Bryant & May on the Loose

∨ Bryant & May on the Loose ∧

24

The Two Delaneys

Rosa Lysandrou slowly opened the door of the Camley Street Coroner’s Office like Mrs Danvers beckoning a visitor into Manderley. She examined the man standing before her with a glum stare that could have brought a corpse out in a sweat.

“Is Giles in?” asked Dan Banbury, in the manner of a schoolboy asking if a friend could come out to play.

“Can I ask who is calling?”

“I’m Dan. We work together.”

“He already has one visitor. I’ll have to see.” Rosa’s grey eyes narrowed in faint disapproval. The door closed again. Banbury took a look around. Rain was mizzling lightly against the grassy banks on either side of the entrance. The only sound came from the wind in the reeds that grew beside the canal. It really was the most forlorn, depressing – the door opened again.

“Dan! Hullo! Sorry about that – Rosa is insisting on screening my callers. Come in.” Kershaw clapped a hand on the Crime Scene Manager’s broad back and drew him into the gloomy corridor. “Apparently that’s what she always did for the professor, her previous boss. He came here from the Hospital for Tropical Diseases just up the road. Have you heard, some absolute doombrain wants to make the place a containment area for unknown serious infections? The press has been speculating about what would happen if it became a terrorist target. Can you imagine the disaster scenario we’d have on our hands? At present such things are dealt with up near Mill Hill. They have PCs from Haringey and Barnet guarding the place. Anyway, the Disease Centre moved out of that weird old Gothic building you can see from the road in 1999, and the professor came here. By all accounts Rosa was dedicated to him, but there seems to be some kind of mystery about how and why he left that she won’t talk about; disgrace, a nervous breakdown, it’s all very – Ah, here we are.”

Bryant was standing in the main room, having just arrived from the church next door. He grinned. “What do you think of this, then, Dan?”

“What an extraordinary place,” Dan marvelled. He tended to admire buildings from an engineering perspective. A modern extension had added nothing of architectural interest, but the slender vaulted morgue ran deep under the road, cutting through ground that had once been filled with coffins from St Pancras Old Church. It reminded Banbury of a post-war railway station, mainly because of the row of green tin lights hanging low over the pair of dissection tables that occupied the main space in the room. The floor vibrated faintly as a subway train passed. Glassware pinged in a cabinet.

“Rather atmospheric, isn’t it?” Kershaw loved having visitors to whom he could show his new domain. “It could do with more light, but it’s surprisingly big.”

“It would have needed to be when it was built,” said Bryant. “The parish church was pretty busy, and I imagine there were plenty of violent deaths to deal with. You can blame both the reformers and the property speculators for that.”

“Why so?”

“The fields of Somers Town and Holloway were dug up to build wealthy villas, suburban homes and houses for the Irish who came here for the Copenhagen Street cattle market. People were pouring in to work on the new railways. Some houses quickly degenerated into slums, but the land was so valuable that it would change hands five times in as many years, leaving the rich butted up beside the poor. London in microcosm, and a classic recipe for trouble.”

“Yeah, well, shoving the lower-waged into council estates doesn’t work, either,” said Banbury, who, like Meera, had been raised on one of the rougher London housing developments.

“No, so now they’re planning to mix households with different incomes within individual land plots, to break down social barriers. An old idea whose time has come again. Whatever the result, I’m sure it’ll keep Giles busy.”

“How are you getting on, Dan?” asked Kershaw.

“You mean apart from having no officially recognised existence? Mr Bryant has found us a temporary home of sorts, but we’re so far off the grid that I can’t get access to any data. At the moment I’m using the wife’s on-line account to get into systems.”

“Did you get anything more out of our corpses?” Bryant asked.

“See for yourself,” answered Kershaw, “although I warn you, they’re not pretty. Here you go, body number one.” He rolled out a green steel drawer and unveiled its contents. Without its identifying features, the remaining grey flesh bore little resemblance to anything human.

“There seems to be some confusion here. From the contents of the stomach and the condition of his skin, I’ve set the time of death for the cadaver that was found in the shop a little earlier than the body found on the building compound – ”

“He wasn’t killed on the premises,” Banbury interrupted. “But I think he was beheaded in the shop. Any blood that fell landed on plastic sheeting that was then removed; there are drag marks in the dust consistent with that.”

“Okay. I imagine the head was destroyed separately. You’ve got a pretty good confirmation on Terry Delaney from the prints plus the scar marks caused by the hot iron filings falling on his ankles. I also found a small star-shaped scar on his right calf. Janice gave me the number of his neighbour, Mrs Mbele, who now remembers that Delaney told her he’d been stabbed in the leg with a screwdriver when he was a kid. Best of all, his chums at work remember he had the ivy wreath band tattooed on his arm. So, that’s the ID taken care of, but not much else.”

“What about the other one?”

Kershaw closed the first drawer and opened the second with an eardrum-shredding screech of metal. “Sorry, I’ve got to oil the runners. This equipment was installed in the 1930^s. Okay, this guy is very messed up. He has no identifying marks on his body. We know he was thirty-four years old and has some lung damage from heavy smoking, but that’s about it. The arms and legs are badly crushed – obviously from the earthmovers.”

He removed the plastic bag containing the victim’s head and tenderly set it down on its left cheek. “Despite the damage by the site excavators it looks like the same method of decapitation, severing at the exact same points with the same blades. So we have a positive ID for Terry Delaney at the building compound.”

“So what’s the confusion?” Banbury asked.

“Well, I managed to get hold of Delaney’s dental records, which proved highly distinctive – he’d had some major surgery – and I was looking at the second corpse’s head, and suddenly I realised I was seeing Delaney’s bridgework. So it seems there are two Terry Delaneys. What I want to know is this: How can the victim be in both places, days apart? And if they’re not both Terry Delaney, who the hell is the other one? Am I making any sense?”

“Not really, no,” said Bryant.

“Look, maybe I’m overtired. I haven’t been sleeping well since I got here. But Delaney’s been identified twice.”

“Then one of them must be wrong. Or else he had a twin.”

“I thought you might say that, so I checked. Terry Delaney doesn’t have a twin.”

“Then perhaps he cloned himself.” Bryant didn’t seem too bothered by the problem. “Tell me, do you think the killer is simply removing signs of identity? Or could there be something more ritualised in his method?”

“You mean is he the kind of serial killer you get in supermarket novels, picking off victims according to the plagues of Egypt or following arcane rules laid down in the Bible? No, I think the neighbourhood has got itself a hit man, taking care of local trouble and sending out a warning to others by looking tough – removing the head. Either that or he’s a psycho; sometimes if there’s a sexual element to the death the killer can’t bear to be watched by the victim.”

“I haven’t been able to file a detailed report about Delaney’s apartment yet,” said Banbury, “but it wasn’t a simple hit. Delaney kept his place neat and tidy, but everything had been pulled out. Not by him; there were no prints on any of the drawer handles. The intruder was surprised while he was searching for something.”

“So where was Delaney while that was going on? Standing around watching? Having tea with his twin brother, perhaps?” asked Bryant.

“No, at the very least he was knocked out. If the blow was fatal, it certainly didn’t cause much external haemorrhaging. The attack happened during daylight hours because the owner had installed a fancy Lutron lighting system that’s operated by a remote. You need to point it at the base controls to turn on the overhead spots, but I found it in a different room to the base, under the contents of ransacked drawers, and the attack was too well placed to have occurred in the dark.”

“What about the time of death?”

“Tricky to ascertain without knowing exactly how airtight the freezer lid was,” said Kershaw, “but the seal was strong enough to stop the skin from drying out. Clearly there was bacterial activity inside the body for about four days. I was able to access my old PCU insect charts from here when I performed the autopsy. I used that data to compare the life cycles of the mites I found present in the gut. I can take you through the larval stages – ”

“Not necessary,” said Bryant. “Your conclusions will be fine.”

“Let’s say he died four or five days before he was found. The trouble is, that date plays havoc with the rest of my calculations. Even allowing for the difference in locations, I’d swear that from the comparable condition of the bodies, the two men were killed with an interval of at least two days between them. It’s pretty clear that Terry Delaney died on Monday afternoon, not on Wednesday or Thursday.”

“Wait, I know I’m old and easily bamboozled,” Bryant complained. “What does this actually mean?”

“Well,” said Kershaw, scratching the side of his head with the pointing-antenna Bryant had given him, “you’ve got the same man dying twice in two separate places, days apart. So to answer your question, I’m buggered if I know.”