“But if that happened,” Barbara said, “if she was held down, wouldn’t there have been an indication of that? Bruising on her neck and shoulders? Ligature marks on the wrists or ankles?”
The pathologist shoved his right hand into a latex glove and snapped it snugly against his skin. “Holding her down wasn’t necessary.”
“Why not?”
“Because she was unconscious when she was put into the water. Which is why all the typical signs of drowning were less marked than normal, as I first said.”
“Unconscious? But you’ve mentioned no blow to the head or—”
“She wasn’t struck to render her unconscious, Sergeant. She wasn’t, in fact, molested in any way, before or after death. But the toxicology report shows that her body was riddled with a benzodiazepine. A toxic dose, as a matter of fact, considering her weight.”
“Toxic, but not lethal,” Barbara clarified.
“That’s right.”
“And what did you call it? A benzo—what?”
“A benzodiazepine. It’s a tranquilliser. This particular one is diazepam, although you might know it from its more common name.”
“Which is?”
“Valium. From the amount in her blood—in combination with the limited signs of drowning on the body—we know she was unconscious when she was submerged.”
“And dead when she got to the canal?”
“Oh yes. She was quite dead when she got to the canal. And had been, I’d say, close to twenty-four hours.”
Bill put on the second glove. He rooted in the cupboard for a gauze mask. He said, bobbing his head towards the outer room, “This next one is going to be rather malodorous, I’m afraid.”
“We were just leaving,” Barbara said.
As she followed Sergeant Stanley on the route back to the car park, she reflected on the import of the pathologist’s findings. She’d thought they were making slow progress, but now it seemed they were back to square one. Tap water in Charlotte Bowen’s lungs meant that she could have been held anywhere prior to her death, that her drowning could have been accomplished in London just as easily as in Wiltshire. And if that were the case, if the girl had been murdered in London, then she could have been held captive in London as well, with more than enough time to kill her in town and then to drive her body to the Kennet and Avon Canal. Valium suggested London as well, a tranquilliser prescribed to assist one in dealing with life in the metropolis. All that was necessary for a Londoner to have kidnapped and done away with Charlotte was that he or she possess some knowledge of Wiltshire.
So chances were good that it was all for nought that Sergeant Stanley had gridded off the land, and chances were equally good that it was equally for nought that Sergeant Stanley had deployed more than a score of policemen in a search for where Charlotte Bowen had been held captive. And chances were, it seemed, outstandingly excellent that she herself had agreed to the deployment of Robin Payne on the wildest of goose chases in which he would waste an entire day scouting round boat-hiring locales, not to mention sniffing up sawmills, canal locks, windmills, and reservoirs.
What a bloody waste of manpower, she thought. They were looking for a needle that probably didn’t exist. In a haystack the size of the Isle of Wight.
We need something to go on, she told herself. A witness to the abduction stepping forward, an article of Charlotte’s clothing found, one of the girl’s schoolbooks recovered. Something more than a body with grease under her nails. Something that could tie that body to a place.
What would it be? she wondered. And in this vast landscape—if indeed it was here and not in London—how on earth were they going to find it?
Up ahead of her, Sergeant Stanley had paused on the steps. His head was bent into the lighting of a cigarette. He offered her the packet, which she saw as an unspoken truce between them. Until she also saw his lighter. It was a naked woman, bent at the waist, and the flame shot out of her arse.
Bloody hell, Barbara thought. Her stomach was unsettled, her head felt fuzzy, and her mind was trying to sort through the facts. And here she was, forced into keeping company with Mr. Misogyny disguised as Sergeant Plod. He was waiting for her to go hot in the face and make some sort of ultrafeminist remark that he could take back to his CID cronies for a chuckle.
All right, she thought. So naffing happy to oblige, you twit. She took the lighter from his hand. She turned it round. She doused its flame, lit it, doused it again. She said, “Utterly remarkable. Incredible, actually. I wonder if you’ve noticed.”
He went for the bait. “Noticed what?” he asked.
And she reeled him in. “That if you drop your trousers and stick your arse in the air, this lighter is a dead ringer for you, Sergeant Stanley.” She smacked it back into his palm. “Thanks for the fag.” She walked to her car.
The squats on George Street were aswarm with members of the scene-of-crime team. With their kits, their envelopes, their bottles, and their bags, they scurried through the building that St. James and Helen had earlier explored. On the top floor, they were rolling up the carpet for analysis in the lab and giving particular attention to the collecting of fingerprints.
As they puffed the black dust onto woodwork and doorknob, windowsill, water tap, glass pane, and mirror, the prints emerged. There were hundreds of them, and they looked like the torn and severed wings of ebony insects. The print officers were lifting and recording all of them, not just those that fitted into the same classification as the one St. James had lifted from the battery compartment of the tape recorder. There was a very good chance that more than one person was involved in Charlotte Bowen’s disappearance. An identifiable print could take them to that person and be the break they were looking for, if the squat proved to be significant in the case.
Lynley directed them to pay particular attention to two locations: the bathroom mirror and the water taps beneath it, and the window overlooking George Street where a pane had been cleaned, ostensibly to give someone a view through a gap in the buildings to St. Bernadette’s on Blandford Street. Lynley himself was in the matchbox-sized kitchen where he was going through cupboards and drawers in a search for anything that St. James might have missed during his own inspection of the site.
There was little enough, and he noted that St. James had accurately listed all of it for him with his typical scrupulous attention to detail during their conversation on the previous afternoon. In one cupboard stood the red tin cup; in a drawer lay the single tine-bent fork and five rusty nails; on the work top stood two grimy jars. There was nothing else.
As water plinked softly into the sink, Lynley bent to the dusty work top and gave it a closer scrutiny. He examined it at eye level, looking for anything that might have gone unnoticed against the motley Formica. He directed his eyes from the wall to the outer edge of the work top, from the outer edge to the strip of metal that held the sink in position. Then he saw it. A fragment of blue—not much larger than a chip from a tooth—was wedged into a slight bubble of space between the metal stripping round the sink and the work top itself.
Using a thin blade from one of the scene-of-crime kits, he gently prised the blue fragment from its lodging. It had a vaguely medicinal scent, and when he scratched his fingernail against it in the palm of his hand, he saw it was friable. Part of a drug? he wondered. Some sort of detergent? He bottled it, marked it, and put it into the hands of one of the crime scene officers, telling her to arrange for its identification as soon as possible.
He went out of the flat, into the airless corridor. Because it was boarded up, there was little ventilation in the building. The scent of rodents, decomposing food, and excrement was heavy in the air, a scent heightened and cooked by the late spring’s warm weather. This particular attribute was the one Detective Constable Winston Nkata commented upon when he came up the stairs as Lynley descended to the flat on the second floor. With a perfectly ironed white handkerchief pressed to his mouth and nose, the constable muttered, “This place is a cesspool
.”
“Watch where you’re stepping,” Lynley advised him. “God knows what’s under that rubbish on the floor.”
Nkata picked his way to the door of the flat as Lynley entered it. He joined him. “I hope these blokes’re getting combat pay.”
“It’s all part of the glory of policework. What’ve you come up with?”
Nkata dodged the more significant piles of rubbish that the crime scene officers were sifting through. He went to the window and unlatched it, letting in an insubstantial stream of air. This was apparently enough to satisfy him because he lowered his handkerchief although he still winced at the smell.
“I been checking with the cops in Marylebone,” he said. “The station in Wigmore Street’s the one with constables who do the walk through Cross Keys Close. It’s one of them would’ve seen the bum that Mr. St. James was telling you about.”
“And?” Lynley said.
“Bust,” Nkata said. “None of their regular blokes or birds remember rousting a dosser from the area. They been busy—tourist season and all that—and they don’t keep score of who they hustle off what street when. So no one’s willing to say there wasn’t any rousting going on. But no one’s willing to have a sit with our sketch man to get a picture of the bloke.”
“Blast,” Lynley said. There went their hopes of a decent description of the vagrant.
“Which is what I thought exactly.” Nkata smiled and pulled on his ear. “So I took a little liberty here and there.”
Nkata and his liberties had uncovered more than one piece of vital information. Lynley’s interest heightened. “And?”
The DC reached into his jacket pocket. He’d taken one of their sketch artists out to lunch, he explained with a duck of his head that told Lynley the artist was one of the feminine persuasion. They’d dropped by Cross Keys Close on the way and paid a visit to the writer who’d given Helen Clyde the description of the tramp who’d been run out of the maze of mews the very day that Charlotte Bowen had disappeared. With the artist working and the writer providing her with the details, a likeness of the man had been composed. And, taking a little more liberty and an admirable amount of initiative, Nkata had had the foresight to ask the artist to draw a second sketch, this one sans the scraggly hair, the whiskers, and the knitted cap that all could be part of a disguise.
“Here’s what we came up with.” He handed over the two sketches.
Lynley studied them as Nkata continued. He’d made copies of both, he said. He’d distributed them among the constables who were currently out on the street attempting to pinpoint the place from which Charlotte had disappeared. He’d given others to the constables who were checking the local doss-houses to see if they could get a name for this bloke.
“Send someone to show the drawings to Eve Bowen,” Lynley said. “Her husband and housekeeper as well. And that gentleman you were telling me about last night: the one who watches the street from his window. One of them may be able to give us something.”
“Got it,” Nkata said.
In the corridor, two members of the crime scene team were labouring with the rolled carpet from the floor above. It lay heavy on their shoulders like an obligation unmet, and one of them cried out, “Steady on, Maxie. I got only so much space to manoeuvre,” as they staggered towards the stairs. Lynley went to assist. Nkata, more reluctantly, joined them, saying, “Smells like dog piss, this.”
“Probably saturated with it,” Maxie said. “It’ll smell quite smart on your jacket, Winnie.”
The others chuckled. With much stumbling, groaning, and fumbling about in the ill-lit corridors, they made their way to the ground floor of the building. Here, at least, there was more light and better air since the metal and boards had been removed from the front door to give them access to the interior. They carried the roll of carpeting through this door and shoved it into a waiting van on the street. Nkata made much of brushing himself off afterwards.
Back on the pavement, Lynley thought about what the detective constable had told him. While it was true that with the number of tourists wandering about the area looking for Regent’s Park, the wax museum, or the planetarium, the local police might not keep in mind the occasional dosser they ordered to move along, it did seem reasonable to conclude that someone might be able to identify him with the assistance of what they now had: the sketch. He said, “You’ll need to talk to the local force again, Winston. Show that picture round the canteen. See if it jogs a memory.”
“There’s another thing,” Nkata noted. “And you’re not going to like it much. They got twenty specials on the force as well.”
Lynley cursed quietly. Twenty special constables—volunteers from the community who wore a uniform and walked a beat like any other policeman—meant twenty more individuals who might have seen the vagrant. The complexities of the case seemed to be increasing exponentially with every passing hour.
“You’ll have to run the sketch by them as well,” Lynley said.
“Not to worry. Will do.” Nkata removed his jacket and inspected its shoulder where he’d balanced the roll of carpet. Satisfied with what he saw, he shrugged back into it and took a moment to adjust the cuffs of his shirt. He gave an evaluative glance to the building they’d just come out of, then said to Lynley, “You think this’s the place where the kid was stowed?”
“I don’t know,” Lynley answered. “It’s a possibility, but then so is the rest of London at the moment. Not to mention Wiltshire.” He reached without thinking for the inside pocket of his jacket where, before he’d abjured them sixteen months ago, he’d always kept his cigarettes. It was odd how hard a habit died. The ceremony of igniting a thin tube of tobacco was somehow connected to the process of his thinking. He needed to do one in order to stimulate the other. At least that’s how it felt at moments like this.
Nkata must have understood, because he fished in his trousers and brought forth an Opal Fruit. He passed it to Lynley without speaking and found another for himself. They unwrapped the sweets in silence, while behind them in the squat the work of the crime scene team went on.
“Three potential motives,” Lynley said. “But only one of them really makes sense. We can argue that this entire affair was a bungled attempt to increase The Source’s circulation—”
“Hardly bungled,” Nkata pointed out.
“Bungled in that it couldn’t have been Dennis Luxford’s intention that the child would die. But if that’s our motive, we still have to dig up the why behind it. Was Luxford’s job in jeopardy? Had another tabloid taken a chunk of The Source’s advertising? What was going on in his life that might have prompted the kidnapping?”
“Maybe both was going on,” Nkata said. “Job troubles. And less advert revenue.”
“Or were both the crimes—the kidnapping and the murder—designed by Eve Bowen to bring herself into the limelight with an outpouring of public sympathy?”
“That’s cold,” Nkata said.
“Cold, yes. But she’s a politician, Winston. She wants to be Prime Minister. She’s on the fast track already, but perhaps she became impatient with the process of getting to the top. She thought about a shortcut and her daughter was the answer.”
“A woman’d be a monster to think like that. It’s unnatural.”
“Did she seem natural to you?”
Nkata sucked reflectively on his Opal Fruit. “Here’s the deal,” he finally said. “White women, I don’t have truck with them. A black woman’s honest about what she wants and when. And how, yes, she even tells a man how. But white woman? No. White woman’s a mystery. White women always seem cold to me.”
“But did Eve Bowen seem colder than the others?”
“She did. But then, that coldness? It’s just a matter of degree. All white women seem icy about their children. You ask me, she was just who she was.”
That might, Lynley thought, be a far more open-eyed assessment of the Junior Minister than was his own. He said, “I’ll accept that. Which leaves us with motive numb
er three: Someone is intent upon toppling Ms. Bowen from power. Just as she’s claimed to have thought from the first.”
“Someone who was there in Blackpool when she had her do with Luxford,” Nkata said.
“Someone who stands to benefit if she takes a fall,” Lynley said. “Have you done background on the Woodwards yet?”
“Next on my list,” Nkata told him.
“Get on it, then.” Lynley fished out his car keys.
“What about yourself?”
“I’m going to pay a call on Alistair Harvie,” Lynley said. “He’s from Wiltshire, he’s no friend of Bowen’s, and he was in Blackpool for the Tory conference.”
“You think he’s our man?”
“He’s a politician, Winston,” Lynley said.
“Doesn’ that give him a motive?”
“Quite,” Lynley said. “For just about everything.”
Lynley found Alistair Harvie at the Centaur Club, which was conveniently located less than quarter of an hour’s walk from Parliament Square. Housed in the former residence of one of the mistresses of Edward VII, the building was a showplace of Wyatt cornices, Adam fanlights, and Kauffmann ceilings. Its elegant architecture was a tribute to the country’s Georgian and Regency past—with decorative details rendered in everything from plaster to wrought iron—but its interior design made a statement about the present and the future. Where once the great drawing room on the club’s first floor might have contained an array of Hepplewhite furniture and fashionably dressed inhabitants enjoying a languid afternoon tea, now it contained a veritable traffic jam of athletic equipment and sweat-drenched men in shorts and T-shirts who grunted and groaned through leg squats, bench presses, and vertical butterflies.
Alistair Harvie was among them. In running shorts, trainers, and a terrycloth headband catching the perspiration that trickled from his extremely well-sculpted greying hair, the MP ran bare-chested on a treadmill that faced a mirrored wall, in which the exercisers could watch and meditate upon their physical perfections or lack thereof.