Christopher Fowler - White Corridor

“Arthur and I are taking a trip to Devon. You can come with us if you want. There’s plenty of room.”

“No, I’m still settling in here.”

“Will you be all right on your own?”

“I’ll be fine, I promise.” She gave him a reassuring smile. T have a lot of reading to catch up on. Someone needs to hold the fort. I’m working my way through Uncle Arthur’s journals.“

“Don’t believe everything you read in them,” May warned. “He has a habit of greatly exaggerating our successes.”

“And libelling everyone else. One police chief is described as ”a human leech with a mind genetically resembling old Stilton.“ I can’t imagine these accounts will ever see the light of day.”

“For God’s sake don’t tell him that. He thinks he has a bestseller on his hands. Remember to call me if you feel the slightest anxiety, won’t you?” He hovered awkwardly in the doorway. “I know I haven’t always been there for you in the past, but now that you know part of the reason why-‘

“It’s fine, Granddad,” April assured him. “You don’t have to say anything.”

But after her grandfather had left the office, his turn of phrase began to puzzle her. Part of the reason? He had finally been honest about her mother’s death, but was there more she had not yet learned about her blighted family?

Oswald Finch was peering gimlet-eyed through the crack in the door like some grizzled old retainer considering whether to admit a tradesman into a mansion. Bryant wrinkled his nose at the sour reek of chemicals drifting through the gap. He looked up from his desk and gave a start.

“Good Lord, Oswald, you frightened the life out of me; it smells like something has died. Don’t lurk outside like some grotesque from Gormenghast. Come in and stop scaring people.”

The ancient pathologist creaked into the room and lowered himself gingerly onto a bentwood chair. “Piles,” he explained, grimacing into a tragedy mask. “I’m at the age where my diary is marked with more hospital appointments than social events. Of course, doctors can do miracles now. Do you know, I’ve hardly anything left that I started out with. Nothing is in its original place. The doctor who opens me up is in for a shock. My intestines lose several feet every year.”

“Well, I’d love to discuss the state of your internal organs all day, but as you can see I’m pretending to be busy.” Bryant ostentatiously flicked over one blank page to examine another. “What do you want?”

Finch sniffed noisily and looked around with disapproval. “The state of this place. A little order wouldn’t kill you. What’s in those petri dishes?” He pointed to a row of plastic bowls arranged on the windowsill.

“It’s rat excrement. I scraped some from the heel of that woman found dead beside the canal at York Way. The canal rats feed mostly on discarded junk food, but those samples contain grain. There’s not much loose grain in King’s Cross, so I guessed she was moved from somewhere else and dumped after dark. The rats had fed on a particular type of red split lentil used in Indian cooking. We tracked the ingredient to a factory in Hackney.”

“I still don’t understand,” Finch admitted. “What’s it doing on the windowsill?”

“Oh, Alma told me it was good for growing mustard cress. I love ham-and-cress sandwiches.”

“You are quite astonishingly disgusting. No wonder I never come up here from the morgue.”

“Too much paperwork, no doubt.”

“No, too many stairs. I was wondering if you’d heard anything about the equipment I was supposed to be getting. I’ve been promised new tanks, a small-parts dissection table fitted with a decent stainless steel drain and a second mobile instrument cart for seven months now, and the cover is still off my extractor fan. Plus, one of my refrigeration cabinets is on the blink. I suppose it was you who left several wine boxes and a tray of sausage rolls in there.”

“They’re for your send-off.”

“Ignoring the fact that it is unsanitary and illegal to keep foodstuffs in a refrigeration unit reserved for body parts, the sausages are past their sell-by date.”

“So are you, old bean. I thought you’d be pleased.” Bryant narrowed his watery eyes in suspicion. “You haven’t become a vegetarian, have you?”

The pathologist looked troubled. “I have the awful feeling that by retiring at this late stage in life, I may find myself with no purpose. I can’t just wither away in Hastings.”

“No choice, old sock. Your retirement’s been accepted and processed. You can sit on the pier and throw stones at the seagulls.”

“But I like seagulls.”

“After a few months of watching them you won’t. Just think of all the fun that lies ahead.” Bryant stapled some papers together and sniffed. “Personally I’ve always found Hastings to be positively suicide-inducing, but I won’t be living there. I’m sure you’ll discover some advantages; it’ll be as quiet as your morgue, and you won’t have me pulling hideous practical jokes on you anymore.”

Finch gloomily picked something unpleasant from his nails. “I suppose that’s true. I worked it out the other day. Over a period of more than forty years, you’ve played a mean-spirited trick on me at least once a week, which comes to well over two thousand japes, jokes, hoaxes, wind-ups and pranks played out with a straight face against my person, while I am trying to carry out the serious business of ascertaining causes of death to make your department look good. You tricked me into cutting up my credit cards over the phone, nurturing a rare mollusk that turned out to be a mildewed mango seed, calling my wife to accuse her of conducting a fictitious affair with a limbo dancer and telling my son that he’d been adopted following his rescue from a Satanist cult. You super-glued my office door shut, put gunpowder in my cigarette filters, sewed prawns into my jacket pockets, dropped a live eel down my toilet, relabelled my sandwich box with plague bacillus warnings, hid whoopee cushions in my cadaver drawers and retuned my radio to receive fake ”end of the world“ bulletins. No wonder I’ve never had any respect around here. Poor Raymond Land, I’ve finally come to understand exactly how he feels.”

“You’d better sit down, Oswald, you’ve gone scarlet. You don’t want to have a heart attack the week before your retirement, eh? Everyone knows that your sense of humour petrified as soon as death’s dark caul wrapped itself around you. Besides, you know I only play jokes because I respect you. You’ll be sorely missed.” Bryant had secretly petitioned the Home Office to have Finch’s pension increased. “At least we’ve got young Giles Kershaw to take over the position. I was thrilled to nominate him in your place.”

“I’ve been meaning to talk to you about that. I’m afraid I turned down Kershaw’s application.”

“What on earth did you do that for?”

“In my opinion, he doesn’t have enough experience.”

“But he’ll be devastated, Oswald. The job was all but promised to him.”

“Then it will teach him not to be so ambitious,” said Finch. “These overbearing young graduates come along thinking the world owes them a living, when they have to pay their dues.”

This wasn’t like Oswald. Bryant assumed that the pathologist was out of sorts because the reality of his long-pending resignation had finally sunk in. Everyone knew he was happiest when he was elbow-deep in somebody’s chest. Physical and mental health problems had a way of crowding in when one’s purpose in life was removed, and Finch’s purpose was to provide resolutions to unfortunately truncated lives.