“She reappeared when she had run out of money, of course.” Eleanor White tapped out a cigarette and lit it. “Living in an East End squat with some other so-called artists, including the one who made her pregnant. Casually announced that she was a sculptor, if you please, not that she’d had any formal training. Didn’t look like she’d had a bath or a hot meal in months. My husband, Patrick, refused to give her a penny, but I couldn’t let her leave the house without something. She was our only child. The next time we saw her was on the television, drunk, swearing at a man who had once interviewed Nixon. Then that disgusting magazine photo spread, her sex life revealed, the abortion, and the rest I don’t even want to think about. Patrick won’t have the subject mentioned in the house. Soon afterwards we started hearing that her – installations, is that what you call them? – were fetching record prices with private collectors.”
“You must have taken some pride,” Meera wondered, “at least in her success.”
“Pride?” Mrs White was horrified by the idea. “To have our name dragged through the mud? To see such muck being sold to the public? There are plenty of other ways to be successful. An animal can be seen rutting in a farmyard, but that doesn’t make it talented. She became famous for exposing details about her private life that no decent wife would share with her husband; it was nothing to do with having artistic talent. We were deeply ashamed of her.”
And you’re more ashamed than ever now, thought Meera. She died before you could find a way to call a truce. “Can you think of anyone who might have wanted to harm her? A former boyfriend? Someone who hated her work? Perhaps even someone who felt jealous of her fame?”
“There were plenty of boyfriends. The artist, and her supposed mentor. She left the first one when she started to make sales.”
“Do you remember his name?”
“Oh, it was something strange and made up, the way they do.” Mrs White stopped. “Don’t give me that disapproving look, young lady. You think I’m just one of those undemonstrative Englishwomen who never showed her daughter love. But it wasn’t like that. We only ever wanted her to be happy. Of course we hoped she would share our values, even if she considered them old-fashioned. We believe in dignity, honesty, and Christian kindness – there’s nothing so unusual in that, is there? Some emotions require privacy. Why would she want to throw it all up in our faces? I don’t understand.” Her fingers traced the outline of a photograph on the side table. “I still can’t believe our sweet little girl changed into such a monstrous person. This is a terribly poisonous time to be young.”
Meera realised she was ashamed to be seen crying, and watched with a softening heart. “We’ll talk to everyone who knew her,” she promised. “We have every hope that her killer will be found. We’ll try to give you back your little girl.”
But she wondered if such comforting words were true. It was the lonely who left themselves open to attack. Eleanor White’s daughter had been insulated by a public life and a large circle of friends. It made her death all the more unlikely, and the chance of discovering its cause almost impossible. They left Eleanor White sitting in her floral lounge, bewildered and diminished, surrounded by the silver-framed memories of a daughter she now realised she had never tried to understand.
∨ Ten Second Staircase ∧
11
Departing Soul
“Ah, there you are,” said Arthur Bryant, strolling into the damp converted school gymnasium in Bayham Street that passed for an autopsy room. To combat the falling temperature, he had swiped a shapeless brown roll-neck sweater from the unit’s evidence room that made him look even more like a de-shelled tortoise.
“Where else would I be, seeing as my rehousing request has been declined?” Oswald Finch, the unit’s pathologist and the only man on the force older than Bryant, straightened his bony back with a series of audible clicks, scowling at the covered body in his aluminium trough. His permanent look of disdain had left him with a face like a sepia photograph that had been crumpled up and flattened out again.
“Yes, I heard about the refusal. I’m afraid it’s the new Home Office chap, Leslie Faraday. He’s been appointed to oversee the operation of all specialist units, and isn’t happy about our meagre budget rise. The usual story: He’s never been too ambitious, but now he fancies making a name for himself. I daresay he thinks he can do so by getting us closed down in the ruthless drive for efficiency. It’s the unsolved cases; we’ve too many on our books. It makes him look bad.”
“Of course it does,” Finch barked. “Good God, look at your resources, they’re embarrassing. You’ve no crime lab of your own, you’re forever cadging equipment downtime from the Met. We live in an era of mitochondrial DNA 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 are the police. The extractors are the same ones they used when it was still a prep school. If it got too hot they simply opened the windows, but we can’t do that with decomposing bodies around. Human fat sticks to everything, you know, and the smell lingers forever. No woman will come near me.”
“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.