matches, environmental signature indices, and psychological profiling, and you’re still sullying crime scenes with your sausage fingers and poking about in filthy old books on Wiccan mythology. You’re a living anachronism, Bryant. The only grant you’re likely to get will be from the National Trust: Upkeep of Ancient Monuments.”
Coming from a man who swore he was present at the first demonstration of television, this was a bit rich. Finch fluttered his long, delicate fingers at the walls. “Look at this place. I could go to the police about the ventilation, except we
“You’re wrong there, Oswald. Nobody at all will come near you.”
“That’s it, laugh at my expense while you still can. My job is about accumulating facts. One inaccurate detail compounds itself until the entire case collapses. It’s not possible to be accurate about anything in here. And without factual evidence, everything else is just conjecture. It’s all right for you to play arcane guessing games, but my reputation is on the line. I’ve tendered my resignation to Raymond Land. I’ve had enough. I’m buying a smallholding in Hastings and will see out my days there alone, an embittered untouchable.”
“If you have to pick a leper colony, I suppose Hastings is as good as any.” Bryant stuck an exploratory finger in his ear and wiggled it, thinking. “Will you have a leaving party?”
“What’s the point? I hate chocolate cake, and I don’t suppose there’s anyone left to even buy me a card. All my friends are either dead or not feeling very well.” He stared gloomily into his dissecting tray.
Bryant checked his finger, then dug in his pocket for a sherbet lemon. The smell of the room was starting to get to him. “What can I do to perk you up?”
“Find me an assistant. I’m not supposed to leave an unpacked body unattended. My bladder’s a colander. What if I need to go for a wee?”
“I didn’t realise you’d become incontinent as well. Every minute we’re getting older. Flesh falls, hairs turn grey, we crumble to pieces as the world regenerates, so why not be happy in the knowledge that we’ll all inevitably fall to bits? Why do you always see the gloomy side of everything?”
“Oh, I don’t know, it’s probably a side effect of spending the last half-century surrounded by dead people.”
Bryant squeezed his eyebrows together in concentration, racking his brain for something cheerful to say. “I know. I’ve been meaning to mention this for ages. You remember Nugent?”
“Your ostracod?” Finch’s eyes strayed to the corner of his workspace, where for a period of four years a tall glass of water had stood untouched. One day, Bryant had turned up with an object that looked like a hairy yellow oyster sitting in a tumbler of liquid. He had explained that it was a rare bivalve, a primitive form of mollusk taken from deep within the banks of the Thames, and that they needed to keep it alive for an experiment the unit was conducting. Finch had named it, and assiduously fed the creature from an eyedropper containing a nutrient solution every day for four years, until one morning he had come in to find the glass empty, whereupon he was informed by Bryant that he had overdosed it and ruined the experiment. Finch had carried the guilt with him ever since.
“What about it?” he asked.
“Nugent didn’t die,” said Bryant airily. “It wasn’t an ostracod. It was a mango seed.”
“You are
“Oh, don’t be such a spoilsport. I’ve done worse things. I switched Raymond Land’s verucca cream for superglue last month; it took him several hours to get his shoes off. There you are, you’re more like your old self already.”
“I suppose it was you who unscrewed the handle of my brain knife as well. I was taking the lid off an Archway Bridge jumper and the damned thing nearly took my eye out.”
“Not my suicide from last week? Why were you examining his skull?”
“One of your lads discovered that he’d stopped in the street to complain of a headache just before he made the leap. I wondered what sort of pain would drive a man to jump from a bridge, and looked for a tumor. He had a morbid fear of hospitals and hadn’t been near one in years. There was a growth on his brain the size of a duck egg, large enough to re-open a suture in his skull. It had been caused by a rare parasite, cysticercus, caught on a business trip to Mexico.”
Finch’s great strength, even at his advanced age, was an enquiring, restless mind. He liked tidy endings and sought resolutions in everything, which was why Bryant’s unfathomable moods annoyed him so much. “You play these ridiculously childish tricks on me without any sense of risk or responsibility,” he complained.
“You shouldn’t take life so seriously,” said Bryant. “Think of it like pipe tobacco. It’s dark, it’s bitter, and it finally destroys you, but it provides a few moments of heaven on the tongue.”
“And it can make you ill,” snapped Finch. “There’s a woman on my table who died in her late twenties for no good reason I can think of. If I don’t take her seriously, who will?” Finch did not appreciate that the detectives took death very seriously indeed.
“All right,” conceded Bryant. “Let’s see what you’ve got.”
Finch unwrapped the corpse from a foil bag that gave it the unfortunate appearance of a giant Marks & Spencer ready meal. “Well, it wasn’t technically drowning,” he told Bryant, “although there’s liquid in her air passages and the lungs are swollen. She was poisoned by the liquid in the tank. It sent her into laryngeal spasms the moment she swallowed it. I couldn’t wait around for the preliminary composite breakdown to come back, so I knocked up a couple of my own tests. It’s a mixture of synthetic preservative, water, vegetable dye, and some form of antibacterial weed-killer that was meant to keep the tank clean but reacted with the objects in it, causing the clouding and increasing the potency of the poison. It’s also flammable.”
Finch stepped back from the body tray with his head on one side. “Getting her into the tank, though, that’s the thing, isn’t it? No defence marks on her hands, arms, or shins, and your man Kershaw tells me there were no scuffs on the glass, so she went over cleanly and without a fuss. I don’t have to tell you this is very unlikely in any circumstance. I understand there were no ladders or chairs, nothing for the killer to stand on.”
Bryant scratched the end of his bulbous nose, thinking. “Therefore we have three options. One, she went willingly into the liquid, which we have to rule out for the simple reason that she knew its potentially lethal composition. Two, she was hurled into the tank during some kind of argument, which at least a dozen visitors to the gallery would have overheard. Three, she was knocked unconscious or sedated first. So what have you checked for?” Bryant always knew when Finch was holding something back.
“Puncture marks. I agree that sedation has to be the answer, something fast-acting. It would have made her a dead weight, of course, harder for someone to lift and throw, but at least she wouldn’t have been fighting. I was hoping to find evidence that she was injected prior to immersion, but there’s nothing.”
“What do you mean, nothing?” Bryant was appalled. There was always something to discover. That’s what pathologists were for.
“You’re expecting me to find a grain of sand stuck in her earhole and match it up to one on the killer’s boot. I’m afraid it doesn’t happen like that. I’m sorry, this isn’t some Hollywood police show, you know.”
Bryant cast his eyes around at the dated equipment and waterstained walls. “I’m painfully aware of that.”
“I know it’s boring for you, but there’s nothing of interest here. I checked for wrist bruising, something to show she’d been hoisted by her extremities, but there’s nothing at all.”
“Are you absolutely sure?” asked Bryant. “She doesn’t look right.”
“Of course she doesn’t look right, she’s brown bread. Dead people rarely look like themselves. What they look like is what they’ve been lying on; thanks to hypostasis I can give you the death position and the contact surface, providing the body is Caucasian and hasn’t been moved for a while, but this one’s a floater, so she doesn’t even look like that.”
“You think she was lifted kicking and screaming, then chucked bodily into the tank? The killer must have had at least one hand over her mouth, otherwise the whole gallery would have heard her, even with the electronic sound-dampers.”
“I suppose she could have been chloroformed, but if she had time to draw breath you’d have to be strong in order to hold her until she was forced to breathe. I’ve known struggling time to last anything up to a minute.”
“What about the physical strength required? What are we looking for, a Russian shot-putter?”
“I heard you’re after a man on a horse.” Finch’s disconcerting smirk reminded Bryant of Lon Chaney trying out
