Bryant’s wry smile caught him by surprise. “I don’t think Saralla White was unstable. She’s been a very clever young woman. She manipulated this controversy about the artwork herself.”
“You only saw the top half of the documentary, Arthur. How could you assume that?”
“Simple. The foetuses aren’t real. They’re painted plastic facsimiles, convincing enough but definitely sculpted. Anyone taking a few minutes to study the contents of the tank should be able to see that the same creases and folds of the limbs are repeated in several of the babies. They were all struck from the same basic mould. White was feeding the press a story they wanted to believe so badly that they rushed it into print without any detailed fact-checking. They’re making sure that their readers are more interested in the lives of the artists than the artwork. No doubt Burroughs colluded by controlling access to photographic material. The only other time most reviewers would have seen the piece is at the press show.”
“Suppose she went out of her way to find identical babies?”
“They’re fake, John. I think she painted over polyurethane, which would require a petroleum-based coating. Chemistry caught her out. She hadn’t counted on the reaction of the formalin compound on their painted surfaces. That’s why the tank has turned cloudy. Burroughs might be a patron of the arts, but he’s also an opportunist. I’m betting he’s in on her story. He’d already called a meeting with her to deal with the tank’s contents. It’s the price she had to pay for notoriety, a compromising deal with her patron.”
May stopped before the chamber and placed a restraining hand on his partner’s shoulder. “We don’t know that yet. Let’s talk to him again, and find these other two artists. Perhaps there was some professional jealousy between them. With someone like Saralla White, how do you separate her personal and public lives? Or her enemies?”
“It wouldn’t be the first time someone had killed for the sake of art. What about the Water Room murders? Look how deeply artistic passions ran there.” Bryant checked his watch. “How much longer can we keep everyone here for?”
“The children will need to be released soon. The rest should be good for another hour or so, if we get Janice to be nice to them. I’m sure you must be very excited. On a purely investigative level this one’s right up your street. Impossible death, single point of entry, no motive, no suspects, and a single witness who reckons the culprit was a man on a horse.”
“Oh, I don’t get enthused about such things anymore,” said Bryant, barely able to suppress the gleam of excitement from his eye. “Locked-room mysteries are the inventions of dreadful novelists, more’s the pity. Besides, there’ll be a motive. You know how many homicides there were last year?”
“Eight hundred seventy-two,” May replied without hesitation.
If Bryant was impressed, he didn’t show it. “Home Office figures show that sixty-three percent of female victims and forty percent of male victims knew the main suspect in the case. Furthermore, around sixty percent of those women and twelve percent of the men were killed by a lover, partner, or ex-partner, which proves how much more vulnerable women are to assault by a male attacker. We’ll find a former lover with a grudge against White, and we’ll be interviewing him in the next twenty-four hours, you wait and see.”
“I read the same Home Office document,” May countered. “Those figures still leave a hefty percentage of motiveless murders. And stranger-homicides tend to get column inches only if the victim is a pretty girl, which leaves a lot of cases unnoticed and unsolved.”
“Come on, John, you know that stranger-crime is usually the result of coincidence. All it takes is a tiny fluctuation in the laws of chance, a decision to take one route home rather than another, and you get a random murder. How can we be expected to solve those?”
“Scotland Yard is always banging on about its ninety-percent murder-detection rate, but that means a lot of killers who might strike again are still wandering the city streets.”
Both detectives had a propensity to become evangelical about fighting crime, but in different ways. May’s righteous anger was born of a vocational desire to protect the innocent. Bryant was more concerned with understanding the moralities and beliefs of urban society. He feared that one day they would become incomprehensible to him, and had vowed to retire upon the realisation.
“By the way, how did you manage to get here before me?” asked May suddenly.
“I was giving Victor a run, if you must know,” said Bryant, referring to the rusting yellow Mini Cooper that still sported a chain of vermilion daisies, painted around its roof during the first Summer of Love.
“You told me the exhaust had fallen off.”
“It has.” Bryant looked at him blankly. “What of it?”
“You can’t drive it like that. It must sound like a Lancaster Bomber.”
“That’s right, I have to turn my hearing aid off while I’m driving, but at least people know I’m coming. I made a vicar jump into a hedge this morning. I was in Vauxhall visiting my psycho-chiropodist,” he explained. “She reads feet. Apparently I’m about to have an unexpected brush with death. Either that or I’ve got a bunion. Let’s go and see if Kershaw’s discovered anything.”
∨ Ten Second Staircase ∧
8
Lock and Key
They found Giles Kershaw stretched prone on the floor, taking digital shots of the green-tinged fluid samples splashed from the installation tank. “The body will be nicely pickled in preservative, although contamination will throw off my tests,” he remarked, tearing off his plastic gloves and flipping them into a zip bag. Scientifically trained officers tended to see crime victims as specimens, but the PCU staff cared to an unusual degree, despite how they sounded.
“What do you think is in the solution?” asked Bryant, thumping his stick against the tank.
“I’m a forensic pathologist, not an embalmer, but I can tell it’s a pretty lethal chemical concoction. She wouldn’t have lasted more than a few seconds after ingesting it, and the instinct to draw breath upon falling in would have paced up the poisoning process. The gallery should never have been allowed to leave so many cubic litres lying around in an unsealed tank. It’s like dumping an open barrel of toxic waste in a public place. If it got warm in here, the stuff could start evaporating into the atmosphere.”
“Good, that gives us something to hold Burroughs on,” said Bryant with relish. “I didn’t like the cut of his jib. Matching silk tie and handkerchief, far too spivvy for my taste. What else have you got?”
“A couple of bootprints, black rubber soles, here and here.” Kershaw pointed to some thick streaks and crescents on the parquet. “They tend to leave marks on this kind of wood flooring when someone’s treading on the side of the shoe, or slipping, say in a scuffle.”
“That’s not much to go on,” May complained. “Could be anyone.”
“Not quite, old sausage.” Kershaw flicked a lick of blond hair from his eyes and pointed to the faint black print. “These are motorcycle boots, a large size, possibly forty-five, forty-seven. The striations at the edges, see here? The soles are designed for grip. I’ve come across this distinctive pattern before: River Road Men’s Twin Buckle Engineer Boots, pricey and well made. Feet spaced far apart but not running or jumping – the prints are too consistently light – so it’s a pretty wide stride. Gives us a height of, oh, something between six one and six three. Big guy. Height’s no real indication of strength, of course – a lot of tall people are rather weedy and hunched – but it’s suggestive all the same. The victim’s corpse is heavyset but quite short.”
“You’re not telling me he could have thrown her into the tank like a shot-putter?” Bryant was incredulous.