Christopher Fowler - White Corridor

“Mum, can’t breathe, you’re squashing me,” he called from within the folds.

“Don’t worry,” she said, convincing herself, “everything’s going to be all right.”

“Where’s Johann? Why can’t he come with us?” said the muffled voice.

She closed her eyes and tried to avoid imagining the dangers that might lay in wait for them both.

“We ain’t going anywhere in this.” The van driver smelled of rolling tobacco and cabbages. His name was Danny, and he transported cartons of counterfeit cigarettes to his supermarket in Cornwall. He had offered Johann a lift from the port because he felt the police were less likely to stop trucks with codrivers. Johann watched the silver Toyota setting off ahead of them, and created an absurd story about needing to keep within sight of his ex-wife because she was worried about breaking down on the motorway.

Danny had heard worse, and dutifully stayed within ten vehicles of the Toyota. It wasn’t difficult; driving conditions had rapidly become atrocious, and no-one was overtaking or speeding. He’d expected to cut off the edge of the A38 and make a stop outside Plymouth, where he had promised to deliver some whisky to his business partner, but the traffic slowed to a crawl, and had now stopped altogether.

“I’ve never seen weather like this, man.” Danny tapped out a Romanian Rothmans and lit up. “It’s as far as we go until the ploughs get here.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Johann told him. T can see my wife’s car from here.“ He opened the passenger door and swung himself down into the snowdrift. ”Thank you for the ride.“

“But I didn’t get you there,” Danny called after him.

“You got me as far as I needed to go,” Johann shouted back, but his words were torn up by the driving gale.

“They’re stranded in a blizzard somewhere at the southern edge of Dartmoor,” said Longbright. “April, try to get an update on conditions from the Devon and Cornwall police. Tell them we’ve got a couple of senior officers snowed in, see if we can get them out and brought back here. Colin, you’d better try and track down Raymond Land. We’ll have to tell him what’s happened. Dan, you come with me to Bayham Street and give me a walk-through.”

“What about me?” asked Giles Kershaw, rising from his seat.

“You stay here, Giles. You had both motive and opportunity. Out of all of us, you’re most under suspicion of murder. Meera, make sure he doesn’t go anywhere and remember you’re under suspicion as well. Neither of you are to use a phone or a computer until I return. You’re on your honour. Don’t make me have to enforce this by calling in the Met.”

My God, she thought, running down the steeply angled stairs to the street, if we really have a murderer inside the unit, there’s no-one I can rely on to help me.

As a child, young Oskar Kasavian had shopped his mother to the police for smoking a joint at a Belgravia embassy party held for King Zog of Albania. This had been a serious matter because his parents both worked in the Foreign Office, and the family were in the middle of delicate negotiations with the Italians. It was only his father’s status as a politically appointed diplomat that prevented severe repercussions. Relations soured between Kasavian and his mother, to the point where she disowned him on her deathbed, but Oskar didn’t care. By then he knew how to operate within the complex ecosystem of interdepartmental government politics, and used it to his full advantage.

By the time he had been promoted within the Home Office to handling matters of national security, he knew how to step on time-serving ministers like Leslie Faraday and gently squash them until they carried out his instructions without ever realising they had lost control of their own departments. The middle managers of Whitehall lived in fear of him, and even his superiors felt a sense of relief when he left the room.

Only Arthur Bryant had managed to bloody his nose over the investigation of the prankster-murderer newspapers had nicknamed the Highwayman. Kasavian’s relationship with a married tabloid editor had been exposed, and the PCU had blackmailed him into dropping his assault on unit funding in return for their continued silence about his affair.

Now, he felt, it was time to take revenge.

Her Royal Highness Princess Beatrice of Connaught, who performed no public duties and was known to the press as ‘Princess Poison,“ was the Baroness Katarina-Marchmaine von Treppitz, Viennese daughter of Baron von Treppitz and the Countess Alexandria Spenten-Berger, and was usually in the headlines for the wrong reasons. She had supposedly told a group of Chinese diners in a Chelsea restaurant to ’go back to Chinky Land‘ and had been accused of everything from expressing pro-Nazi sympathies to living in a Regent’s Park apartment subsidised by the Queen. Her office also had occasion to correspond with Oskar Kasavian, and she had been persuaded, in the interest of public relations, to make a rare royal visit to a government law enforcement unit representing experimental policing techniques, namely the Peculiar Crimes Unit.

Kasavian’s plan in arranging the trip was ostensibly connected with the Princess’s desire to take more of an interest in government funding initiatives. She had a reputation for being outspoken and litigious, something journalists rarely forgave, but had seemed perfectly charming on the few times Kasavian had dealt with her. He reasoned that, as his hands were still tied in the matter of closing down the PCU, which he considered a ridiculous squandering of resources, he would get someone else to do it for him. When Princess Beatrice saw the chaotic shambles that existed above Mornington Crescent tube station, he felt sure that her acerbic comments would bring the harsh spotlight of attention onto the PCU and provide him with the ammunition he needed to shut its doors once and for all. Then he would be able to reallocate funding to a new unit under his personal supervision.

When the Princess’s office confirmed that the conductor of the Vienna Boys’ Choir had slipped and broken his baton wrist outside a Salzburg McDonald’s, the sudden cancellation of his royal performance allowed her to schedule a brief visit to the unit in its place, which meant that she would be stepping daintily from her limousine onto the mean streets of Mornington Crescent this Thursday afternoon at five. Kasavian quickly informed Leslie Faraday, who sent a protocol package to Raymond Land, who was in the middle of opening it and reading the contents with a dropping jaw just as Janice Longbright walked into his room.

“He can’t do this,” Land murmured. “He can’t send a royal visitor around at such short notice, not here, not now-not her.”‘ He had always known that the unit’s victory over Kasavian would be temporary, and that he would come back fighting, but this was more underhand than he had imagined. “They’re heading here for an inspection in less than two days’ time. Our computer system is down, there are cables and equipment boxes and God knows what all over the floor and our two chief detectives are away on some kind of bizarre winter holiday.” Well, the last part was perhaps a blessing, as Mr. Bryant could not be trusted to avoid controversial topics, and had expressed his cynicism about certain members of the royal family a number of times in the past. “Hullo, Janice, what do you want?” Land eyed the strangely garbed sergeant with suspicion. Why is she sporting that outlandish hairstyle and wearing a pencil skirt? he wondered. Would it kill her to dress normally?

“Sorry to be the bearer of more bad news, Raymond. Oswald Finch has been found dead in the Bayham Street Morgue, a heart attack brought on by blows to the neck and the chest, and our lads think it looks like murder.”