Christopher Fowler - White Corridor

Finch, found dead in his own morgue. Why had the blade of an extractor fan been used as a weapon? Because it had fallen, because it was there. “If you meant to kill or at least wound someone, you wouldn’t strike them with a piece of lightweight aluminium, would you?” he asked Dan. “I mean, a child could tell it’s no good as a weapon.”

“When you’re desperate, anything will do,” said Banbury, pulling his head out of Finch’s instrument cupboard. “I’ve heard of pens, stereo speakers, coat hangers, candles and laptops all being used as assault weapons. Everyone knows that if you attack a burglar with a torch you’re likely to get off, because it’s an item you’re likely to be carrying. You don’t think Renfield clouted him?”

“I should imagine the good sergeant’s training in the Met would have taught him not to leave marks,” said Kershaw. “The business with the empty bottle of naltrexone still bothers me. Finch didn’t use it on himself. There was nothing in his system.”

Banbury rose slowly to his feet and stared steadily at his colleague. “My God, he used it on the corpse,” he said, heading for the cabinets. “You heard Renfield. Oswald knew that the sergeant’s boy had got it wrong; he realised she wasn’t your usual Camden overdoser. He was trying to revive her when the sergeant reappeared. He must have been furious with him. He’d already had Owen Mills turning up in a state just after the body had been delivered, trying to understand why his girlfriend was lying on an autopsy tray, and it sowed doubt in his mind, so he pumped in the naltrexone and called Renfield back to have a go at him.”

Kershaw was already helping him to slide open the drawer and ease out the body bag containing Lilith Starr’s cadaver. “This is my damned fault. I was so preoccupied with Finch putting the blocks on my career that I didn’t run the obvious checks. I’ll bet he had doubts about the cause of death from the moment he saw the body. He’d have found obvious signs of cocaine and heroin use, but would have known the levels weren’t enough to put her into a coma, so he tried to pull her out of it. When that didn’t work, he started searching for something else, probably testing for the most common causes of anaphylactic shock. And either before or after Renfield returned, he discovered something, stopping to write it down.”

“Wait, that can’t be right,” said Banbury. “Renfield insists he didn’t destroy the report, so Mills must have, but Mills arrived first, when Finch could only have just started working on it. So why would he have ripped it out?”

“You have a point, old chap. You don’t think someone else was here?”

Banbury looked up. “Who?”

“There is only one other person left: our missing man, the former lover-Samuel, the man with no surname.”

“Blimey, it seems like the morgue was busier than Camden Market on Tuesday morning.”

“An appropriate blasphemy,” said Kershaw excitedly. “Blimey is supposedly short for God blind me, something that’s been happening to all of us in this investigation. We’ve been blinded from the outset. Think, what else did you find here?”

“I’ve got Finch’s handprints, Mills’s trainers and Renfield’s boot marks, but no fingerprints on your supposed weapon, the fan blade. Exactly where am I supposed to look for this invisible man?”

Meanwhile, Longbright had found Owen Mills in the very first place she looked-Lilith Starr’s claustrophobic flat on the Crowndale Estate. The front door was ajar, and Lilith’s belongings stood stacked in cardboard boxes in the hall. Mills was sitting cross-legged on the floor of her bedroom, sorting through a pile of drawings and photographs.

“Owen?” Longbright took a further step into the shadowed room. When he turned to her, she could see he had been crying, but he hastily wiped away the evidence with the tips of his fingers. “I’m not going to go away, you know,” she told him, “not until I’ve heard the truth. You see, I’ve been wondering about your last night together.”

“That’s nothing to do with you.”

“How was she? You spent the evening here, right? How did she seem to you?”

Mills thought for a moment, caught by the question.

“Owen, I’ll help you, I promise. I have the power to do that. If you care about her, you have to tell me how she was.”

“All right, she was kind of weird. Vague, you know? Not all there. She kept saying she had a chest pain. But she’d said that before. I don’t want to talk about her.”

“I’m not here to disrespect your relationship with Lilith,” Longbright insisted. T think you’ve been through enough in the last two days. I know how much you cared for her, but I want to rule out your involvement in the death at Bayham Street.“

“Then talk to me about something else.” Part of him seemed anxious to tell her more.

“All right, let’s talk about you. How are you coping?”

“Okay, I suppose.”

“What’s your family arrangement?”

“I got three other brothers, two sisters. I’m the oldest.”

The detective sergeant seated herself on the floor beside him. “Get on okay with your parents?”

“I don’t know. I guess.”

“Did they meet Lilith? What did they think of her? I mean, you were serious about her, right?”

“She wanted me to marry her, I guess that’s serious.”

“Did you introduce her to your mum and dad?”

“Yeah. Yeah, they met her once. They thought she was nice.”

“And to your brothers and sisters?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“They respect me. They look up to me.”

“What, you didn’t think Lilith was respectable enough for them?”

“Not that.” The wall of evasion Mills used as protection had suddenly reappeared.

“Owen, I’m going to need two answers from you about Lilith, then I’m out of your way. Can we make that a deal?”

“I don’t have to answer anything.”

“I know, but you must be as anxious as I am to put the subject to rest. I’m convinced you took Finch’s notes. Just tell me what you did with them.”

“I told you, I didn’t take anything.”

“They were there before you turned up, and gone immediately after. He didn’t tear them out himself, or we would have found them. If you’re only prepared to tell me one thing, make it this. I won’t ask anything more of you.”

“I didn’t take them; he burned them. It was like, one page, okay? He did it for her.” His voice was toneless.

“You mean Oswald Finch burned his own notes? Why would he do that?”

“You don’t need to know. It has nothing to do with your investigation.”

“I understand why you asked him, to protect her,” said Longbright. “I know that. You didn’t want her drug use to come out on the report that would be sent to her parents.”

“She hated her parents, but she felt like she’d hurt them enough. She said there was no point in kicking them beyond the grave, asked me to clean up behind her if anything bad ever happened, like she was expecting it.”

“Where can I find her former boyfriend?”

“Why do you need to know?” asked Owen wearily.

“I have to eliminate him from the investigation.”

“Well, you can do that, all right. He’s dead and buried, in-nit. Gone forever.”

“When did it happen?”

“Eight months ago. That’s why she took his name off her arm.”

“What happened? How did he die?”

Owen gave her a crooked smile. “It was a knife wound.”

“Who did it?”

“Nobody you know.”

Getting answers from the boy was like pulling teeth once more. In the peculiar manner of most of the kids living around this estate, he had answered her questions without explaining a single thing. Longbright checked her watch and saw that it was three-fifteen p.m., which left just one and three quarter hours before the slow-motion car crash of the unit’s destruction concluded. More frustrated than angry, she rose and left Mills to his grief and his photographs.