Bryant & May and the Bleeding Heart

by Christopher Fowler - Bryant

  ‘I didn’t mean anything specific,’ Alma protested.

  ‘Maybe your gods are working through you.’ He wriggled out of bed, gave her cheek a painful pinch and headed for the bath.

  ‘God singular,’ she called after him, ‘not gods!’ but her words were drowned out by running taps.

  ‘He was dead long before the Emergency Medical Team got to him,’ said Giles Kershaw, holding open the door for May. The forensic pathologist always looked as if he should be playing cricket rather than peering into dead bodies. Today he was actually wearing a white cricket jumper. ‘They brought him here to UCH and immediately put the incident down as suspicious.’

  ‘Why did they do that?’ asked May, following him down the eye-wateringly bright corridor that ran beneath University College Hospital. This was the medical equivalent of a theatre’s backstage area, where doctors worked behind the scenes and patients who had not survived their stays awaited collection. ‘They couldn’t have known that we interviewed him as a witness yesterday.’

  ‘There’s a chance they could have. EMTs around the stations get updates on all local incidents.’

  ‘The grave desecration wouldn’t have gone down as anything major. I don’t think anyone would have known what to put it down as.’

  ‘Well, the medics got the call at just after one thirty a.m. so their thinking is that he was at the Scala nightclub and left at around one fifteen a.m., somewhat the worse for wear.’

  ‘What makes them assume that?’

  ‘There was a club night on, nothing much else happening in the area on a Monday.’ He pointed the way ahead. ‘Sorry about the walk, it’s just down here on the right. He had alcohol and a high dose of MDMA in his system, and was hit by a vehicle in Britannia Street, round the back of the club.’

  ‘Britannia Street. It would have been the logical route to follow if he was taking a short cut back to his mother’s flat. I’m presuming the driver left the scene.’

  ‘Yup, and the suspicious part is that the contact marks aren’t consistent with a single collision. Legs, one arm and throat crushed.’

  ‘I’ve seen that from a single collision before.’

  ‘The med team thought it didn’t look right,’ said Kershaw. ‘He was lying half on the pavement but there were no corresponding bruises from the kerbstone underneath him. They thought it was likely that someone had moved the body afterwards. It was called in and a couple of officers made a report. It should be in your inbox by now.’

  ‘Anything stolen?’

  Kershaw opened the door to the area ironically nicknamed the Delivery Room, a storage point for bodies that required pathological investigation, and ushered May inside. ‘He still had his wallet, keys, mobile and loose change,’ he explained. ‘The mother doesn’t know what else he normally had on him. She’s a nurse over at the Killick Street Clinic, says he rarely drank and never took drugs, but that’s what they all say. Anything else, you’ll have to find out about. I’m just necrology, love.’ He led the way over to a stack of white aluminium units and searched the labels. ‘Behave yourself in here. UCH medics don’t like jokes so it’s just as well you left your comedy partner at home. Don’t worry, I’m not going to make him suffer the indignity of public display, I just want my prelim.’ Kershaw fished inside one of the drawers and pulled out a sheet from the clear plastic envelope attached to its headboard. ‘The NHS computer system has been down for repairs again today so I made hard copies. Here you go, Romain Wellington Curtis. Brave middle name, that.’

  He unfolded the top sheet and laid it flat. The page showed a line-diagram of a generic male body with different areas shaded in pen. ‘As you can see, fractured front right tibia, right patella, fractured right tarsals and metatarsals, left ulna and radius, left-side fracture on the clavicle and crushed trachea. It may well just have been an accident – you see pedestrians left in all kinds of impossible positions, and for all I know he was so stoned that he could have been lying in the road – but there is another scenario.’

  ‘The vehicle hit him once, spinning him around, he fell, then the driver reversed on to him. So you get the fractures on both sides.’

  ‘Something like that.’

  ‘Any tyre marks?’

  ‘I was hoping we’d get a lift from the trachea but it looks unlikely. The whole thing must have happened very quickly. There was no time for bruising, but the skin was broken so it’s possible there are blood spots on the tyres. Perhaps you could locate your driver before it rains? I’d like to bring in a trace-evidence examiner to look for rubber samples but I suppose you’re going to tell me there’s no money.’

  ‘Not unless the City of London has suddenly raised our budget without telling us.’

  ‘Then I’ll run my own check for residue particles, but it won’t be as exact. Britannia Street’s your beat, isn’t it?’

  ‘I know every inch of it. Those half-dozen backstreets are never used by vehicles. The lighting’s atrocious and there’s no CCTV because there are hardly ever any pedestrians. No private residences, just offices that close their doors at six. It’s one of the council’s Catch-22 areas.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ Kershaw sucked a pen, leaning over his diagram.

  ‘They won’t go to the expense of installing infra-red security cameras because nobody uses the street, and it’s deliberately underlit so that nobody will venture down it. A nice little money-saver all round. Besides, when they do install CCTVs kids tend to deliberately hang around them, just to look hard.’

  ‘Why don’t local gangs use it for drug pick-ups?’

  May stuck his hands in his pockets and had a nose around the room. ‘Because both ends come out on to brightly lit main thoroughfares, and they’re squarely inside the King’s Cross Stop and Search Zone. Anyone wanting to use Britannia Street as a drop point would have to pass through a surveillance area in order to get in there – while they’re carrying. It’s too risky. There was a spate of phone thefts around there a few months back – a couple of kids on bikes snatching mobiles out of office workers’ hands, but they were caught.’ He wandered over to the map of catchment areas Blu-tacked to the wall beside the department duty roster and various gruesome hygiene posters. ‘These backstreets are generally safer than the main thoroughfares around the stations. Temptation occurs in crowds, not in dead zones. Between Euston, St Pancras and King’s Cross you’ve got a complex footfall going in every direction, which makes crimes easier to commit. It wouldn’t have been gang-related, either.’

  ‘Why not?’

  May tapped a blank-looking area of the map. ‘Britannia Street is neutral territory. Gang boundaries don’t start until you reach the edges of the estates below Euston Road. There’s nothing worth disputing in these little pockets of office buildings.’

  ‘There’s something else. Take a look at this.’ Kershaw withdrew a slender grey electronic tablet from his pocket and raised its cover, thumbing through to some photographs. ‘I asked the attending officer to let me have his stills. Nobody from Camden associated the death with you guys, otherwise someone would have called Dan out to the scene.’

  ‘He would never have got there in time. He lives too far away.’

  ‘That’s what I figured. The EMT had another callout, so it was left to the local team to sort out. Anything odd strike you about this?’ He turned the photograph around and showed May. Curtis was on his back, half on the kerbstone, his legs angled awkwardly.

  ‘The clothes,’ said May. ‘It looks like he’s been pulled upright.’

  ‘My thought exactly. Like the driver got out and tried to sit him up. Now why would he do that?’

  ‘Maybe you’re right about sticking to necrology, Giles. Despite what Arthur will try to tell you, in cases like this the obvious solution is usually the right one. Curtis realizes he’s in a bad state, leaves the club, weaves his way through the darkened backstreets, sits down on the kerb to wait for his head to stop spinning and someone accidentally runs over him. He’s already in
a seated position so he turns over beneath the wheels and gets the fractures on both sides.’

  ‘I guess that’s feasible,’ Kershaw admitted. ‘It doesn’t seem likely that anyone was lying in wait for him.’

  ‘There is another way of looking at it. One of Arthur’s favourite tricks is to reverse investigations by starting from the other end. Assume that the likelihood of Romain Curtis being killed just after he’d made a police statement is impossible to conceive as coincidence, a bit of Occam’s Razor. Which would mean his attacker targeted him, waiting for him to leave the club, then followed him until he got his chance.’

  ‘And sitting him upright after?’

  ‘Either he wanted the boy to talk while he was still alive, and tried to clear his airways, or he did it to search through his clothes. Maybe he was looking for something.’ May tapped his teeth with a nail, thinking. ‘If Curtis was followed from the club by car we’ll have the licence plate, because the Congestion Zone camera line is just south of the Scala on Gray’s Inn Road. It’ll take a couple of hours to get access to the drives, then someone will have to go through all the footage.’

  ‘It’s funny having you here without the old man,’ said Kershaw. ‘I thought he’d jump at the chance. He loves coming down here.’

  May’s face clouded. ‘Something’s up with Arthur. I don’t know what it is. I told him I was meeting you and he fell silent. Usually he can’t resist the opportunity to start poking about among the dead. He seemed all right last week. It’s just since yesterday morning.’

  ‘How’s his health these days?’

  ‘He had a full medical a few weeks ago. As far as I know his report was adequate, although the doctor gave him the usual warning about giving up his pipe.’

  ‘Maybe it’s an intimation of mortality,’ said Giles.

  ‘He had his first one of those forty years ago. And he’s been around death all through his career. We both have. You know what it’s like: you learn to separate it out from your own life.’

  ‘That could be it,’ said Giles ominously. ‘Perhaps this time he’s associated it with himself. You know how certain cases get to people. I’ve seen pathologists chuck in successful careers because they couldn’t handle it any more. You should keep an eye on him for a while and let me know if he gets any worse.’

  ‘How can I keep an eye on him?’ said May, exasperated. ‘You know what he’s like. He’s always going off on his own. I have no idea where he is right now.’

  If May had known, his fears would have increased.

  11

  THE LAZARUS COMPLEX

  Shirone Estanza sat on the bench outside her school chewing at a fingernail painted with tiny silver stars. Class had already started but she couldn’t bring herself to go inside. She still couldn’t take it in. How was it possible that Romain was dead? She was no fool; she knew how little she’d meant to him, but in the back of her mind was the feeling that somehow they might have remained friends.

  She seemed to be jinxed when it came to boys.

  A terrible thought crossed her mind – what were her brothers saying about her? Nico and Enrico hated her talking to anyone. They only cared about themselves. You didn’t have to sleep around to be branded a slut, and they didn’t want their little sister getting a reputation in case it reflected badly on them. The word was already going around that Romain had been hit by a car, and her brothers both had part-time work driving vans. She could see the law beating a path to her home. She decided to cut classes and go over to Drummond Street, where the boys hung out.

  She found Nico outside the Indian bakery, his grey hood turned up above the collar of an expensive-looking black leather jacket. As he saw her he turned away, continuing to talk into his mobile.

  ‘Oi, I want a word with you,’ she began as he held up his hand and dismissed her. She knew he was doing some kind of dodgy deal. He and Enrico were always up to something involving van drivers, little packages and visits to blocks of flats after midnight. She didn’t know the details and didn’t want to know. She tapped her painted nails on the bakery window, impatiently waiting for him to finish the call.

  ‘What?’ he said. ‘What you here for?’

  ‘Did you do something to him last night?’

  ‘What, your little mate?’ He sucked his teeth in annoyance. ‘You think we whacked him?’

  ‘You was there in the club, right?’

  ‘Yeah, and so was, like, a thousand other people. Make some sense. Your batty boy got nothing to do with us. Someone run him over, yeah?’

  ‘That’s what they’re saying,’ said Shirone, standing her ground as Nico’s friends ambled over, looking for something to break the monotony of the morning. ‘And if I find out anything that makes me think you messed with him, I’ll be telling Mum what you and Enrico get up to down here every night, you understand what I’m saying?’

  ‘What, you been shagging him, then? He been in your pants? You wanna try covering yourself up a bit, then blokes won’t get the wrong idea.’

  She turned and walked away, trying to look confident, but she was shaking with anger, close to tears. This is a nightmare, she thought. Romain, why did you have to bloody die?

  Dr Evrim Ersoy had come to the University College Hospital from the finest teaching college in Istanbul, and was now acting as a consultant on the new exhibition about death at the Wellcome Collection, a museum that displayed medical artefacts and artworks exploring ideas about the connections between medicine, life and art.

  He met Arthur Bryant in the elegant café attached to the gallery on Euston Road. Ersoy had glossy, shoulder-length black hair and a carefully trimmed beard that gave him the appearance of a benign Satan. A playful intelligence danced in his eyes; he always seemed on the verge of becoming uncontrollably excited.

  ‘I was surprised to get your call, Arthur,’ he said, sliding into the opposite seat armed with tea mugs. ‘It’s been quite a while. Have you seen the exhibition?’

  ‘No,’ Bryant admitted, ‘I’m not sure I’ve got the stomach for it.’

  ‘What? That’s not like you. The final grand adventure? I thought it would be right up your street.’

  Bryant accepted the mug and leaned forward confidentially. ‘It’s not much of an adventure, is it, losing everything that’s dear to you? Anyway, I see enough of death every day without peering at pieces designed to turn it into a decorative motif, thank you. I don’t think they’d tell me anything I don’t already know. But you might be able to.’

  Ersoy sipped his mint tea. ‘How so? What have you got for me?’

  ‘Your speciality is coma patients, isn’t it?’

  ‘That’s a bit of a simplification. I’m a neurologist. My specialist area is the reticular activating system, yes.’

  ‘What is that, exactly? I think you explained once before but I wasn’t listening then.’

  Ersoy added a staggering amount of sugar to his mint tea. ‘It’s a structure consisting of connected nuclei in the brainstem that’s responsible for the regulation of sleeping and wakefulness, and the transition between the two states. If either that or the cerebral cortex gets damaged, you have yourself a coma patient. The RAS is a more primitive structure than cerebral tissue or so-called “grey matter”. It has a system of acetylcholine-manufacturing neurons arranged in two paths, one rising, one falling – they’re what wake you up or keep you asleep.’

  ‘How do you define a coma?’

  ‘Usually more than six hours of unconsciousness. That’s to say you’re in such a deep sleep that you can’t be shaken awake.’

  ‘And how long can it last?’

  ‘Up to about five weeks.’ Ersoy dropped yet another sugar cube in his tea. ‘But in theory it can last indefinitely. There have been extreme cases where patients have returned after twenty years. The danger is that over long periods of time in a vegetative state, secondary infections kick in. We think coma states originally developed in order to compensate bodies while they repaired themselves, to stop the s
ystem from wasting energy. But you don’t necessarily come out of it in one piece.’

  ‘All right.’ Bryant pressed his hands flat on the table, thinking it through. ‘Say I’m a doctor and my patient has been knocked out. How do I know he’s in a coma and not merely unconscious?’

  ‘Comas result from a number of conditions. The most common are drug abuse, diseases of the central nervous system, lack of oxygen, car accidents, other traumas, strokes and so on. What do you have in mind?’

  ‘Asphyxiation. A suicide – hanging.’

  ‘That would be lack of oxygen, certainly.’

  ‘What would stop me from thinking my patient is dead?’

  Ersoy gave a guttural laugh. ‘Well, you wouldn’t be a very good doctor if you couldn’t tell the difference. But it has been known. First you perform a general examination. Then you check the medical background. History of drugs, other compounding factors. Make sure that he’s not in a locked-in state.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Total paralysis except for the eyes. He’d probably be able to move them due to oculocephalic reflex, also known as doll’s eye. Psychogenic response isn’t repressible. You’d run lots of tests including looking for trauma, doing the blood work, checking levels of sodium, urea, phosphate—’

  ‘Skip the boring details, Evrim. I’m old, I may not live long enough to hear them all.’

  Ersoy laughed again. He was a natural chuckler. ‘Same old Bryant. There’d need to be a brain scan if a coma was suspected. Or you could pump glucose into a body to try and give it a shock. But if it was certain that this patient of yours had hanged himself, such tests wouldn’t be performed, or performed less thoroughly than they should be.’

  ‘If a coma state went undiagnosed, you think my theoretical patient would still be awake inside his own body, thinking and feeling everything?’

  ‘The degree of awareness varies, but yes.’

  ‘All right, one last question, then I’ll let you get back to your Mexican death puppets or whatever it is you’re sticking in glass cases back there. What happens to my patient’s body while he’s in a coma?’