But Ogilvie prevented Rodney from answering by holding up a large and bony hand. The chairman reflected on the information in silence. His glance rose—not heavenward to seek the Almighty’s counsel—but wallward, where the chrome-framed display of The Source’s circulation-winning front pages were hung.
“If Ms. Bowen phoned someone else,” he said thoughtfully, “then I suggest we let her tell us that herself. And if she has no comment to make on our story, then that fact can be displayed—along with the others—for the public’s consumption.” His gaze dropped to Rodney. “And the contents?” he said genially.
Rodney looked blank. He massaged his beard in a movement that bought time and served to cover his confusion.
“Mr. Ogilvie is asking about the contents of the kidnapping notes,” Luxford said in translation with cool courtesy.
The temperature of the statement wasn’t lost on Rodney. “We don’t know,” Rodney answered. “Only that there were two.”
“I see.” Ogilvie spent a moment considering his options. He finally announced his decision with, “That’s enough to build a story round. Is your man on it?”
“As we speak,” Rodney said.
“Lovely.” Ogilvie rose. He turned to Luxford and offered his hand. “Things are picking up, then. I can be assured, I trust, that I won’t have to come into town again?”
“As long as every story is solidly founded,” Luxford replied, “it’ll run in the paper.”
Ogilvie nodded. He said, “Nice work, Rodney,” in a thoughtful fashion that was intended to communicate his evaluation of the two men’s relative positions at the newspaper. He left the room.
Luxford went back to his desk. He slid the photographs of Charlotte into a manila folder and returned the magnifying glass to his drawer. He punched the button to light his computer’s screen and dropped into his chair.
Rodney approached. “Den,” he said in a casual, introductory tone.
Luxford checked his appointment diary and made an unnecessary notation in it. Rodney, he decided not for the first time, needed a lesson to teach him his place. But he couldn’t think what the lesson would be while his mind was occupied trying to come up with options Evelyn might pursue to avoid becoming a target of the press. At the same time he wondered why he was concerned for her in the first place. After all, she’d dug her own grave in this matter and—The thought of graves chilled him, brought everything back to him in a sickening rush. It wasn’t Evelyn’s grave that had been dug. And she wasn’t the only one who’d assisted in the digging.
“…and generally because of that, as I’m sure you’ll understand, I wasn’t altogether up front with Ogilvie just now,” Rodney was saying.
Luxford raised his head. “What?”
Rodney rested a sizable portion of his beefy thigh on the front of Luxford’s desk. “We don’t have all the facts yet. But Mitch is on their trail, so I’d lay money on our having the truth within a day. You know, Den, sometimes I love that kid like he was my own.”
“What are you talking about, Rodney?”
Rodney cocked his head. Not listening, Den? his expression said. Something on your mind? “The Tory conference in Blackpool,” Rodney said gently. “Where someone put Bowen in the club. As I said a moment ago, she was there, covering the conference for the Telegraph. And the conference began nine months to the day before her kid was born. Mitch’s on the trail right now.”
“Of what?” Luxford asked.
“What?” Rodney repeated in gentle mockery. “Of Dad, of course.” With admiration he looked at the framed front pages. “Think of what it’ll do if we get an exclusive on this one, Den: Bowen’s unidentified paramour speaks to The Source. I didn’t want to mention the possibility of a story on the dad to Ogilvie. No sense in having him riding our backs every day when we may not be able to come up with a thing. But still and all…” He released his breath in a sigh that acknowledged The Source’s commitment to snuffling through the pasts of the country’s most prominent personalities in order to find a succulent truffle of personal history that would send the newspaper’s circulation into the double-digit millions. “It’s going to be like an A-bomb going off when we run it,” he said. “And we will run it, won’t we, Den?”
Luxford didn’t avoid Rodney’s gaze. “You heard what I told Ogilvie. We’ll run anything that’s solid.”
“Good,” Rodney breathed. “Because this…Den, I don’t know what it is, but I have a gut feeling that we’re on to something as good as diamonds.”
“Fine,” Luxford said.
“Yes. It truly is.” Rodney removed his thigh from the desk. He headed in the direction of the door. But there he paused. He pulled at his beard. “Den,” he said. “Hell. I’ve just realised something. I don’t know why I didn’t think of it before. You’re the man we’re looking for, aren’t you?”
Luxford felt the chill from his ankles to his throat. He didn’t say a word.
“You can help us out, help Mitch out, that is.”
“I? How?”
“On the Tory conference,” Rodney said. “I forgot to mention. I drew in a chit over at the Globe and had a wander through their microfilms after I talked to Mitch.”
“Yes? What about them?”
“Come on, Den. Don’t hide your light on this one. The Tory conference? In Blackpool? Doesn’t it ring any bells?”
“Should it?”
“I should certainly hope.” His teeth flashed like a shark’s. “Don’t you remember? You were there yourself, writing editorials for the Globe.”
“Was I,” Luxford said. Not a question, a statement.
“Yes indeed. Mitch’ll want to talk to you. So why don’t you have a nice long think about who it was who might have bonked Bowen.” He gave a slow wink and left the office.
19
BARBARA USED the hem of her jersey to blot the cold sweat from her forehead. She got up from her knees. More disgusted with herself than she’d been in recent memory, she flushed the toilet and watched the unsightly contents of her stomach whirlpool into oblivion. She gave her body a vigorous mental shake and ordered herself to act like the head of a murder investigation instead of like a whinging teenager going weak in the knees.
Postmortem, she told herself roughly. What is it? Merely the examination of a corpse, undertaken to determine the cause of death. It’s a necessary step in a murder enquiry. It’s an operation performed by professionals on a hunt for any suspicious processes that could have contributed to the untimely cessation of physical functions. In short, it’s a critical step in finding a killer. Yes, all right, it’s the disembowelment of a human being, but it’s also a search for the truth.
Barbara knew those facts well. So why, she wondered, had she been unable to go the distance with Charlotte Bowen’s postmortem?
The autopsy had been performed in St. Mark’s Hospital in Amesford, a relic of the Edwardian era built in the style of a French chateau. The pathologist had worked quickly and efficiently, but despite the professional atmosphere in the room, the initial thoracic-abdominal incision into the body had caused Barbara’s hands to sweat in an ominous manner. She knew immediately that she was in trouble.
Stretched out on the stainless steel table, the body of Charlotte Bowen was virtually unmarked, save for some bruising round the mouth, some reddish burn marks on the cheeks and chin, and a scab-covered cut on one knee. Indeed, the little girl actually looked more asleep than dead. So it seemed like such a defilement of her innocence to cut into the pearl flesh of her chest. But cut the pathologist did, tonelessly reciting his findings into a microphone that dangled above his head. He snapped away her ribs like so many thin branches from a sapling and removed her organs for examination. By the time he had taken out the urinary bladder and sent its contents off for analysis, Barbara knew she wasn’t going to be able to make it through what was to follow: the incision through the child’s scalp, the peeling back of her flesh to expose her small skull, and the high-pitched whizzing of the saw as
it cut through bone to get to her brain.
Is all this necessary? she wanted to protest. Bloody hell on a wafer, we know how she died.
But they didn’t, really. They could offer speculations based upon the condition of her body and where it had been found, but the exact answers they needed could only come from this essential act of scientific mutilation.
Barbara knew that DS Reg Stanley was watching her. From his position by the scales on which each organ was separately weighed, the man was glued to every expression that crossed her face. He was waiting for her to run from the room, hand clamped over mouth. If she did so, he would be able to snort, “Just like a woman,” in dismissal. Barbara didn’t want to give him an opportunity to deride her to the men with whom she was supposed to be working in Wiltshire, but she knew it was going to come down to a choice: She could humiliate herself by being sick on the floor or she could exit and hope she found a lavatory before she was sick in the corridor outside.
Upon reflection, however—with her stomach ever tightening, her throat closing in, and the room beginning to swim in her vision—she realised that there was another alternative.
She gave a marked glance to her watch, feigned realising that she’d forgotten to do something, emphasised this by rustling through her notebook, and communicated her intentions to Stanley by miming a telephone call with one hand to her ear and her lips saying, “Must phone London.” The DS nodded, but the caustic quality of his smile told her he wasn’t convinced. Sod you, she thought.
Now in the ladies’ lavatory, she rinsed out her mouth. Her throat burned. She cupped her hands for water and drank greedily. She splashed her face, dried off on the limp blue towelling that spooled forth unantiseptically from a dispenser, and leaned against the grey wall upon which the dispenser hung.
She didn’t feel much better. Her stomach was emptied of its contents, but her heart was still full. Her mind was saying, Concentrate on the facts. Her spirit was countering with, She was only a kid.
Barbara slid down the wall to the floor and rested her head against her knees. She waited for her stomach to settle and for the chills to leave her.
The child had been so small. Forty-nine inches tall, less than six stone in weight. With wrists that looked as if an adult’s single finger could encompass them. With limbs whose definition came from birdlike bones, not muscles. With thin, sloping shoulders and the clam-shell bareness of completely undeveloped pudendum.
So easy to kill.
But how? Her body showed no sign of struggle, no indication of trauma. It emanated no telltale odour of almonds, garlic, or wintergreen. It bore no flush of carbon monoxide in the blood, no cyanosis of the face, the lips, or the ears.
Barbara slid her arm beneath her knee and looked at the time. They’d be done by now. They’d have some kind of answer. Faint or not, she needed to be there when the pathologist made his preliminary report. The derision she’d seen in Sergeant Stanley’s eyes across the autopsy table was enough to tell her that she wouldn’t be able to rely upon him for an accurate account of the information.
She forced herself to her feet. She went to the mirror over the basin. She had nothing to use as a means of improving her colour, so she would have to depend upon her limited Thespian powers to bluff her way through what would undoubtedly be Sergeant Stanley’s suspicion that she’d recently sicked up in the loo. Well, it couldn’t be helped.
She found him in the corridor not five steps away from the ladies’ lavatory. Stanley was making a pretence of forcing a fuller stream of water from an antique porcelain drinking fountain. As Barbara came his way, he straightened from his endeavours, said, “Bloody useless thing,” and pretended to catch sight of her. “Phone calls made, are they?” he asked, glancing towards the lavatory door in a way that communicated his intimate knowledge of where British Telecom had installed every phone box in Wiltshire. No box in there, Missy, his expression said.
“Quite,” Barbara said and walked past him to return to the postmortem room. “Let’s get on with things, shall we?” She steeled herself to whatever grisly sight was beyond the door. She was relieved to see that her assessment of the time that had passed since she’d first left the room was correct. The autopsy was completed, the corpse had been removed, and all that remained as evidence of the procedure was the stainless steel table on which it had been performed. A technician was in the process of hosing this down. Ensanguined water sluiced across the steel and drained away through holes and channels on the sides.
Another body, however, awaited the ministrations of the pathologist. It lay on a trolley, partially covered by a green sheet, its hands still bagged and an identification tag tied to its right big toe.
“Bill,” one of the technicians called in the direction of a cubicle at the far end of the room. “I’ve popped new tapes into the recorder, so we’re ready when you are.”
Barbara didn’t relish the thought of standing through another autopsy in order to get information from the last one, so she headed towards the cubicle. Inside, the pathologist was drinking from a mug, his attention given to a miniature television on whose screen two sweating men were battling each other in a tennis match. The sound was muted.
He murmured, “Come on, you numbskull. His net game is murder and you know it. So get aggressive, put him on the defensive. Yes!” He saluted the tennis player with his mug. He saw Barbara and Sergeant Stanley and smiled. “I’ve fifty quid riding on this match, Reg.”
“You need to go to Gamblers Anonymous.”
“No. I just need a decent bit of luck.”
“That’s what they all claim.”
“Because it’s true.” Bill switched off the television and nodded at Barbara.
Barbara could tell from his expression that he was about to ask her if she was feeling better and she didn’t think she needed to give Sergeant Stanley any fodder for his suspicions. So she took her notebook from her shoulder bag and said with a tilt of her head in the direction of the other corpse in the outer room, “London’s waiting for word from me, but I’ll try not to keep you from your other work long. What can you tell me?”
Bill looked to Stanley as if for an indication of who was in command. Behind her, Barbara could sense the sergeant giving some sort of limited papal dispensation because the pathologist began to make his report. “The superficial indications are all consistent, although none of them are very pronounced.” And then he cooperatively translated this introductory remark by adding, “The conditions apparent to the naked eye—while not as well-defined as is usual—all support one cause of death. The heart was relaxed. On the right side, the auricle and ventricle were engorged with blood. The air vesicles were emphysematous, the lungs were pale. The trachea, bronchi, and bronchioles were all lined with froth. Their mucosa was red in colour and congested. There were no petechial haemorrhages under the pleura.”
“What does that all mean?”
“She drowned.” Bill took a sip from his mug. He used a remote control pad to turn off the television.
“When exactly?”
“There’s never an exactly with drownings. But I’d say she died roughly twenty-four to thirty-six hours before the body was found.”
Rapidly, Barbara did her maths. She said, “But that puts her in the canal on Saturday morning, not on Sunday.” Which meant, she realised, that someone in Allington may well have seen the passage of a car carrying the girl to her death. Because on Saturday the farmers rose at five as usual, according to Robin. It was only on Sunday that they stayed in bed. She swung to Stanley and said, “We’ll need to have men go back to Allington and question everyone at the houses. With Saturday, not Sunday, in mind this time. Because—”
“I didn’t say that, Sergeant,” Bill said blandly.
Barbara returned her focus to him. “Didn’t say what?”
“I didn’t say she was in the canal for twenty-four to thirty-six hours before she was found. I said she was dead for that length of time before she was found. My specu
lation as to the time she was in the canal hasn’t changed from twelve hours.”
Barbara sifted through his words. “But you said she drowned.”
“She drowned, all right.”
“Then are you suggesting that someone found her body in the water, removed it from the canal, and returned it later?”
“No. I’m telling you that she didn’t drown in the canal at all.” He drank down the rest of his coffee and set his mug on top of the television. He went to a cupboard and dug in a cardboard box for a clean pair of gloves. He said, slapping the gloves against his palm, “Here’s what happens in a typical drowning. A single strong inspiration on the part of the victim while under water carries foreign particles into the body. Under the microscope, the fluid taken from the victim’s lungs shows the presence of those foreign particles: algae, silt, and diatoms. In this case, those algae, silt, and diatoms should match the algae, silt, and diatoms from a sample of water taken from the canal.”
“They didn’t match?”
“That’s right. Because they weren’t there in the first place.”
“Couldn’t that mean that she didn’t take that—what did you call it—‘single inspiration’ under water?”
He shook his head. “It’s an automatic respiratory function, Sergeant, part of terminal asphyxia. And at any rate, there was water in the lungs, so we know she inhaled after submersion. But under analysis, the water in her lungs didn’t match the canal water.”
“I assume you’re saying she drowned somewhere else.”
“I am.”
“Can we tell from the water in her body where she died?”
“Could do, in some circumstances. In these circumstances, no.”
“Why not?”
“Because the fluid in her lungs was consistent with tap water. So she could have died anywhere. She could have been held down in a bathtub, dunked into a toilet, or dangled by her feet with her head in a basin. She could even have drowned in a swimming pool. Chlorine dissipates quickly and we’d have found no trace of it in the body.”