The Water Room

21. MURKY DEPTHS

‘There’s only one word for present driving conditions: atrociously bad,’ squeaked Hilary, the Sky One weather lady. ‘Flood warnings have been posted across Kent and Sussex, and there’s another belt of low pressure sweeping in from the south west. The AA is offering this advice: if you’re going out, don’t.’ She suddenly folded in half and vanished as the cable signal popped from the tiny wall-mounted television. Oswald Finch threw the TV remote on to his dissection table with disgust. ‘Stupid woman. I can’t believe the rain in England always makes the headlines.’

‘I can’t believe you’re still here,’ called Bryant, checking his watch.

‘Nor me. I was supposed to retire fifteen years ago.’ The ancient pathologist creaked up from his chair and shook Bryant’s hand. ‘I could be seeing out my retirement in a fisherman’s cottage overlooking the Channel. It’s all bought and paid for, but it’ll fall into the sea before I get there. I’m stuck here, and it’s your bloody fault.’

‘I don’t know what you mean.’

‘You know very well that the Home Office won’t pay the going rate for newly trained technicians because they can’t afford to buy them more up-to-date equipment, and most kids can’t work with antiques, so I’m being blackmailed to stay on.’

‘All right to smoke in here?’ asked Bryant, dragging his pipe from his top pocket.

‘No, it is not. You’re the one who requested my services in the middle of the bloody night. You know they’ll only agree to supplement my pension if I do two days a week for you. So instead of fresh sea air I get formaldehyde poisoning and rheumatism from sitting in a damp Camden basement twice a week.’

‘I thought you were getting a new building.’ Bryant looked about with distaste.

‘We are,’ sniffed Finch. ‘Not in my lifetime, however. It might have helped if you hadn’t incurred everyone’s wrath by blowing up your office.’ This part of the morgue had been housed in the old school gymnasium. Where once the youth of Camden had come to stretch their muscles, there were now only departed souls waiting to have their sinews sliced open and examined.

‘Come on, you old misery, I’ll give you a game of basketball.’ Bryant pointed at the steel hoop still attached to the far wall.

‘At my age the effort of getting up from a chair becomes an Olympic event in itself.’ He looked at the hoop longingly. ‘The only thing I can still dunk is a doughnut. I used to go ballroom dancing, you know. Now I can’t even get the shoes on.’

‘I hope this infirmity hasn’t spread to your brain,’ said Bryant rather rudely.

Finch ignored him. ‘I suppose you’re here about Mr Copeland.’

‘That him over in the corner?’ asked Bryant cheerfully.

Finch led the way to a shiny metal container shaped like an overgrown takeaway box. ‘This is what your bosses are providing for me instead of a sterile laboratory. They’re meant for use in the field, and they’re bloody awkward. I have to stand on a stool in order to get my arms over the sides, and they’re sharp, too. Take a look.’

Bryant climbed up beside the pathologist and peered into the tray. He found himself staring at a fleshy white male, face-down. Lilac bruises had blossomed across his lower back like pressed flowers. In the folds of his neck, a black contusion erupted in torn crimson petals.

‘I wanted to get the back of his head open before you arrived,’ Finch complained, ‘but the caterers upstairs keep borrowing my tools. They used my cranium chisel to take the top off a jar of piccalilli yesterday. I’m not meant to be alone in here. I’ve got a part-time technician and no exhibits officer. No notes, no video, nothing. I’m having to share the photographer and police witness with the Met, and all this after promises of increased personnel.’ He gave the corpse a desultory flick with his forefinger. ‘Jack the Ripper’s pathologist had more technical expertise at his disposal. I have to tell you, Arthur, I’ve lost a lot of faith in the system in the past few years. We define a few addled souls as being worthy of removal from society, and everyone’s under such pressure that we consider the job done when we’re lucky enough to find a court that will shut them away. You know, doctors look for five main signs of mental disturbance in prisoners: personality disorder, psychosis, neurosis, drug dependence and alcohol misuse, and less than one in ten inmates is clean of all five. The prison population stands somewhere above 70,000, which means that over 5,000 of them are functionally psychotic. And all you do, every time you catch someone, is add to the problem.’

‘You’re right, Oswald, we should just leave them out on the street to slaughter each other. Have you seen the headline of this week’s Camden New Journal? “YARDIES TORCH TOT.” I’m surprised mothers don’t do the school run in armoured cars.’

‘There’s no need for sarcasm.’ With a quick slip of the scalpel, Finch exposed the back of Elliot Copeland’s neck to reveal damage at the base of his skull. ‘Take a look at that. A nasty crack, wouldn’t you say? It’s a large area. First and second cervical vertebrae have copped it, anterior and posterior tubercles crushed, so it came at him from the left side. Plenty of myofibril rupture, pretty straightforward. Was he hit with a large flat-edged rock?’

‘In a way,’ Bryant explained. ‘It was part of a paving slab, among other things.’

‘Hm. I assume the weight of it slammed him forward. Broken nose. You see this sort of thing in industrial accidents, except that there’s no bruising to his shins, so he had a soft landing. A manual worker, obviously, judging by the state of his hands. John phoned me and explained about the bruising. At first I thought the single blow had killed him, but that was before I cleaned him up. Mouth and nostrils blocked solid with earth.’

‘Hardly surprising. He fell face-down in a mud-filled ditch.’

‘Not the point, old fruit. He took a deep breath after he was hit. Do you remember the Aberfan disaster-ghastly business of the coal tip sliding on to the Welsh school? The nightmarish part of that was the coal dust, very fine. It poured in like water, suffocating those who had survived the collapse of the building. This is the same. Basically earth-fine particles of soot, clay, grit, vegetable matter and non-biodegradable stuff like polystyrene granules, held in a suspension of water-straight down into his throat. He couldn’t get up because of the weight on his back, so he choked to death. Nasty way to go, but at least it was fast. I ran a standard internal; judging by the state of his liver he was an alcoholic, which reduced his resistance to blood-vessel rupture. His stomach’s full of half-digested pizza, high sodium-heavy drinkers eat salt. What puzzles me is why he’s here. You usually only get me out of bed for murders.’

‘That’s exactly what it was,’ said Bryant, looking for something to put in his mouth. He finally located a tube of Love Hearts in his raincoat. ‘He was standing behind a truck that shed its load. Do you see anything contradictory to that?’

‘No, I suppose not. Except-’ He thought for a minute, resting his hand disconcertingly on Elliot’s waxy back. ‘It’s rather an inexact method of execution, isn’t it? I mean, ensuring that your target is standing exactly where you want him.’

‘I thought that,’ Bryant admitted. ‘The biggest problem it poses for me is the matter of premeditation. As far as we can tell, he had nothing stolen. Longbright’s conducting a search of his house, and has found his wallet. This isn’t the sort of crime you plan in advance. Which means it had to be committed by someone waiting to cause him injury.’

‘Rough neighbourhood, is it?’

‘Not really. The street doesn’t get much foot traffic. With the exception of the residents, hardly anyone uses it.’

‘Then I would suggest they’re your first port of call,’ said Finch, wiping his hands and stepping back to admire his handiwork.

The following morning, Balaklava Street was anaemic with mist as May knocked on the Aysons’ door.

The front room had been aggressively polished, and was clearly reserved for guests; it was an old-fashioned notion but appropriate to the street, and to the Aysons, a third-generation Caribbean family who honoured the attitudes of their grandparents. Kayla Ayson prepared breakfast while her children dextrously thrashed each other in a lurid Nintendo race, ignoring calls to the table. With Randall’s entrance, the atmosphere subtly shifted; the children became more subdued, and Kayla found something to occupy her attention in the kitchen. May appreciated that Randall Ayson took a dim view of the detective visiting his house, but he was required to check out witness statements as quickly as possible, and Heather Allen was adamant about having seen him on the edge of the waste ground.

‘You think they’re connected, don’t you?’ asked Randall. ‘Copeland and the Singh woman.’

‘We have no reason to think that, Mr Randall.’

‘She was of Indian extraction. Tamsin Wilton told us she’d been receiving offensive notes. You should be looking for a racist, not wasting your time picking on the black man.’

‘In case you haven’t noticed, Mr Randall, you have an Egyptian lady across the road from you, a large Ethiopian family next door, a same-sex couple on your other side and several South African medical students in the end house. This is an ordinary London street, and I don’t appreciate you playing the race card. My visit has nothing to do with your ethnicity. I’m here because a neighbour identified you last night at the crime scene.’

The room was enveloped in a tomb-like silence. May could feel the temperature drop. Bryant’s bluntness is starting to rub off on me, he warned himself.

‘What do you mean, identified me?’

‘They say you had an argument, or at least a conversation, with the deceased.’

‘That’s a lie. I don’t have to listen to this. It’s that damned estate agent over the road, isn’t it? He has no right to tell people-’

‘Think about this rationally, Mr Randall, and you’ll help me to disprove the possibility. First, forget about who saw you, it doesn’t matter. When you take into account the distance and the weather conditions, it’s obvious to me that they’ve made a false assumption. All you have to do is provide me with details of your whereabouts to have the statement discounted.’

When Ayson glanced at his wife, May knew he was in trouble. ‘What is it?’ he asked.

‘I was here.’ Another flick of the eyes, as if Ayson was seeking tacit support from his wife. ‘But I did talk to him.’

‘While he was working in the rain?’

‘Well, yes. I was coming home from work and saw him digging, but we didn’t argue. I just asked him why he was working in such lousy weather.’

‘What did he say?’

‘That the men in the builders’ yard were paying him extra to finish quickly.’

The Bondini brothers wore matching blue boiler suits, and looked like Italian acrobats. May half expected one to back-flip on to the other’s shoulders with a cry of ‘Hop-La!’ They came out of the shop wiping their hands on rags in unconscious mimicry of one another.

‘Builders’ supplies, right?’ May shouted above a cacophony of hammering.

‘Yeah, and manufacturers.’

‘What do you make here?’

Bondini One thrust his hand inside his boiler suit and pulled out a finely marbled fountain pen. ‘Traditional craftsmanship, mate. Look at the cap. See the metal ring around the base? We make those.’

‘Wrought-iron teapot stands,’ bellowed Bondini Two.

‘Stained-glass frames. Window boxes. Bathroom pipes. Garden furniture. Lots of stuff. Come inside.’

The machine shop was lethally active. Young apprentices-three or four, it was hard to tell exactly how many because they moved with such agility-hurled themselves in and out of doors, bursting up from traps in the sawdust-hazed cellar and down from hatches in the ceiling, laden with trays of searing metal, razor-sharp shards of steel, huge willowing sheets of glass, splintery pine beams, glinting drills and blades. May edged between the electric saws and tin-stamping equipment, trying to avoid being snagged. A young man, little more than a child, limped past him with blood seeping from a badly bandaged hand.

‘We got a lot of rush orders on,’ Bondini Two explained. ‘Big department stores, very low profit margins but we make it up on bulk. Oi, Darren, mind what you’re doing with that.’ This last admonition was directed at a youth with bleached and knotted dreadlocks who was bending over a lathe. ‘He’s always getting his hair caught in it. I’ve told him ‘undred times.’ The wood on the lathe had split and fragments were flying off at alarming tangents. Nobody was wearing goggles, or any kind of safety equipment.

‘Why were you paying Elliot Copeland extra to finish quickly?’ May shouted above the din.

‘You seen the state of it out there, all dug up? We got the concrete posts coming Thursday and new die-cutting machinery being delivered two days after that. Where else am I gonna put it all? I told him I’d pay time and a half.’

‘You’re expanding the premises,’ May answered. ‘Have you got permission from the council?’

‘Don’t come the old acid, Granddad, I’ve got all the documents. Bleeding council is a scam, we already own the property, innit? We’re just converting part of the waste ground into off-street parking and extending the machine shed, but we gotta pay the council for the change of use. Bleeding Camden Mafia, the United Bank of Backhand. Don’t make me laugh. I’d get a better deal in Palermo. They’re all crooks, innit?’

‘Did you have any trouble from Mr Copeland? Did he talk to you much?’

‘Nah, bloody good worker. His wife had left him-drank a bit, but blokes like that all hit the bottle, don’t they? My brother thinks he was pissed.’

Bondini One spoke up. Behind him, someone threw a sheet of glass into a bin with a smash. ‘Stands to reason, you’d have to be pissed to bury yourself under your own rubble, wouldn’t you?’

May decided not to bother explaining the logistics that would have prevented Copeland from falling under his own truck load. ‘Did he have any friends? Anyone who came around to talk to him?’

‘Nah, he was a real loner. Cut up bad about his missus. Never saw him with anyone.’ Both brothers shook their heads.

‘Well, thanks for your time,’ said May. ‘I’ll call again if I need your help.’ He stopped in the doorway. ‘Have you met anyone else in the street?’

The brothers conferred as jets of steam blasted around them. ‘The Caribbean bloke in the sharp suits,’ Bondini One decided. ‘He’s been coming around a fair bit.’

‘What for?’

‘He’s been buying wood, doing some shelves. And he had some glass cut.’

‘Can you remember when he last came around?’

‘Day before yesterday, wannit?’ More fraternal conferring took place. ‘Yeah, Tuesday.’

‘Anyone else apart from that?’ May breathed the scent of freshly sawn timber. It reminded him of the garden shed where his father had worked before the War.

The brothers exchanged glances, each waiting for the other to speak first. ‘There’s a bloke called Aaron-Jewish boy,’ said Bondini Two finally. ‘He lives down the street.’

Jake Avery’s partner, May recalled. ‘Is he buying wood as well?’

‘Nah.’

‘Then what?’ There was something here that May wasn’t picking up on. He looked back at the machine shop and suddenly realized. ‘He’s got a friend here?’

‘Yeah, he comes round to see Marshall sometimes. Oi, Marshall.’ Bondini Two clearly did not approve.

May studied the muscular young man who looked up at the mention of his name. So, he thought, the water gets a little murkier. His mobile rang.

‘John, I think you should come back as soon as possible,’ said Bryant. ‘Your friend Mr Greenwood’s on the move again.’