Bryant & May 03; Seventy-Seven Clocks

Finch was tall and thin, with spiky hair and bony raw hands, and his knee joints creaked like desk drawers when he sat down. A suntan gained on a recent holiday was all that prevented him from looking like Stan Laurel. As usual, the sickly smell of cheap splash-on deodorant rose from his skin.

“I don’t see anything wrong.” May forced himself to study the body. The whiteness of the skin contrasted shockingly with the crimson hole that had been formed by pinning back the victim’s flesh.

“I’ve seen an awful lot of insides, John, and I know when something isn’t kosher,” said Finch, wiping his hands on his lime-green plastic apron. “Tell me what you know about him.” He moved to the scales and made a note of the calibrations before removing a kidney from the tray.

“Maximillian Jacob, fifty-nine years old, five feet eleven inches, fourteen stone two ounces, partner of the law firm Jacob and Marks, based in Norwich. He checked into the Savoy last Friday. He was visiting London on unknown business – at least, he seems to have given his wife and partner two different stories for leaving town. No history of medical problems, nothing much out of the ordinary, but we’re still searching.” He looked back at the corpse on the table. It seemed that the more cleanly a man lived his life, the harder it was to find anything out about him when he was dead. “At the moment he’s just a statistic, Oswald. I wish he’d been a criminal. At least we’d have somewhere to start.”

“Well, you know that someone hated Mr Jacob enough to want to kill him,” said Finch.

“Nobody mentioned murder.”

“Then let me be the first. Take a look at this.” The pathologist beckoned May to advance on the cadaver. “Jacob’s stomach is a mass of dissolved tissue. Extensive haemorrhaging here, here, and here.” Finch prodded beneath a bloody flap of flesh with the end of his pen. Thick streaks of yellow fat surrounded an abdominal incision. “And here in the heart, the liver, and lungs.”

“What are you putting down as the actual cause of death?”

“Cardial dysfunction. The heart couldn’t pump properly because the vascular bed surrounding it had become riddled with lesions. It had to be some kind of corrosive fluid, but as there were no burn marks in the mouth or trachea I ruled out ingestion and started searching for an injection site. It’s not hard to see once you’re looking for it. Here.”

He turned Maximillian Jacob’s head to one side and pointed to a spot below the corpse’s left ear. A swollen patch on his carotid artery was pinpricked with coagulated black fluid.

“If you examine the wound closely, you’ll find not one puncture mark but two, like a vampire. Beauties, aren’t they?” He twisted Jacob’s head and revealed a pair of tiny livid pinpricks.

“And it’s become gangrenous. The flesh around it has turned to diseased mush. I carried out the routine toxicology tests, checked for alcohol, cocaine, barbiturates, and so on; nothing much there. I didn’t want to run up a bill testing for more exotic stuff, but this had me beaten. I sent blood and tissue samples to the National Poisons Reference Centre for analysis, not expecting to hear back for several days.” Finch absently prodded the end of his nose with his pen. “Instead, the results were telexed back just over an hour ago. Seems this got them all excited. It’s a cottonmouth.”

“Sorry, what?” John had been transfixed by the cadaver on the table. It was hard to believe that poor, putrefying Jacob would be stitched back together and buried beneath a headstone engraved with a soothing phrase like Just Resting. “Foot and mouth?”

“Cotton mouth. That’s the common name. Latin, Agkistrodon piscivorus, from the family Crotalidae.” The pathologist’s enthusiasm was always more pronounced when he had just discovered something in an opened body. “It’s called a cottonmouth because it threatens with its mouth wide open, and the inside of the mouth is white.”

“Oswald, what the hell is a cottonmouth?”

“That’s the odd part.” He thoughtfully probed his left ear with his pen. “It’s a North American snake.”

“You’re telling me this man was bitten by a snake?” John threw his hands up helplessly. “They must have made a mistake.”

“No mistake. They cross-checked their results.” Finch pointed at the corpse. “You can see the extraordinary effect it’s had, even on the minor organs. This is a very particular venom, apparently found only in aquatic pit vipers.”

“God, Oswald – a water snake? In the lobby of the Savoy Hotel?”

“I must admit it’s a bit of a puzzle,” Finch casually conceded. “The cottonmouth is more commonly found in marshland.”

“Don’t you find that just a little bit strange?”

“Every unnatural death is strange, John.”

“Did they give you an idea of the reaction time between infection and death?”

“Oh, yes. Immediately after the bite, the wound turns itchy, then the victim gets irritable. After this he settles into a quiet aphasic state, and then he suddenly collapses and dies. Ten minutes in total. There’s one other thing I wanted to show you.” Finch raised a plastic bag and gently emptied the contents into a bowl. May found himself looking at Max Jacob’s brain.

“As you probably know,” said Finch, “the human brain has the consistency of a well-set blancmange. Fluid protects it from thumping into the skull wall. Look at this.” He touched his pen against a darkened patch on the frontal lobe of the brain. “When you’re hit on the head you get a bruise on the scalp, perhaps a fracture underneath it, and a bruise on the brain below that. All three are on top of each other; that’s what we call a coup injury. Jacob’s brain is marked at the front, but there’s no corresponding damage to his scalp.”

“Why?”

“Instead there’s a bruise on the back of his head. If someone passes out and the back of their head hits the floor when they collapse, the brain is driven forward and bashes itself on the inside front of the skull. That is a contra coup, and that’s what Jacob has. It looks like your man took a fall sometime shortly before his death.”

“Thanks, Oswald, you’ve done a great job.” May hastily made his apologies and left the room. The combined smell of disinfectant and antiperspirant was starting to get to him.

“Let me know how this one turns out,” said Finch with a cheery wave as he turned back to the corpse. “And John – don’t be such a stranger in future. I’m always delighted to see you down here.”

¦

The lobby of the Savoy was in chaos. Commonwealth speakers had begun to arrive in force, and stacks of expensive luggage stood in corners among the arrangement of dried plants arranged to resemble harvested corn bales. Jerry had spent the morning easing guests into rooms with the aid of encouraging smiles and pidgin English.

“He’s no spring chicken, is he?” muttered Nicholas disparagingly. “They could have sent someone a bit more with it.”

“Keep your voice down,” said Jerry, embarrassed. “He’ll hear you.”

“Intelligence is a compensation for the departure of youth, Sonny.” John May set a heavy Dictaphone on the counter. “As even you may discover one day. I need to talk to this young lady for a few minutes, so perhaps you could busy yourself dealing with the minor grievances of your guests.”

Jerry smiled to herself. There was something instantly appealing about the detective. The old guy looked like a man who had retained much of his own youth by listening to the young. “There’s a room we can use behind here,” she said. “It’ll be quieter.”

Once they were seated in the small cream-painted staffroom, May dragged his own transistorized recorder from his bag and switched it on. “I trust you’ve fully recovered, Miss Gates. It must have been a nasty shock for you.”

“I fainted, that’s all,” she explained. “He was spraying blood all over the place.”

“I’ve read your admirably lucid statement. There are just a few points I need to clear up. You checked Mr Jacob in last Friday, is that correct?”

“I took his filled-in reservation form, gave him the carbon copy, and arranged for his baggage to be sent up. He was booked for a double room even though we had singles available.” She cleared her throat, more nervous than she had realized. “Nicholas – the other receptionist – made a remark at the time. He handled the actual room allocation because he’d taken the original telephone booking.”