the room.
? Ten Second Staircase ?
20
Ancient Blood
Dan Banbury and Giles Kershaw had so little in common that they were ideally suited to work together.
There were some similarities: Both were in their late twenties, both had been high scorers at university, neither had much field experience. Despite their intelligence and enthusiasm, the unit was able to buy them cheaply, because each possessed a flaw; Banbury had spent his entire childhood in his bedroom in Bow operating increasingly sophisticated computer networks while his parents explored new methods of destroying each other downstairs, and the period had taken its toll by leaving him with no social skills. He assumed everyone was interested in crime scene technology, and bored civilians into submission at the slightest provocation. Years of junk food and immobility had left him with the unprepossessing air of a root vegetable, a turnip in shape, a parsnip in colouring. Women made a special effort to avoid him. Lately he had dieted, exercised, and taken advice on a haircut, most of which had rendered him the approximation of a normal human being, but he still fell short in the area of normal conversation, and women still avoided him.
Giles Kershaw came from a posh, impoverished family whose country home had been sold to the government in 1976 and turned into the National Museum of Farming Implements. His speech was so strangled that his tongue fell over in conversation, and hardly anyone in London could understand him. The police force is no place for the upper classes. He was the first person in his family ever to have a job or buy his own furniture. As a consequence, he had suffered snubs from his friends and ridicule from his colleagues. At least he had social skills – rather too many, in fact – and was prepared to teach Banbury the basics. It was no secret that Bryant and May saw the duo as potential counterparts to themselves who might one day come to inherit the unit, should it miraculously survive that long.
Still, Banbury and Kershaw had never worked closely on a case together before, and bets were being taken in the unit staff room as to whether they would prove a successful combination or end up conducting a class war. The PCU’s new independence meant that its component parts had to fit as tightly as members of a football squad. That meant no stars, no upstaging, no missed passes. Their first test came the following morning, in the sealed-off gym behind Farringdon Road, as the pair unpacked their equipment: bags, pots, sacks, swab kits, water bottles, tape, labels, print powders, flatpacked boxes, cameras, and a mobile Smartwater Index tracer that Banbury was dying to try out.
“Perspiration stains,” Giles Kershaw indicated, walking around the exercise equipment. “Looks like there are plenty of them on the machine Martell was using.”
“A man of that size should have been leaving pools of sweat,” said Banbury. “Never see the point of exercise myself. The patches must have dried fast, but we can still get a residue match. Maybe it wasn’t all his.”
“Don’t get into the glands, old sausage, they’re too unreliable.” Sweat contained amino acids, fats, chlorides, urea, and sugar in varying amounts, but its construction varied in the body from one day to the next. “I take it you’re assuming his attacker managed to slip under the door with his portable lightning conductor, then leave the same way.”
“I don’t know; maybe he killed Martell by remote control.”
“Perverse but possible, I suppose.”
Banbury dropped to his knees, then shimmied under the seat of the exercise machine, examining its base. “He certainly didn’t come in through the main door.”
“You can’t be sure of that.”
“Martell left pristine prints on both inner and outer handles. You can’t open a door without touching the handle. The prints should be smudged, otherwise we must assume no-one else came in via the entrance. Forget the windows, they’re barred and dead-bolted.” Banbury wriggled back out and rose to inspect the grip bars. “There’s no other access, so there has to be something here you’ve missed.”
“Something
Banbury pulled at the foot-long grips, but they fitted tightly over the steel arms of the machine. “You’re right, he shouldn’t have come into contact with metal. There’s no way to get these off. Give me a hand.” Between them, they managed to move the machine out and check beneath it. “If you were going to electrocute someone here, you’d have to assume your victim would be wearing rubber-soled trainers, so I guess the current would need to pass through his hands. Martell wasn’t wearing workout gloves.”
They tore up four carpet tiles and exposed a red rubberised layer coating the concrete floor. Banbury climbed behind the machine and examined the white ceramic wall tiles. “Hang on a minute, take a look at this.” He shone a penlight into a centimetre-wide hole between the tiles.
“Clutching at straws,” said Kershaw, disappointed. “It’s just an air bubble in the grout. What’s behind there?”
“A private apartment; I don’t know who it belongs to. The hole looks like it might go all the way, though.”
“Not big enough to pass anything through.”
“Yes, it is. Let’s get the keys.”
They found the caretaker and had themselves admitted to a narrow flat, thickly perfumed and decorated in claustrophobic seventies’ paisley patterns of green, yellow, and brown.
“Madame Briquet divides her time between here and her villa in Menton,” explained the caretaker. “She wouldn’t like me letting strange men into her flat.”
“We’re not strange,” said Kershaw. “We’re from the Peculiar Crimes Unit.”
“All right.” The caretaker regarded him uncertainly. “Just don’t disturb anything.”
“That depends on what we find, mate.” Banbury bridled. “We might have to tear the place to bits.”
Kershaw silenced his partner with a look. “We’ll be terribly careful,” he promised. “This will only take a moment.”
They located the connecting wall to the gymnasium. Banbury tapped on it experimentally. “Kitchen,” he said. “Look at the cooker. Interesting.”
Kershaw couldn’t see what was interesting about an ancient upright electric Canon but held his tongue. Banbury knelt and felt around in the gloom. “Blimey, there’s some muck behind here,” he complained.
After a few minutes, he heaved himself to his feet dragging a coil of fine copper wire from behind the stove. “He’s a clever sod, but we’ve got him.” He waved the roll in a chubby fist. “Did you ever have a home physics kit when you were a kid?”
“Certainly not.”
“So what did you do for fun?”
“I went shooting on the estate.”
“Yeah, there were a few shootings on our estate, too. Better warn the caretaker this apartment’s part of a crime scene now. His tenant’s going to have a fit.” Banbury scratched himself thoughtfully while studying the wire. “I won’t get prints off this, but I might be able to lift a palm heel from the cooker front. He had to push it back into place.” He produced a Zephyr brush from his kit and twirled it experimentally. “You know, the Met have put more technology on the street than any other force in Europe. They’re outside my flat monitoring radio waves from fake ice cream vans, and still couldn’t stop my car from being nicked. They’d be useless at something like this. This is the kind of crime I joined the unit for. It requires belief in the absurd. Even in death, you can be given proof of the desperate ingenuity of human nature.”
“I’m pleased you approve of the killers we attract,” said Kershaw, non-plussed. “Go and get the rest of your kit. It’s time we scored one for the unit.”
¦
Arthur Bryant found himself back at The Street, the dingy, litterstrewn concrete corridor running beneath the central block of the Roland Plumbe Community Estate. His route took him through a flooded concrete stairwell
