The Invisible Code (30 page)

33

CONSPIRACY THEORY

‘
I DON’T NEED
to be coached on how to behave like a lady,’ said Longbright, straightening her jacket in the full-length mirror she had installed in her office. Looking over her shoulder, she caught Meera trying not to laugh. ‘What? This jacket’s a Biba classic.’

‘It’s not the jacket,’ said Meera, ‘it’s how you wear it.’

‘And how’s that?’

‘With your shoulders hunched up. You look like a boxer, or a tranny. Try to relax a bit.’

‘That’s rich coming from you. I’ve never seen you in anything but jeans and workboots. You don’t exactly exude femininity.’

‘It’s not about being feminine, it’s about looking classy. Like you were born to the style. Don’t you ever watch any makeover shows?’

‘No, of course not.’

‘Drop your shoulders. What have you got on your hair?’ Meera reached up and touched Longbright’s blond mane. ‘God, there’s enough lacquer on that to create a new hole over the North Pole.’

‘It’s Silvikrin Twelve-Hour Hard Hair with Highlights.
They stopped making it in 1968. I found some in a warehouse off the Edgware Road. Lady Anastasia has already agreed to introduce me to the rest of her coven today. She said she’s happy to gather them at short notice.’

‘Why would she agree to do that?’

‘Because I represent an organization that’s setting out to limit the freedom of the press in the wake of the recent phone-hacking scandals, and need to canvass opinion from women in the public eye. John came up with that one. She was very impressed by the CV he wrote for me.’

‘What’s the organization called?’

‘Dunno, I’ll come up with something. We’re meeting in a Mayfair restaurant called La Cuisine des Gourmets. It’s the closest I’ll ever get to being taken out to a posh dinner, I can tell you.’

‘You’d better eat something first. They’ll order green salads. You’ll be the only one asking the chef if he can knock up a cheeseburger.’

Longbright’s hands went to her hips. ‘Is that what you think of me? I admit I was born into a family of public-service-industry employees, but I do actually know how to eat with a knife and fork, thank you.’ She checked herself in the mirror. ‘Maybe I’ll ditch the Bowanga Jungle Jaguar lip gloss, though. It’s a bit too Ruth Ellis.’

‘Who’s she?’

‘The last woman to be hanged in Britain. Call yourself a copper? Blimey. I mean, goodness gracious.’

Arthur Bryant found his way back through the corridors of the Robin Brook Centre at St Bart’s Hospital, looking for Dr Benjamin Fenchurch. He spotted his old friend through the smoked-glass panel of the mortuary door, hunched over his desk as usual, and quietly entered. Creeping up behind the coroner, he tapped him on the shoulder.

Fenchurch jumped. ‘God, you gave me a fright,’ he said. ‘It’s a good job I wasn’t holding a scalpel.’

‘It’s funny,’ said Bryant, shaking some Dolly Mixtures out of a paper bag and offering them, ‘I didn’t startle you last time. But then you heard my shoes, didn’t you? You made a comment about me still wearing Blakey’s. You didn’t see me reflected in the mirror above your desk. And then there was the mix-up with the cadaver drawers. You had trouble finding O’Connor. How long have you been having a problem with your eyes?’

Fenchurch looked devastated. ‘Don’t say anything, Arthur. Please. I’ve got eight months to go before retirement.’

‘But it’s affecting your work, Ben. You didn’t spot the puncture mark on O’Connor’s left calf, did you? She was stabbed with a needle-tip coated in Tetrodotoxin. You had no assistant but still went ahead with the post-mortem, and you missed it.’

‘I started having trouble with my right eye a year ago. I knew it would exempt me from finishing my term if it got on to an official medical report, so I delayed my check-up. I’ll lose my payout if they make me go early.’

‘Is O’Connor still here?’

‘The funeral parlour is due to pick her up tomorrow morning.’

‘Let me see her. My eyesight’s not much better than yours, but I know what I’m looking for.’

Fenchurch led the way to the cadaver drawers and they extracted the chilled bag containing O’Connor’s remains. Bryant donned gloves and turned her left leg without waiting for Fenchurch’s permission. He was always surprised by the way in which the absence of life left bodies looking smaller and less substantial, as if the soul could be weighed.

Leaning forward, he saw that a tiny but definite lump could be found now that the skin had lost its elasticity and started to retract.

‘OK,’ said Bryant, ‘I won’t say anything about your
eyesight on two conditions. You need to change the report, and promise me that any further post-mortems you handle in your remaining time are conducted in the presence of a qualified medic.’

‘Of course,’ said Fenchurch gratefully.

‘And I’m still expecting you on my bowling team next Saturday,’ said Bryant, tightening his scarf in anticipation of the sunlit streets.

Meanwhile, Dan Banbury and Giles Kershaw were at the St Pancras Mortuary with the remains of a black Triumph Thunderbird and its rider, bagged and labelled with scanner codes.

‘You know how many of these we see a month?’ said Kershaw. ‘Trucks still have blind spots that let them take out bikes at corners.’

‘He was really travelling,’ said Banbury. ‘It must have been like driving straight into a concrete wall. No tags in his clothes. The bike was bought through an online site, and the seller was given an alias. Think it was the same guy who went after Waters?’

‘Well, he’s right-handed, and his build is consistent with Waters’s attacker. He recently took anabolic steroids and cocaine.’ He held up the rider’s left wrist and turned it over to reveal a dense, smudged square of deep blue ink. ‘That’s a Russian prison tattoo, made by repeatedly jabbing yourself with a darning needle dipped in household ink. He tried to remove it with a razor blade but it looks like it went septic. If you’re thinking of a criminal career, it’s not a good idea to trademark yourself with something traceable.’

‘What is it?’

Kershaw drew closer and shone a penlight over the patch. ‘A church or a monastery. The crucifix at the centre indicates that the wearer is the prince of thieves. Four spires on the church. That’s either the number of years or
prison terms he’s served. And that looks like a spider at the base. The joints on the legs are irregular, see? That gives us his admittance date. Russian prisoners take great pride in tattoo codes, and they’re evolving all the time. I’ve seen these coming out of St Petersburg.’ He snapped his gloves off. ‘You should be able to fill in the rest, shouldn’t you?’

‘An ID won’t be enough to link him to anyone at the Home Office. They’re covering their tracks.’

‘My dear fellow, you give up far too easily,’ said Kershaw. ‘This chap wasn’t supposed to go under a lorry. That was a mistake, and mistakes leave a trail you can follow.’

‘You say that, but I can’t even check to see if he ever contacted Kasavian’s department because we can’t access their phone records, and this guy wasn’t carrying a mobile. We retraced his route on the off chance that he dropped it somewhere, but no luck.’

‘There’ll be a mistake,’ Kershaw insisted. ‘I can’t be doing with conspiracy theories; they really are the province of crackpots. Just how many could be in on this? I mean, really?’

‘I don’t see that it would have to be that many. We’re talking about, I don’t know, five, maybe six people who are already signed up to the Official Secrets Act.’

‘So what’s the big international secret they’re all protecting?’

‘You tell me. Amy O’Connor worked in a bar. Anna Marquand, if it goes back that far, was a biographer. Jeff Waters was a
paparazzo
. And Sabira Kasavian, when it comes down to it, was an Eastern European bride coming to the realization that she’d made a bad marriage. They
must
have shared a piece of knowledge that got them all killed, but I can’t begin to think what it might have been.’

‘You’ve linked them,’ said Kershaw. ‘Good. Let’s go from there.’

34

DOXIES AND RAKES

LONGBRIGHT CHECKED HER
reflection in the glass-covered menu outside La Cuisine des Gourmets and barely recognized herself.

She was dressed in a high-necked grey trouser suit she had only worn once before, to her aunt’s funeral. Meera had tied her hair back with tortoiseshell clips. In gold earrings, a single strand of pearls, a tiny gold Cartier watch Bryant had borrowed from the ‘unclaimed’ drawer in the PCU’s evidence room, low patent black heels and a matching bag, she looked like the Thames Valley wife of a professional golfer.

The restaurant was hung with gleaming copper pots, bunches of dried lavender and other pastoral French knick-knacks. And there they all were, seated at a long table by the largest window, the Home Office wives.

Longbright still had Sabira’s notes about them. She could identify Cathy Almon, whose spouse headed the HO’s Workforce Management Data System, and Lavinia Storton-Chester, whose husband Nigel was the security division’s public relations manager. She also recognized a highborn woman named Daniella Asquith, wizened
and birdlike, from staff files Dan had downloaded. At the head of the table sat Lady Anastasia Lang and Emma Hereward. The empty chair beside Ana Lang had clearly been left for Longbright.

Introductions were made, but the swirl of conversation was barely interrupted by Longbright’s arrival. Apparently the chef had prepared a set menu for the group. Longbright’s dietary requests – not that she had any – were obviously not to be taken into account. A first course arrived, something with asparagus tips and quails’ eggs fussily laced with a crimson sauce that reminded her of blood-spatter patterns. Longbright trotted out her prepared mission statement about building evidence against the press.

‘If you could do something about the
Guardian
journalists,’ Emma Hereward piped up, ‘we get a very rough ride from them.’

You picked the only left-wing newspaper out of nearly a dozen national dailies
, thought Longbright, who had been in the public-service sector long enough to be able to spot a table of union-busters at a hundred paces.

‘All our expenses have to be checked now,’ Ana Lang agreed. ‘All this rubbish about the taxpayer having to fork out to have MPs’ moats cleaned. The lack of trust is appalling.’

Inflamed by the topic, Daniella Asquith became so animated that there seemed a chance she might be going into cardiac arrest. ‘I think we behaved impeccably,’ she said. ‘You know what it’s about? Jealousy. We have got a very, very large house. Some people say it looks like Balmoral, but it’s a merchant’s house from the nineteenth century. It was Labour who introduced the Freedom of Information Act and it is Labour who insisted on the things that caught us on the wrong foot.’

The wives chorused their dissatisfaction with the press reportage of the expenses scandal. The irony was
that the story had been brilliantly uncovered by the
Daily Telegraph
, traditionally a bastion of right-wing journalism, but this appeared to have passed them by.

‘They won’t leave us alone,’ Ana Lang told Longbright. ‘It’s because we’ve publicly voiced support for our husbands. They think we’re fair game now.’

‘I imagine Mr Kasavian’s wife made the situation worse,’ said Longbright.

‘Well, of course it was terribly sad that she chose to kill herself, but she was unstable,’ said Lang.