“What about it?” he asked.
“Nugent didn’t die,” said Bryant airily. “It wasn’t an ostracod. It was a mango seed.”
“You are utterly impossible,” sputtered the pathologist.
“Oh, don’t be such a spoilsport. I’ve done worse things. I switched Raymond Land’s verucca cream for superglue last month; it took him several hours to get his shoes off. There you are, you’re more like your old self already.”
“I suppose it was you who unscrewed the handle of my brain knife as well. I was taking the lid off an Archway Bridge jumper and the damned thing nearly took my eye out.”
“Not my suicide from last week? Why were you examining his skull?”
“One of your lads discovered that he’d stopped in the street to complain of a headache just before he made the leap. I wondered what sort of pain would drive a man to jump from a bridge, and looked for a tumor. He had a morbid fear of hospitals and hadn’t been near one in years. There was a growth on his brain the size of a duck egg, large enough to re-open a suture in his skull. It had been caused by a rare parasite, cysticercus, caught on a business trip to Mexico.”
Finch’s great strength, even at his advanced age, was an enquiring, restless mind. He liked tidy endings and sought resolutions in everything, which was why Bryant’s unfathomable moods annoyed him so much. “You play these ridiculously childish tricks on me without any sense of risk or responsibility,” he complained.
“You shouldn’t take life so seriously,” said Bryant. “Think of it like pipe tobacco. It’s dark, it’s bitter, and it finally destroys you, but it provides a few moments of heaven on the tongue.”
“And it can make you ill,” snapped Finch. “There’s a woman on my table who died in her late twenties for no good reason I can think of. If I don’t take her seriously, who will?” Finch did not appreciate that the detectives took death very seriously indeed.
“All right,” conceded Bryant. “Let’s see what you’ve got.”
Finch unwrapped the corpse from a foil bag that gave it the unfortunate appearance of a giant Marks & Spencer ready meal. “Well, it wasn’t technically drowning,” he told Bryant, “although there’s liquid in her air passages and the lungs are swollen. She was poisoned by the liquid in the tank. It sent her into laryngeal spasms the moment she swallowed it. I couldn’t wait around for the preliminary composite breakdown to come back, so I knocked up a couple of my own tests. It’s a mixture of synthetic preservative, water, vegetable dye, and some form of antibacterial weed-killer that was meant to keep the tank clean but reacted with the objects in it, causing the clouding and increasing the potency of the poison. It’s also flammable.”
Finch stepped back from the body tray with his head on one side. “Getting her into the tank, though, that’s the thing, isn’t it? No defence marks on her hands, arms, or shins, and your man Kershaw tells me there were no scuffs on the glass, so she went over cleanly and without a fuss. I don’t have to tell you this is very unlikely in any circumstance. I understand there were no ladders or chairs, nothing for the killer to stand on.”
Bryant scratched the end of his bulbous nose, thinking. “Therefore we have three options. One, she went willingly into the liquid, which we have to rule out for the simple reason that she knew its potentially lethal composition. Two, she was hurled into the tank during some kind of argument, which at least a dozen visitors to the gallery would have overheard. Three, she was knocked unconscious or sedated first. So what have you checked for?” Bryant always knew when Finch was holding something back.
“Puncture marks. I agree that sedation has to be the answer, something fast-acting. It would have made her a dead weight, of course, harder for someone to lift and throw, but at least she wouldn’t have been fighting. I was hoping to find evidence that she was injected prior to immersion, but there’s nothing.”
“What do you mean, nothing?” Bryant was appalled. There was always something to discover. That’s what pathologists were for.
“You’re expecting me to find a grain of sand stuck in her earhole and match it up to one on the killer’s boot. I’m afraid it doesn’t happen like that. I’m sorry, this isn’t some Hollywood police show, you know.”
Bryant cast his eyes around at the dated equipment and waterstained walls. “I’m painfully aware of that.”
“I know it’s boring for you, but there’s nothing of interest here. I checked for wrist bruising, something to show she’d been hoisted by her extremities, but there’s nothing at all.”
“Are you absolutely sure?” asked Bryant. “She doesn’t look right.”
“Of course she doesn’t look right, she’s brown bread. Dead people rarely look like themselves. What they look like is what they’ve been lying on; thanks to hypostasis I can give you the death position and the contact surface, providing the body is Caucasian and hasn’t been moved for a while, but this one’s a floater, so she doesn’t even look like that.”
“You think she was lifted kicking and screaming, then chucked bodily into the tank? The killer must have had at least one hand over her mouth, otherwise the whole gallery would have heard her, even with the electronic sound-dampers.”
“I suppose she could have been chloroformed, but if she had time to draw breath you’d have to be strong in order to hold her until she was forced to breathe. I’ve known struggling time to last anything up to a minute.”
“What about the physical strength required? What are we looking for, a Russian shot-putter?”
“I heard you’re after a man on a horse.” Finch’s disconcerting smirk reminded Bryant of Lon Chaney trying out a new look in his make-up mirror.
“We have a small child who’s an unreliable witness. Like most imaginative children, he probably has a history of telling fabulous lies.”
“All I know is that she became immersed in the tank, drew a breath, swallowed, and died. How your man did it is a mystery I’ve no interest in solving. What more can I do? I’ll need to send away liver and lung samples, as well as ingestion residue for toxicology analysis, they can run some immunoassay and chromatography tests. There might have been an allergic reaction, I suppose. Obviously, it’s not something I can handle in this dump. I hate to admit it, but I’m as out of my depth as she was.”
“Perhaps we both are,” agreed Bryant. He was usually forming some kind of opinion by now, no matter how ridiculous or bizarre it seemed, but today he felt utterly lost.
“One other thing I should mention,” said Finch, “it doesn’t impinge on the circumstances of her death, but you should know she was pregnant.”
“You’re joking.”
“I’m not the kind of man who jokes,” Finch reminded him.
“She was dead set against having children at this time, campaigning in favour of abortion. How far gone?”
“It was a late-developing foetus, but I’d say about fourteen weeks.”
“We have one of the most restrictive abortion laws in Europe. The current legal time limit is twenty-four weeks, and they’re reducing that to twenty-two.” Bryant knew that women required signatures from two doctors before they could access abortion services. “I’ll see if she made any enquiries.”