In The Presence Of The Enemy (48 page)

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 fl oor 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 fi nger 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 winter-green. 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 Thes-pian 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 fi ve 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 superfi -

cial 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-defi ned as is usual—all support one cause of death. The heart was relaxed. On the right side, the auri-cle 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 bland-ly.

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 speculation 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 f luid 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 fi rst 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.”

“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 fi rst 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 clarifi ed.

“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 sniffi ng 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 fi nd 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 fi ngerprints.