White Corridor

call. The sound of the car door opening propelled her to the second building, a lopsided two-floor house with peeling green shutters. She slapped at the door with her hand, calling ‘S’il vous plait! Au secours! but there was silence within. He was striding up the alley stairs towards them now, calling to her, “Madeline, I have to talk with you.”

The door before her suddenly opened, and a miniscule old lady peered up at her from the gap. “Please, do you speak English?” Madeline asked. “There is a man following us.”

‘Alors, vous devez entrer.“ She slipped the chain and widened the door as Madeline pushed Ryan forward. The old woman remembered the village as it had been before the arrival of the foreigners, when residents still took care of each other. For centuries these hills had offered refuge to smugglers, and old habits were slow to die.

“We don’t want to get you into trouble,” she insisted. “Is there another way out of the house?”

“Madeline!” She heard the call from the street. “I know where you are. I just want to talk.”

‘Est-ce votre mari?“ asked the old lady, squinting suspiciously from the window.

“No, he is a burglar,” she said, searching for her schoolgirl French. ‘Un cambrioleur.“

‘Je comprends. Venez avec moi, il y a une porte arriere.“ She led the way through a small Provence-style lounge crowded with dark turned wood and overstuffed floral chairs. They reached the kitchen as Johann started hammering at the door. ’Allez, allez avec votre beau fils. Je me debarrasserai de lux. Toute vite.”

Madeline found herself in the dark rear garden of the house as the old woman closed the door on her. Gripping Ryan’s hand tightly, she pushed into the wet hibiscus bushes, searching for the back gate. As they slipped along the side of the house she could hear Johann arguing with the old woman at the front door, and prayed he would not hurt her. He was swearing loudly at her now, and she was shrieking back. Ryan yelled at her, complaining that she was hurting his arm as they hurtled back down the steps to the road.

The train had left Cap-d’Ail and was already coasting the headland as they ran towards the station. The underpass to the correct platform was too far away. “We’ll have to go over the line,” she told Ryan. “Can you run?”

“Mum, the barrier’s down. I can see the train coming.”

She swung him up into her arms before he could think further, and ran across the track as the light from the double-decked train illuminated the pine trees around them. Their bags were still lying on the platform. The sight of Johann appearing on the other side was cut off as the carriages flashed past and the train came to a stop. She prayed he would not have enough time to reach the underpass.

They boarded the train without tickets and found their way to an upstairs seat. She watched anxiously from the window as the train stayed at the platform, its door wide open. Please, she prayed, let the doors close before he reaches us.

As they finally pulled out of Eze-sur-Mer in the direction of Nice, she had no idea whether he had managed to board the train or not.

14

MORTIFICATION

At five to twelve on Tuesday morning, DS Janice Longbright pushed open the door of the Bayham Street mortuary and entered the musty passageway that ran beside the former school gymnasium.

She looked up at the narrow windows, paused, and took a slow, deep breath. Having resisted promotion from the status of Detective Sergeant for so many years, it now seemed that she was to have the responsibility of leadership placed upon her whether she liked it or not. An uncomfortable-looking Giles Kershaw was waiting for her outside the door. The young forensic scientist coughed loudly, but remained at the threshold of the room. He leaned around the jamb, reluctant to enter.

“Giles, either go in or stay out,” said Longbright, more in puzzlement than irritation. “What on earth’s the matter?”

Kershaw looked sheepish. “Oswald didn’t want me here at all, so I’m not sure I should be intruding upon his turf.”

“Oh, don’t be so sensitive and territorial. I don’t understand what’s so important that you couldn’t talk to me about it on the phone.” The sickly look on his face stopped her. “Tell me what’s happened.”

“I think you’d better take a look,” said Giles, running a hand through his lank blond hair as he stepped back to admit her first. “The door was locked on the inside. I had to use one of the spare keys to get it open. This is just how I found the place.”

She moved carefully into a room that was still more like a gymnasium than a morgue. Most of it was below street level, with five short windows near the ceiling framing a dusty view of passing ankles on the pavement outside. An old wood-and-steel climbing frame still stood in the corner, the last surviving remnant of the St Patrick Junior Catholic Boys’ School gym. The bare brick walls had been painted gloss white, and the aluminium-cased strip lights that hung low across the steel desks added a forensic glare to a room which still smelled faintly of plimsolls and hormonal teens. The sprung wood basketball floor had been covered with carpet tiles. Longbright noted a folded pile of black micromesh sheets, a scuffed stainless steel dissecting table, several glass-fronted equipment cabinets, Finch’s old wooden desk and, at the rear of the room, a bank of four steel body drawers, but there was no sign of the pathologist.

She had expected to find Finch in his usual spot, seated on a bentwood chair beside one of the sinks, reading a gardening magazine. He was now past the age when he could spend much of his day standing. She looked about, puzzled. “I don’t understand. Where is he?”

“Look under the sink,” Kershaw instructed her. Longbright slowly bent over, apprehensive of what she might find. Finch was lying on his back with his papery eyelids shut, his bony death’s-head face finally suited to circumstance. He looked for all the world as if he had decided to take a nap on the floor and then simply drifted beyond the vale of sorrow.

“Seems entirely at peace, doesn’t he?” Kershaw voiced her thought. “At a guess, I’d say he’s been dead for at least an hour. The exact time might prove difficult to pin down, but I’ll get to that problem later. There’s no blood, no outward sign of the cause. The only anomaly I can see is the angled bruise on the left side of his neck, about two inches long, just above his collar.”

Longbright crouched beside the pathologist’s body and gently touched her hand against his skin. “Looks new. What do you think it is?”

“I don’t know. I came here looking for Dan and found this instead. He’s cold to the touch. There’s a contusion on the back of his head, presumably caused by the fall. Ought we to call someone?”

“I’m not sure if he has any surviving relatives left in this country. His wife and son went home to Poland.”

“I’d heard he was depressed. John told me he’d changed his mind about leaving the unit, but Raymond Land wouldn’t take back his resignation. There’s a clear handprint on the stainless steel counter, Finch’s own I’d guess, because there’s a band missing on his fourth finger, where he wears a ring. It would be consistent with him placing his left-hand palm down on the surface. It’s the sort of thing you’d do to steady yourself. My first thought was heart attack, but what about suicide?”

“Surely a sudden illness is the most likely explanation,” said Longbright.

“Of course, that’s the first thing Dan will be considering after his examination of the room. The door was locked from the inside, and the only key in the room should be on the hook behind Finch’s desk, except it’s not. The windows require a pole to be opened, and have no external fastenings.”

“There’s another way into the mortuary,” said Longbright, looking up. “The ventilator shaft.”

“Right, the cover’s missing from the front of the extractor fan.”

“The pipe measures about forty-five centimetres,” said Dan Banbury, walking in beside them. “So unless someone trained a monkey to come and attack him I think we can rule out that possibility.”

“Murders in the Rue Morgue,” said Longbright. “How on earth do you know what the pipe measures?”