White Corridor

an outsider.”

“I’m not meant to do anything,” Longbright informed him.

“This is the PCU, not the Metropolitan Police, and you’re now in charge. Call Bimsley in and keep him on site until you’ve got some preliminary findings. I don’t want you left alone in here.”

“I say, that’s a bit strong.” Kershaw rose and flicked back his hair, affronted, his public school background drawn to the fore in any confrontation with someone he considered to be from an inferior class. “I’m assuming you’re appointing me because you trust me.”

“Yes,” Longbright admitted, “but I also sent you down to visit the morgue earlier, which makes you a potential suspect with a strong motive, placed at a possible crime scene at the estimated time of death.”

For once, Kershaw was dumbfounded. “Then I can’t possibly be seen to be investigating my victim’s murder. I can’t find myself guilty.”

“You might try taking Mr. Bryant’s advice about thinking instinctively rather than putting all your trust in the circumstantial evidence. I want a report from you before we close tonight.”

Returning to the PCU, the detective sergeant found DC Mangeshkar at work in the office she shared with Bimsley. “Why were you looking for Giles Kershaw this morning?” she asked. The forensic scientist had informed her of Meera’s visit to the mortuary.

“I was going to ask him if I could help out with the unidentified female they brought in. I didn’t think Finch would let me watch the postmortem; I just wanted to examine his case notes. I heard it had already gone down to Bayham Street, so I went there.”

“Did you take a set of keys with you?” Longbright asked, already knowing the answer.

“I had to, because when Finch is alone in the room with the door shut he keeps his headphones on and doesn’t hear you knocking.”

“You found him, I take it.”

“Yes, but Finch told me to leave. He must have heard my key in the lock, because he opened the door before I could. But he wouldn’t let me in.”

“Why not?”

“He was in the middle of an argument. Kershaw was asking him why he’d changed his mind about something. I didn’t hear Finch’s reply but he sounded bloody angry, told Kershaw that he was immature and careless. I decided to leave them to it, and came back here.” Presumably Kershaw had gone specifically to complain to Finch about being passed over for his promotion, and the old man had given him a piece of his mind, after which Kershaw had left the coroner alone in the room.

A grim thought formed in Longbright’s mind. Access to Bayham Street Morgue was restricted. The Met could arrange visits via its resident pathologist, as could members of the PCU. The room’s tiny windows were all bolted, and its only door was locked. The good news was that all the sets of keys were now accounted for. Finch, Kershaw and Mangeshkar had been holding a set each, which left the final bunch of keys on the hook behind Arthur Bryant’s desk, from where Banbury had borrowed them.

The bad news was that if Kershaw found enough reason to suspect homicide, the restricted access to the morgue limited the murder suspects to someone in the Peculiar Crimes Unit itself.

“Meera, you’ll have to stay here, too,” Longbright said.

Mangeshkar looked more furious than the detective sergeant had ever seen her. “That’s ridiculous. I’ve done nothing wrong.”

“Wait, let me think for a minute.” Four sets of keys, four suspects, she thought, but anyone in the unit could have walked into Arthur’s office and taken them. If we have to suspect each other, all the trust we’ve built up over the years will be destroyed. Oswald’s death could achieve something that none of our enemies has managed to do. It could divide us and bring about the end of the unit.

17

BLOCKADE

“Ah, Devon,” said Arthur Bryant, thumbing through his ancient map book. “A million people and only fourteen surnames.” The battered white Bedford van left the arterial route at a junction and coasted onto a snowy tree-lined road free of traffic. Low clouds beyond the hills reflected soft saffron light from a distant town. “You see,” said Bryant, “that’s Plymouth to the right of us. Five miles at the most.”

But the road curved away to the left down a one-in-seven hill, dropping them into a valley surrounded by wind- blasted woodland. By now the last vestiges of daylight had faded, and the snow bleached all remaining features from their surroundings. May turned the wipers up as high as they would go, but they could no longer keep the windscreen clear.

“I don’t like the look of this.” He angled the heater nozzles so that they warmed the glass and provided him with some vague visibility.

The road ahead was as direct as desert blacktop, Roman in its refusal to deviate for the land’s natural features. It cut over the far side of the valley in a perfect straight line, and was hemmed on either side by hawthorn hedge. May felt the traction in his tyres give as he started on the downward slope. The rear of the van fishtailed on the hardening snow tracks left by the previous vehicle. He gripped the wheel tightly, struggling to keep the van from ploughing into walls of dense brush. The engine squealed as the tyres spun, gripped, spun again.

“I was just thinking about the Malleus Maleficarum, the Witches’ Hammer,” said Bryant, who had clearly failed to notice that they were in difficulty. “Have you ever actually tried reading the 1486 edition? I mean, it’s intriguing that we vilify Mein Kampf, a volume with which it shares the same fundamental fear and hatred of anyone different, while most practising Christians still have the same beliefs that the Hammer puts forward, so that if you hold the contemporary view of piety that places Wicca on the opposite side of Christianity, you’re aligned with the same witch-burning mentality that existed over five centuries ago.”

He watched as the headlights flashed across bushes, then road, then bushes again. “I mean, even Galileo was considered heretical for thinking about the planets in terms of their gravitational fields rather than their holy design. I suppose what I’m really trying to say is-‘

May never found out what Bryant was really trying to say, for at that moment the wheel spun out of his hands as the tyres locked into a set of frozen truck tracks. He fought to correct the trajectory of the Bedford van, then changed gear and applied the brakes when that failed. Bryant was thrown against the passenger door as they slipped sideways across the road and came to an angled halt against the hawthorn bank.

May flooded the engine trying to restart it. As the snow clouds briefly parted, he saw that there were at least half a dozen vehicles littering the road ahead. Opening his window and looking back through the spattering white flakes, he could see a Spar supermarket truck coming in behind him, and another vehicle pulling up behind that. If they blocked the road, nobody would be able to leave.

As he closed the window, the wind rose in an ear-battering bluster, and the flurries turned back into a blizzard. “Well, that’s it,” he said, sitting back in his seat. “We’re not going anywhere tonight. We’ll have to wait for the emergency services to come and dig us out. You realise this wouldn’t have happened if we’d stayed on the main highway.”

“Don’t blame me,” said Bryant indignantly. “You should have paid more heed to the weather report. We can’t just stay here. I have to be at tomorrow’s opening ceremony in Plymouth.”

“Well, I wouldn’t suggest trying to walk there tonight, especially as you managed to forget your stick. The snow’s getting deep, and you’d never get across the fields while it’s like this. I think we’re on the closest main road running beside the southern part of Dartmoor. Your shortcut appears to have taken us over the most inhospitable piece of land in the whole of Southern England.”

“It looks like there are plenty of others in the same boat,” Bryant pointed out. “At least we shouldn’t have to wait here for very long.”

“I wouldn’t bet on it. It looks like the road is already impassable. They won’t be able to get a snowplough down