Bryant & May 01; Full Dark House

∨ Full Dark House ∧

33

AS BAD AS EACH OTHER

Always ahead, always alone, thought May. If only I’d been friendlier from the outset…

He returned his attention to the retired pathologist.

“I haven’t finished yet. I’m eighty-four,” continued Oswald Finch. “I’m slowing down. When you get to be this old, it seems like everyone else is on Rollerblades.”

“I appreciate that, Oswald,” May insisted, “but you must have removed most of the intact material by now.”

“Oh, we’ve removed it from the building, all right. Not that it’s my job, you understand. I’m just here because, well, I have an interest in finding out what happened.” He pushed open the door of the evidence room. “Nobody’s had a chance to go through it all.” In front of Longbright and May were around thirty large clear plastic bags filled with chunks of charred wood, blackened files, sticks of furniture, bricks, pieces of broken glass and twisted metal.

“This is all that’s left of the unit?”

“Pretty much so.” Finch lowered himself into a chair and grimaced. “Stinks, doesn’t it? Wouldn’t be surprised if there were still bits of Bryant in there.”

May ignored his remark. The pair of them had never really got on. Even so, he was surprised and rather touched to find Finch in the building. “Did you find any of our office equipment in one piece?”

“Not actually in one piece, but there are surviving chunks that were shielded by closed doors. Raymond Land thinks the explosion was caused by old hand-grenades, you know. Something about cordite striation patterns.”

“Surely grenades couldn’t have done so much damage?”

“Well, they weren’t all the same size, some were more powerful than others. The Mills grenade was really a small-barrelled missile containing up to three ounces of amatol. Modern blast sites smell different because they use more sophisticated chemical compounds. This was pure stuff. We found powder burns on the walls. The remains of your photocopier should be over there somewhere.” Finch pointed into a corner, and May and Longbright clambered across the bags in that direction.

“He was always playing tricks on me, you know,” called Finch as they went through the bags. “Gluing my furniture to the ceiling, putting fleas in my briefcase, weeing into my rain gauges, getting my keys recut so that they only fitted the ladies’ loo, replacing the fish in my tank with piranhas. Remember the tropical plant that made us all sick? A tarantula fell out of it and bit my wife. He had a very strange sense of humour. I suppose I’ll miss him.”

“Over here.” May unzipped the top of a sack and peered in. “This looks like it.”

“Let me give you a hand.” Longbright was as strong as her mother had been. Together they lifted out the buckled grey panels of the photocopier and set them on the floor. The quarter-inch plate-glass square was cracked, but had not shattered. Unfortunately, the plastic lid had melted tightly over the top of it, like Cheddar on a piece of toast.

“Give me your penknife.” May took the Swiss blade from Longbright and inserted it into a corner of the lid.

“You’re tampering with evidence,” complained Finch, turning his chair round. “I’m not a part of this, I’m not looking.” He couldn’t stop himself from glancing over his shoulder. “Aaah, you’re not even wearing plastics, you’re as bad as Bryant.”

May sawed the blade through the melted cover and gingerly pulled it away from the glass sheet. There beneath the cover was a single scorched sheet of paper. With the tips of his fingers he lifted it away from the glass.

“Looks like we’ve got it,” he told Longbright, grinning.

“You’re not taking evidence away, it’s illegal,” cried Finch. “Sixty years I’ve had to put up with this kind of behaviour. Why me?”

“Oh, stop moaning, Oswald, you can just pretend you never saw us,” said Longbright.

“You’re on the CCTV, I’m not going to lie for you and risk my job.”

“You’re eighty-four, this is no time to worry about being passed over for promotion.” Longbright rose and carried the sheet to a bench by one of the side sinks. “This is odd,” she said, after examining the scorched page for a minute. “It’s got Arthur’s notes scribbled in the margins, but it’s not a list at all.”

“What is it?” asked May.

“I think it’s an architectural plan,” she said finally. “Look at the stamp on the bottom. ‘Palace Theatre Revised Edition September nineteen…’ Can’t read the rest of the date.”

“He must have taken it from the archive room when he went back to the Palace. Then what did he do with the list of patients from the Wetherby clinic?”

“Maybe it was of no use, and he threw it away. He told you he’d been to the theatre, so he was either looking for this, or stumbled across it while he was researching his memoirs.”

“But what is it?”

“Dunno,” Longbright admitted. “Oswald, is there a lightbox anywhere?”

They laid the scorched sheet on a fluorescent panel and May studied it. “Looks like a layout of two long corridors, bisecting at one end. These shadings…the wall cross-sections look completely circular. What’s he written down the side?”

“Looks like a circumference measurement. You wouldn’t normally build a corridor with round walls, would you?”

“I wonder if it could be part of a theatrical set design. It would help to have a complete date. The Palace might keep records of the struck sets.”

“We could check it against them,” said Longbright. “That’s what Bryant would have done.”

“We don’t know what he was looking for. Anyway, I have a better idea.” May dug out his mobile. “Arthur had an architect friend called Beaufort. I think we should get an expert opinion.”

“Wait a minute, you’re not leaving here with evidence,” warned Finch, barring the door.

“Don’t be daft, Oswald. No one will know unless you tell them.” May moved him gently aside.

“What you’re doing is illegal,” Finch called as they left with the evidence. “You’re both as bad as him, you realize that, don’t you?”