Original Sin (31 page)

He felt now like a man who all his life had been living underground in partial darkness. With Julie he had come up into the sunlight, his eyes dazed by an unimagined world of light and sound and colour and sensation. He was glad that Julie had been previously married, but in their lovemaking she managed to make him feel that it was she who was inexperienced, who was finding fulfilment for the first time. He told himself that perhaps she was. Sex with her had been a revelation. He could never have believed that it was at once so simple and so marvellous. He was glad, too, with a half-guilty relief,
that her first marriage had been unhappy and that Terry had walked out on her. He need never fear that she was comparing him with a first love romanticized and immortalized by death. They spoke rarely of the past; for both of them, the people who lived and walked and spoke in that past were different people. Once, early in their marriage, she had said to him: “I used to pray that I could find someone to love, someone I could make happy and who could make me happy. Someone who would give me a child. I had almost given up hope. And then I found you. It seems like a miracle, darling, the answer to a prayer.” Her words had exalted him. He felt for a moment as if he was the agent of God himself. He who all his life had known only what it was to feel powerless was filled with an intoxication of power.

He had been happy at Peverell Press until Gerard Etienne took over. He knew himself to be a valued, conscientious accountant. He worked long hours of unpaid overtime. He did what was required of him by Jean-Philippe Etienne and Henry Peverell; and what they required was well within his powers. But then one had retired and the other died, and the young Gerard Etienne had taken his seat in the managing director’s chair. He had played little part in the firm for the previous few years but he had been watching, learning, biding his time, taking his Master’s degree in business administration, formulating plans which didn’t include a fifty-two-year-old accountant with minimal qualifications. Gerard Etienne, young, successful, handsome, rich, who through all his privileged life had grasped what he wanted without compunction, had been going to take from him, Sydney Bartrum, everything which made his life worthwhile. But Gerard Etienne was dead, lying in a police mortuary with a snake stuffed into his mouth.

He tightened his arm around his wife and said: “Darling, let’s go down to supper. I’m hungry.”

The street entrance to Wapping Police Station is so unobtrusive that it can easily be missed by the uninitiated. From the Thames its agreeable and unpretentious brick façade and the domestic note of a bay window overlooking the river suggests an old and accommodating utility, the residence of an eighteenth-century merchant, with a preference for living above his warehouse. Standing at the window of the incident room, Daniel looked down at the wide ramp, the three bays of the floating pier with its flotilla of police launches and the discreetly sited stainless-steel bath trolley for the reception and hosing-down of drowned bodies, and reflected that few perceptive travellers by water would fail to recognize the function of the house.

He had been busy since he and Sergeant Robbins had arrived, passing through the vehicle parking lot and up the iron staircase into the subdued busyness of the station. He had set up the computers, cleared desks for Dalgliesh, himself and Kate, had spoken to the coroner’s officer about arrangements for the post-mortem and the inquest and had liaised with the forensic science laboratory. The photographs taken at the scene
had been pinned to the noticeboard, their stark shadowless clarity seeming to reduce horror to an exercise in photographic technique. He had also spoken to Lord Stilgoe in his private room at the London Clinic. Happily the effect of a general anaesthetic, the cosseting of the nurses and the number of his visitors had temporarily diverted Lord Stilgoe’s attention from the murder and he had received Daniel’s report with surprising equanimity and had not, as expected, demanded Dalgliesh’s immediate appearance at his bedside. Daniel had also put the Met’s Press Bureau in the picture. When the story broke they would be responsible for setting up press conferences and for liaison with the media. There were a number of details which the police in the interests of their inquiry had no intention of divulging, but the bizarre use of the snake would be known to everyone at Innocent House by tomorrow at the latest and would be round the publishing houses of London and into the papers within hours. The Press Bureau was likely to be busy.

Robbins had moved up beside him, obviously taking his senior’s inactivity as the justification for a break. He said: “It’s interesting to be here, isn’t it? The oldest police station in the United Kingdom.”

“If you’re itching to tell me that the River Police were established in 1798, thirty-one years before the Met, then I know.”

“I don’t know whether you’ve seen their museum, sir. It’s in the carpenter’s shop of the old boatyard. I was taken round it when I was at Preliminary Training School. They’ve got some interesting exhibits. Leg irons, police cutlasses, old uniforms, a surgeon’s chest, early nineteenth-century records and accounts of the
Princess Alice
disaster. It’s a fascinating collection.”

“That probably accounts for the less than enthusiastic welcome. They probably suspect the Met curator of wanting to get
his hands on it, or suspect we might nick the choicest exhibits. I like their new toys though.”

Below them the river had erupted into foaming tumult. A couple of high-speed semi-rigid inflatables, bright orange, black and grey, with their crew of two in crash helmets and fluorescent green jackets, skimmed, veered and circled the police launches like dangerous adult playthings before roaring downstream.

Robbins said: “No seats. I should think those back rolls are hard on the muscles. They must be doing close on forty knots. Do you think there will be time to have another look at the museum, sir?”

“I shouldn’t rely on it.”

In Daniel’s opinion Sergeant Robbins, who had come into the police service straight from his red-brick university, with a second-class degree in history, was almost too good to be true. Here surely was the epitome of every mother’s favourite son: fresh-faced, ambitious without being ruthless, a devout Methodist, engaged, so it was rumoured, to a girl from his church. No doubt after a virtuous engagement they would marry and produce admirable children who would go to the right schools, pass the right exams, cause no grief or pain to their parents and eventually end up interfering with people for their own good, as teachers, social workers, and possibly even policemen. In Daniel’s book Robbins should have long ago resigned, disillusioned by a macho ethos which could so easily degenerate into violence, by the necessary compromises and fudges, and by the job itself with its daily evidence of the sleaziness of crime and man’s inhumanity to man. Instead he was apparently both unshockable and idealistic. Daniel supposed that he had a secret life; most people did. It was hardly possible to live without one. But Robbins was singularly adept at keeping his hidden. Daniel reflected that it would pay the Home
Office to parade him round the country to persuade idealistic school-leavers of the advantages of a police career.

They settled back to work. There was very little time before they were due at the mortuary, but there was no justification for wasting it. Daniel sat down to go through Etienne’s papers. Even at his first and cursory glance he had been surprised at the amount of work Gerard Etienne had taken on. The firm published about sixty books a year with a total staff of thirty. Publishing was an alien world to him. He had no idea whether this was average but the administrative structure seemed odd and Etienne’s load disproportionate. De Witt was the editorial director with Gabriel Dauntsey assisting him as poetry editor but otherwise, apparently, doing little except for his job in the archives. Claudia Etienne was responsible for sales and publicity, including personnel, and Frances Peverell for contracts and rights. Gerard Etienne, as chairman and managing director, had overseen production, accounts and the warehouse and had had by far the heaviest load.

Daniel was interested, too, in how far Etienne had pushed forward his plans to sell Innocent House. The negotiations with Hector Skolling had been under way for some months and were now advanced. Looking through the minutes of the monthly partners’ meetings, he could see little reference to much that was happening. While Dalgliesh and Kate had been busy with the formal interviews, he had learned almost as much by listening to Mrs. Demery’s gossip and talking to George and the few staff who were in the building. The partners might wish to present the picture of a generally united board with a common purpose, but the evidence so far showed a very different reality.

The phone rang. It was Kate. She was going back to her flat to change. AD had been called to the Yard. They would both see Daniel at the mortuary.

The local authority mortuary had recently been modernized but the exterior remained unaltered. It was a single-storey building of grey London brick approached from a short cul-de-sac, the forecourt bounded by an eight-foot wall. Neither noticeboard nor street number proclaimed its function; those who had business there knew how to find it. It presented to the curious an impression of some dull and not particularly flourishing enterprise where goods were delivered in plain vans and unpacked with discretion. To the right of the door was a garage, large enough to accommodate two undertaker’s vans, from which double doors led to a small reception area with a waiting room to the left. Here Dalgliesh, arriving a minute before 6.30, found Kate and Daniel already waiting. An attempt had been made to make the waiting room welcoming with a low round table, four comfortable chairs, and a large TV set which Dalgliesh had never found turned off. Perhaps its purpose was less entertainment than therapy; the lab technicians in their unpredictable spells of leisure needed to exchange, however momentarily, the silent corruption of death for the bright ephemeral images of the living world.

He saw that Kate had exchanged her usual tweed jacket and trousers for denim jeans and jacket, and that her thick plait of blonde hair had been tucked inside a peaked jockey cap. He knew why. He too was informally dressed. The half-sweet, half-citrus smell of the disinfectant became almost unnoticeable after the first half-hour but lingered for days in the clothes, permeating his wardrobe with the smell of death. He had early learned to wear nothing that couldn’t be thrown into the washing machine, while he obsessively showered, lifting his face under the power-jet as if the sting of the water could physically wash away more than the smell and the sights of the last two hours. He was due to meet the Commissioner at the Minister’s room in the House of Commons at eight o’clock. Somehow he must find time to get back to his Queenhithe flat to shower before then.

He remembered vividly—how could he not?—the first post-mortem he had attended as a young detective constable. The murder victim had been a twenty-two-year-old prostitute and there had, he recalled, been difficulty over the formal identification of the body since the police had been unable to trace either relatives or close friends. The white undernourished body stretched out on the tray, with the weals of the lash purple as stigmata, had seemed in its pale frigidity the ultimate mute witness to male inhumanity. Looking round at the crowded PM room, the phalanx of officialdom, he had reflected that Theresa Burns was receiving in death a great deal more attention from the agents of the state than she had received in life. The pathologist then had been Doc McGregor, one of the old school of egregious individualists, a rigid Presbyterian who had insisted on conducting all his post-mortems in the spiritual, if not the physical, odour of sanctity. Dalgliesh remembered his rebuke to a technician who had responded with a brief laugh to a colleague’s
muttered witticism. “I’ll have no laughter in my mortuary. It’s no a frog I’m dissecting here.”

Doc McGregor would have no secular music while he worked and had a preference for the metrical psalms whose lugubrious tempo tended to slow down the speed of the work as well as depressing the spirits. But it had been one of McGregor’s post-mortems—that of a murdered child—accompanied by Fauré’s
Pie Jesu
that had given Dalgliesh one of his best poems, and he supposed that for this he should be grateful. Wardle cared little what music was played while he worked, so long as it wasn’t pop, and today they were to listen to the familiar anodyne melodies of Classic FM.

There were two post-mortem rooms, one with four dissecting tables and a single room. It was this which Reginald Wardle preferred for murder cases, but the room was small and there was the inevitable crush as the experts in violent death jostled for space; the pathologist and his assistant, the two mortuary technicians, four police officers, the laboratory liaison officer, the photographer and assistant, the scene-of-crime officer and fingerprint men, and a trainee pathologist whom Dr. Wardle introduced as Dr. Manning and announced would take the notes. He had a dislike of using the overhead microphone. In their fawn cotton overalls the group looked, thought Dalgliesh, like a cluster of dilatory removal men. Only the plastic overshoes suggested that theirs might be a more sinister assignment. The technicians were wearing their head-straps but with the visors still up. Later when they received the organs into the bucket and weighed them the visors would be down, protection against AIDS and the more common risk of hepatitis B. Dr. Wardle as usual wore only his pale green apron over slacks and shirtsleeves. Like most forensic pathologists he was cavalier about his own safety.

The body, parcelled and sealed in its plastic shroud, lay on the trolley in the outer room. At a word from Dalgliesh the technicians slashed the plastic and tore it aside. There was a small explosion of air like an expelling sigh, and the plastic crackled like a charge of electricity. The body lay exposed like the contents of some great Christmas cracker. The eyes were duller now; only the snake taped to the cheek, its head gagging the mouth, seemed to have life or vitality. Dalgliesh was visited by a strong desire to see it removed—only then could the body be restored to some dignity—and he wondered briefly why it was that he had been insistent it remain in place until the autopsy. It was all he could do to prevent himself from reaching down and tearing it away. Instead he made his formal identification establishing the chain of evidence.