Christopher Fowler - White Corridor

“I don’t understand. Why would he have bothered to lie to Mrs. Gilby? Besides, he’s not a lapsed Catholic. According to her, he’s such a believer that he thinks God watches him whenever there’s a clear sky. I don’t like the sound of this, John; something is not right about the man’s life. I’m starting to think we’ve been mightily had.”

“I’m coming back,” said his partner. “My battery’s nearly dead, so I’ll get off the line. Don’t do anything reckless.”

“I need to go and find the envelope Mrs. Gilby took from her attacker. We have to expose him. Is there any way of getting its contents transmitted?”

“I can upload digital shots and send them back to the unit in seconds, but what if you have an accident out there? Wait in the vehicle and I’ll collect it.”

“She put it under the front passenger-side wheel arch of her rented blue Toyota,” Bryant explained. “It’s about ten cars in front of us, around the curve.”

“I’ll go after it now.”

May bade farewell to Maggie and her group, and set off along the road until he reached the bend, where it banked steeply. The snow had started to fall heavily once more, and was rapidly obscuring the way ahead. If Johann thinks God is watching him, he could strike whenever the clouds hide him from view, thought May. That’s now.

A new sense of urgency drove him on, but the route had scabbed over with gem-hard ice, and the going was difficult. When he heard the rumble, he thought that a train must have finally managed to break through, but upon looking up at the side of the hill he saw what appeared to be rocks disappearing in the great plateau of white smoke.

A plain of snow the size of a football pitch was slowly gaining momentum. It gathered speed as it slid down towards the road, bursting between the trees and spraying over the bushes. When it hit the valley of cars, it raised and shoved them gently, silently, to the far bank, burying several completely. May fought to keep his footing, but the avalanche was fracturing the ground in a pattern that reminded him of the partition of ice floes, shaking and finally tipping him over onto his back.

As he clambered back to his feet, May saw that the other half of the traffic corridor had been cut off and that he was completely separated from Bryant, without any way of reaching him.

Giles Kershaw agreed to join Longbright for the interview. She had been planning to take Banbury in with her, as he was the burliest officer they had apart from Bimsley, but no-one knew where the detective constable was. The pair of them peered through the window before they went in.

Sergeant Renfield was squirming about on an orange plastic chair as if he had been tethered there. He was so furious that he had changed colour. His ears were white, his cheeks were a deep crimson, his nose almost blue. If his face had been rounder he would have looked like an archery target. He had once told Longbright that the Met was run like a doctors’ surgery and the unit behaved like a bunch of alternative therapists, and his detention today confirmed this belief. He had always fancied his chances with the detective sergeant, but now he was displaying the bitterness of a man who knew that he had been irrevocably rejected.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing, bringing me in here?” He spat the words at her as she entered.

“I wanted to keep this more informal, but the heater’s broken in my room,” she told him. “And it’s less public in here.”

“You’ve lost the bloody plot, Longbright. I knew you lot were hopeless without your bosses around, but this is a bloody joke.”

“No joke,” said Janice. “You went back to the mortuary to see Oswald, didn’t you?” She knew she was chancing her arm with this supposition, but needed to provoke a reaction. If he decided to call her bluff and demand evidence, she was lost.

“I didn’t have much of a choice, did I? Finch phoned me and accused me of screwing up. He told me he’d put it in the report if I didn’t come over and sort it out at once.”

“So you went back to Bayham Street and had it out with him.”

“Finch hadn’t been out in the field for years; he had no idea what it’s like on the streets: the chavs, the drunks, the endless aggression. The Camden junkies are worse than their dealers, because they’re either whining excuses or angling for a fix, by which time they’re little more than animals. I’d seen that girlie on the street before, or if it wasn’t her it was someone damned well like her.” Renfield was eager to explain his side of the story. “Anyone who tells you that rehabilitation works is a liar. They’ll swear to God they’re clean, and you can lift the gear out of their pockets while they’re talking to you. No matter what they say, you know you’ll see them again, shooting up in a toilet or a shop doorway. That’s what we did when we picked up the girl; we dealt with the situation.”

“Then why did Finch call you back in?” asked Longbright.

“Listen, I’d been on duty all night, and she looked like another dead junkie.” Renfield’s body language proclaimed him guilty without the need to speak.

“You bypassed the hospital and sent her straight to the morgue, didn’t you?” said Longbright. “That’s why you went yourself. You didn’t call the paramedics.”

“I saved everyone a docket. You think you have the monopoly on unorthodox procedure? If it improves the situation for all parties concerned, do it without thinking twice. Bryant himself told me that. Finch was a doctor, he could have signed her off easy enough, but instead he had to make life difficult for everyone. My boys were coming to the end of a long shift; they were knackered.”

“What did Finch tell you about Lilith Starr?” asked Longbright.

“He said the girl was in ana-ana-‘ Renfield stuttered.

“Anaphylactic shock?” asked Kershaw.

“Yeah, that’s it.”

“It’s an extreme allergic reaction to a particular substance,” the young forensic scientist told Longbright. “Her immune system would already have been compromised because she was a junkie. Under anaphylaxis, the system decides that some alien substance poses a danger, and overreacts by creating huge quantities of the antibody immunoglobulin E. The body releases an excess amount of histamine and the throat closes up, making it difficult to breathe.”

“What happens after that?” asked Longbright.

“All sorts of problems can occur,” said Kershaw, “but mainly, immunoglobulin E expands blood vessels, causing a drop in blood pressure, which leads to loss of consciousness.” As if to avoid letting Renfield off the hook, he added, “There are usually visible signs a paramedic would immediately notice. Swelling and rashes on the skin, or on the lips and tongue if it was something ingested orally.”

“Even Finch didn’t know what had set her off,” snapped Renfield. “It’s a mistake anyone could have made. He said it could have been any number of things.”

“That’s right. Nuts, drugs like morphine or X-ray dye, dental painkillers, something in the dope she’d taken,” Kershaw confirmed.

“Finch’s competence in diagnosing her isn’t the matter at hand,” said Longbright. “I want to know whether he made you so angry that you attacked him.”

“Of course not. God, he’d made me angry often enough in the past. You think I couldn’t take it from him? He had a go at me, and I left.”

“Then why didn’t you tell us when we first talked?” Longbright demanded.

“Because he and his lads dropped off a woman at a morgue who wasn’t dead,” said Kershaw disgustedly. “He didn’t turn up at Bayham Street with a paramedic, just one of his constables. When they’d found her in the doorway, her body was cold to the touch and showing signs of cyanosis. They couldn’t find a pulse, so they made an assumption, when a hospital might have saved her life.”