the reeking liquid pooled about him. He realised he was sitting on the drain, preventing it from emptying, but was unable to raise himself. The fumes unfocussed his brain even as they made him nauseous. The most important thing, he knew, was to climb to a standing position, but it seemed so difficult to negotiate a way clear from the path of the spattering spirit.
Pushing hard against the tiles at his back, he woozily shoved himself upright and lurched to a freestanding position, concentrating on stepping out of the poisonous cascade. He was about to throw himself forward, when he glanced up and saw the tiny descending light in the gloom of the cubicle. There was just enough time for him to register the dropping match before its flame combusted.
¦
It seemed impossible, but the floor was bowing beneath Paradine’s feet. He began moving forward, but the shifting of his weight caused the pale green tiles to sag still further, until he realised that he was actually dropping through the corridor floor.
For a moment, nothing more happened – he fought to maintain his balance while absurdly sinking into the ground. The motorcyclist remained motionless, watching impassively, as though he had been expecting this to happen all the while. The carpet tiles were parting fast, splinters of wood beneath them piercing his trousers and striating his legs. Then, sickeningly, there was nothing below him but dead dark air.
¦
The shower was transformed into a tiled oven as it filled with molten fire. Flame bellowed and belched, ceramic cracked, and above the noise rose Sarne’s scream. The fire formed a scorching red whirlwind around him. He saw the flesh of his bare arms blackening, and over the roiling blaze in the booth, the mask and tricorne and the implacably reptilian eyes peering down at him from their safe vantage point above the inferno.
¦
Paradine plunged down into darkness. The fall seemed to last forever. It occurred to him that this acceleration towards a painful and abrupt oblivion was merely the last stage of an effect that had been occurring for some time now. The final unforgiving rupture of flesh into concrete, when it came, offered agonised purification.
¦
Two men dead, blackened and shattered, one figure watching before striding away in black leather boots and a crackling cape – a new London legend on the rise to everlasting infamy.
? Ten Second Staircase ?
28
Dual Impossibilities
“We’ll need a burns man, old fruit.”
Giles Kershaw dropped like a collapsing deck chair and crouched at the base of the shattered shower booth. He shone a slender torch beam across the black body, its flesh crusted like barbecued chicken skin. Over an hour had passed since the fire had burned out, but the atmosphere in the changing room was thickened with an acridity that still stung the eyes.
“We don’t have a burns specialist,” snapped Bryant. “You’re supposed to have covered this sort of trauma in your training.”
“I have, Mr Bryant. I’ve just not come across anything like this in the field before.” Kershaw viewed the twisted corpse with illdisguised incredulity.
“I’m sorry the unit can’t provide you with more traditional methods of death, Mr Kershaw.” Bryant studied the charred mess of limbs and broken tiles, and softened a little. “Just take a few deep breaths and do the best you can. How was your sister’s hen night, by the way?”
Kershaw was pulled up short. If there was one thing everyone knew about Arthur Bryant, it was that he never showed the slightest interest in the personal lives of his employees. His concern was neither natural nor appropriately timed – when it came to handling pleasantries, he had the air of a hotel guest picking the wrong moment to tip a porter – but he was clearly making an effort to be sociable, and Kershaw accepted the gesture in good grace.
“Very good, sir, thank you.” He examined the shower stall. “Well, this isn’t a job for FIT, because the fire was deliberate, not accidental.” The Fire Investigation Team was a specialist service intended to aid a police investigation by mapping the source, growth, and decay of fires. “The triangle stayed intact long enough to kill him. There are three points on the triangle after ignition: heat, fuel, and oxygen. Fires have to stay alive by moving, and they do that by conduction, convection, or radiation, but there were no pipes or other objects in the cubicle to aid the transfer of heat, and the ceiling above is too high for it to have spread easily.”
“There’s a faint
“It means combustion started low, and a pool burned here on the floor, see?” He indicated a dark halo shape on the cracked tiles. “An accelerant, petrol obviously.” Kershaw lifted some scraps of burned matter and dropped them into a nylon sack. “Chromatography can break down the chemical structure of the vapour in the bag. God, it smells like a burger bar in here. My tummy’s rumbling.” He stepped back from the cubicle and took some air.
“Can you tell whether he was dead or alive when the fire started?” asked Bryant.
Kershaw swallowed gamely and concentrated. “That’s straightforward enough. A positive reaction for carbon monoxide in his blood will prove he was still breathing, and we’ll check for soot in the air passages. Hyperaemia – inflammation caused by the healing process of leucocytes, the white blood cells – will be present around blisters. Look at this.” Kershaw indicated what appeared to be knife marks across the top of Sarne’s skull. “Heat ruptures caused by the splitting of soft tissues where bone is closest to the skin.”
He rose once more and stretched, pushing blond hair from his eyes with his wrist. “Usually it’s not a very practical way to kill someone, but he was standing in a narrow glazed box and basted with petrol – he might as well have stepped into an Aga. We know he was showering when he went up. That’s burned bare flesh, no fibres that I can see, apart from the remains of his trunks. A polyamide of some kind, they melted onto him. It’s telling that the shoulders are the most heavily burned part.”
“Oh, why?” Bryant leaned closer to examine the roasted body with a handkerchief attached to his nose.
Kershaw unwittingly pulled Bryant’s old trick of not answering the question. “I was thinking perhaps he’d struck some kind of flame like a lighter, but why would anyone smoke in a shower? And besides, that would have left him with his arms bent, at about midheight, and the scarring’s not right. We know this was petrol, not a gas explosion, and there are several odd things about that. First, the boiler is down in the basement, so it couldn’t be faulty pipework; too many metres away to cause an explosion up here. If the petroleum was thrown into the shower unit, it would have to be lit pretty damned quickly before the victim could jump out of the booth. And there are no splash burns on the surrounding floor tiles in front, which you’d have had if someone was tossing the contents of a can. The deeply charred upper body suggests it was tipped from above, except that our perpetrator didn’t climb up from the adjoining booth, because the walls are still wet from a previous shower, and there are no scuff marks breaking the water patterns.”
“What about over the back wall?” Bryant asked.
“You’d have to be about seven feet tall to do that. Don’t tell me we’re looking for Spring-Heeled Jack.”
“Then there’s only one other answer. The petrol was sent through the pipework itself into the showerhead.”
“You’d have to saw into the existing pipe and manually pour the stuff in, but gravity would do the trick from that height. Why would anyone go to such effort? It’s the kind of deranged thing – ”
“ – that the Highwayman would do. Yes, isn’t it?” Bryant raised a knowing eyebrow and walked away.
“You’re right, sir, more Highwayman sightings,” said Mangeshkar, grabbing him at the entrance to the changing room. “Up on the rooftop about ninety minutes ago. Plenty of people in the flats opposite – this time we’ve got more witnesses than we can wave a stick at. He ran across the flat roof, stopped at the skylight, climbed down the far side, in full regalia: tricorne, cape, black leather bodice, boots. Colin is up there now having a look around.”
“He wants to be placed at each site,” muttered Bryant. “It doesn’t make sense. Keep a lookout for a calling
