving too fast by Diamond’s reckoning. ‘You can take it more steadily now,’ he said. ‘We’ve made good time. I haven’t heard what you dug up on Clarion.’