A Gathering of Saints

by A Gathering of Saints (retail) (epub)

  Blowers in the low ceiling brought in gusts of freezing air, but even that wasn’t enough to remove the dark, sour odour the room had been steeped in for the last eighty or ninety years. Spilsbury, whose poor sense of smell was legendary, didn’t appear to notice and the corpse on the table was long past caring. Black had witnessed dozens of autopsies in his time but he could never get used to the stench of death. An image of Fay drifted into his mind and he blinked it away quickly. Sometimes he found himself wishing he’d never met her at all; any sort of loneliness was better than the burden of love and loss he’d carried for the past year. The thought of her laid out on a table like this was unbearable.

  ‘He was found this way?’ Spilsbury asked.

  ‘Yes, sir, according to the report.’

  The body, that of a naked man in his late teens or early twenties, was nestled within a dark blue rubberised bag fitted with a row of metal snaps. The letters W.O./D.S.S. and a serial number had been stenciled in white onto the upper-left quadrant. The bag, Black knew, was a standard-issue War Office Department of Supply and Services waterproof shroud manufactured by the government for use by the Ministry of Home Security (Air Raid Precautions Department). Black also knew that several hundred thousand bags just like it were stored in strategically located warehouses all over London. Although the bag had a serial number, he realised that it would be virtually impossible to trace.

  ‘Found in a bombed-out building?’ Spilsbury continued to move around the body. Black noted that the pathologist was on his third circuit. He began the fourth, then paused long enough to peel back one of the man’s eyelids with a thumb and forefinger. He nodded to himself and moved on.

  ‘Yes, sir. A block of cheap flats. Bed-sitting-rooms.’

  ‘Couldn’t have been left there by a forgetful air-raid warden I suppose?’

  ‘No, sir.’ Black shook his head. ‘The shroud, with the body inside it, was discovered under the debris from the house.’

  ‘So, we presume that the body was placed there prior to the bombing?’

  ‘Yes, sir. There was no evidence that it was placed there after the fact. No burrowing or tunneling.’

  ‘Interesting,’ repeated the elderly pathologist. He glanced up at Black and smiled, the grey, intelligent eyes twinkling. ‘Do you know how much I get paid for doing this sort of thing, Inspector?’

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘Five guineas for each postmortem as a rule, with a pound to the mortuary keeper for his services. Each one takes the better part of half a day, not to mention writing it up and giving evidence at Coroner’s Court if need be.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’ Black had no idea what the old man was getting at.

  ‘What I’m saying, Inspector, is that I don’t do this for the enormous financial benefit I derive from poking about in people’s internal organs or mucking about in their brain pans with a scoop and trowel.’

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘And after some twenty-five thousand postmortems, Inspector, I can assure you that I have seen virtually everything there is to see as regards the practice of homicide. I continue to do them, however, in the faint hope that there is still something which I have not seen. Something to pique an old gentleman’s curiosity.’ Spilsbury beamed. ‘This,’ he said, nodding his chin towards the body in the blue bag, ‘is one of those rare occasions.’ He shook his head absently. ‘I must admit, Inspector Black, that I am confounded… quite happily so.’

  ‘I’m pleased the Yard could be of service, Sir Bernard.’ Black smiled. Despite Spilsbury’s conservative style of dress, out of court and off the lectern he was remarkably informal and often showed signs of having a rather schoolboyish sense of humour. Once, it was said, when asked to carve the Christmas bird at a friend’s house, he opened his famous ‘murder bag’ and laid out a set of gleaming dissecting instruments. There was also an unsubstantiated story making the rounds that he’d recently given someone’s dog a human thighbone done up with ribbon as a birthday present.

  Black also knew that Spilsbury had suffered a mild stroke the past summer but it didn’t seem to have dampened his wit or his enthusiasm. With the exception of the stoop, which Black had already noticed, and a certain weariness around the eyes, the chief pathologist seemed quite himself.

  ‘Let’s get on with it, shall we?’ he said, finishing his final circuit of the table. ‘I have a lecture I really should be getting to at Guys.’

  ‘Of course.’

  The body, Spilsbury noted aloud, was that of a male in his late teens or early twenties, dark-haired, light-skinned, nude and presently residing in a rubberised shroud. Notes made by the investigating officer, Detective Sergeant Windridge, regarding postmortem lividity, and corroborating photographs taken in situ, led Spilsbury to believe that the body had been dead for some eighteen to twenty-four hours. There was no visible cause of death. The only wound was the letter Z incised into the palm of the left hand with a sharp instrument. According to Spilsbury, the lack of bleeding suggested that the wound had been inflicted after death.

  ‘Cause of death?’ asked Black.

  ‘Poison,’ Spilsbury answered, standing back from the body. ‘Nothing violent like strychnine or cyanide – there’s no sign of vomitus in the mouth and no bluish tint to the lips. I’d say a narcotic of some kind. Morphine in a large dose. I’ll need to gut him to be sure.’

  Black nodded, already taking the diagnosis as given. Spilsbury’s nickname at the Yard was The Pope; if Sir Bernard said it was morphine, then it probably was. Infallible.

  ‘And the Z?’

  ‘Yes, that really is very different,’ Spilsbury murmured. He dropped his glasses down onto his nose and peered at the dead man’s hand. He used his scalpel to delicately peel back the pale, curling, labial edges of the wound. ‘No telling how a madman thinks.’

  ‘You think the murderer was insane?’

  ‘Or wished us to think he was.’ Spilsbury shrugged. ‘This is ritual, premeditated. The man who did this was either mad or very shrewd, or both.’

  ‘A pervert of some sort?’

  ‘Are you asking if there was some sexual element to all of this?’

  ‘It occurred to me.’

  ‘I see no immediate evidence to suggest such a thing.’ The pathologist seemed to be a little uncomfortable with the subject. ‘Making that sort of assumption at this stage is premature I think.’

  Spilsbury picked up a pair of tongs from the counter behind him, carefully peeled back the front of the shroud and bent slightly to take a closer look at the man’s genitalia. The testes were small, nested like pale eggs in the dark brown pubic hair. The man’s sex organ was engorged and much darker than the surrounding flesh. Using the tongs, Spilsbury lifted it by the foreskin.

  ‘Blood tends to settle in the penis after death, makes it swarthy like that.’ He glanced at Black, smiling pleasantly. ‘The only thing it really tells us is that he wasn’t one of your tribe. As you see, he was uncircumcised.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’ Black nodded, trying to ignore the comment. During his twenty years on the Metropolitan Force, from his earliest days as a probationary constable at Peel House to his present position with CID, Morris Black had never thought much about being a Jew, at least as far as being a policeman was concerned. The last few months had changed all that.

  Since early May and the enacting of the new Home Office regulations regarding refugees and so-called ‘enemy aliens,’ the latent anti-Semitism of his white Anglo-Saxon brethren had been given a hearty stamp of approval. People were seeing so-called ‘fifth columnist’ saboteurs, most of them Jews, under every bed.

  In a nervous response to the nation’s sudden distemper, Scotland Yard’s Special Branch had been given a mandate to investigate every individual of German or Austrian birth resident in England and thousands – some of whom who’d been living here for decades – had been summarily arrested and interned under the all-encompassing Regulation 18B.

  It was ludicrous, of course, especially since more than ha
lf of the fifty thousand already arrested were Jews fleeing Nazi persecution after Kristallnacht and two-thirds of those were children under eighteen – hardly fertile ground for the nurturing of Gestapo thugs or agents of the Abwehr, the Nazi secret service. Black’s intuitions told him that Special Branch interests had more to do with communists than it did with Hitler’s bully boys.

  Whatever the case, it seemed as though he’d been hearing an increasing number of comments like Spilsbury’s recently, or perhaps he had simply become more sensitive to them. He knew the elderly pathologist meant no real harm or slight by it but not so long ago an aside like the one he’d just been offered would never have been made to his face.

  ‘No obvious means of identification I suppose?’ Spilsbury murmured, leaning over the dead man.

  ‘No, sir,’ said Black, shaking his head. ‘His fingerprints were given to Central Records but I don’t hold out much hope.’

  ‘Quite right.’ Using a hooked dental pick, Spilsbury pulled back the corpse’s lower lip to reveal a set of large, even teeth. He took another pick, poked the tongue back down into the throat and peered into the mouth. After a few moments he removed the picks and straightened. ‘I think you’ll find that he’s not on your files at all, Inspector.’

  ‘Oh?’ Black waited patiently for the explanation. Spilsbury was like an overwound watch; you simply had to wait for it to run down.

  ‘The dental work is definitely European. They use a much greater volume of silver in their amalgam. British dental work tends to tarnish rather more than this fellow is showing.’ Spilsbury plucked a cotton swab on an orange stick from the breast pocket of his lab coat and thrust it deeply into the dead man’s left nostril. Black winced; it looked incredibly painful, even though he knew the man couldn’t feel anything. The pathologist withdrew the swab and looked at it closely.

  ‘Smoked.’ He nodded to himself. ‘And not Virginia tobacco, the staining is much too dark. Yes. European. At a guess, Polish.’

  ‘Interesting.’

  Spilsbury gave Black a brief, penetrating glance. ‘Do I detect a hint of doubt?’

  ‘I just wondered how you came to that particular conclusion.’

  ‘It is not a conclusion, Inspector Black. As I said, it is a guess, and a speculative one at that.’

  ‘Sorry, sir.’

  ‘On the other hand, I didn’t simply pull a nationality from thin air.’

  ‘No, Sir Bernard.’ Black waited, realising that any further comment would simply delay Spilsbury’s assessment. After a long moment the pathologist spoke again, firmly and without the slightest hesitation.

  ‘A man who, by all appearances, was in good health until the time of his death, who shows no signs of having worked at hard labour and whose teeth show care and attention given from an early age. His complexion is somewhat pale and his features are Middle European rather than Gallic. We therefore rule out the French. He is far too tall to be Belgian, yet he is not robust enough to be of Scandinavian descent We may also presume that he is not a German who fell out of the sky, already bagged for disposal. That leaves us with the Balkan countries, the Soviet Union or Poland. Given the present political climate, I would suggest the latter.’

  Black tried to suppress a smile. Spilsbury really was very good.

  The pathologist poked one of the dental picks across the table in Black’s direction. ‘Interesting indeed. And probably quite accurate.’ Spilsbury paused for effect. ‘If I were you, Inspector, I’d have a chat with the RAF about our friend here.’

  ‘Yes, sir? Why is that?’ Black had had the same thought but almost certainly for very different reasons.

  ‘Stand over here,’ the pathologist instructed, motioning Black to come to the head of the table. He adjusted the large dish of the overhead light so that it shone directly down into the dead man’s pale, waxy face. He used a pair of tweezers to gently fold back the left eyelid, tucking it under itself so that the entire eye was revealed. It was a cloudy blue, the pupil dull and dry. The white of the eye appeared bloodshot.

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘What do you see?’

  ‘His eye. Blue. A little bloodshot.’

  ‘No. Not bloodshot. A bloodshot eye shows an irritation of the surface veins. What you see are a number of ruptured blood vessels.’

  ‘What’s the difference?’

  ‘He was breathing pure oxygen on a regular basis. Too much blood being brought to the ocular area. And he was doing so at high altitudes. That’s what caused the haemorrhaging.’

  ‘A pilot.’

  ‘Quite so,’ Spilsbury answered. ‘A Polish pilot.’

  Chapter Three

  Monday, September 9, 1940

  11:30 a.m., British Summer Time

  Morris Black made his apologies to Spilsbury and left the mortuary before the pathologist began ‘gutting’ the rubber-shrouded, unidentified corpse. Even though the atmosphere was sour from the smoky pall still standing like a fog over Docklands and the East End, the open air was a welcome relief after the mortuary’s dankness.

  The bombers had come again last evening but not in anything like the numbers that had appeared on Saturday. The raiders concentrated on the East End and the Docks again and rail travel to the south was completely blocked, at least for now.

  On the other hand the Evening Standard was still advertising Lixen laxative and Wolsey socks across its front-page banner and the wireless, commenting on Churchill’s tour of the East End yesterday afternoon, said the prime minister had found the people to be in ‘good spirits and defiant.’ Black wondered what sort of spirits and defiance the PM might have seen if he’d chosen to make his tour through the lower levels of the underground station at Leicester Square. Thousands of East Enders had forced their way into the subterranean tunnels and crammed the platforms, refusing to leave. The terrified refugees from the bombing raids had been on the verge of wholesale panic and had come close to rioting.

  Black went on to the Yard and after making a few telephone calls discovered that the Free Polish Squadron of the RAF was based at Northolt, a few miles west of London. After filling out the necessary travel documents, Black then took the tube to Paddington, where he caught the one o’clock train to Northolt Junction. It was a half-hour journey and sitting in his compartment Black realised that filling out the forms for the trip had taken almost twice that long.

  Arriving at the small, unattended station, the detective was met by a pretty, dark-haired Women’s Auxiliary Air Force driver wearing goggles and piloting an RAF Norton motorcycle with a sidecar. The WAAF took him on a short, bumpy ride to the aerodrome, dropping him off in front of a long, single-storey brick building protected by an earth embankment on all sides and completely surrounded by trees.

  ‘Ops Centre, sir,’ said the WAAF briskly as Black clambered out of the sidecar. ‘Flight Lieutenant Kent is waiting for you inside.’ Without waiting for a reply the woman put the Norton in gear and thundered off in a cloud of dust.

  Black watched her go, squinting in the bright sunlight. He was amazed at the size of the place. Established in 1915, it was the oldest operational aerodrome in the Royal Air Force and looked like a small town, complete with roads and street lamps. From where he stood he could make out at least a dozen H-shaped, two-level barracks buildings, dozens of workshops and, in the distance, seen over the screening trees, he could see the jagged rooflines of the two giant hangars.

  He was surprised at how neat and tidy things were. The newspapers had been reporting savage attacks on fighter stations by German dive-bombers for weeks now but there was no evidence of it here. He shrugged, then turned back to the Operations Building and followed the short gravel path to the main door.

  Opening it, he found himself on a small wooden platform with half a dozen steps leading down to a large open room, the floor covered in exactly the same shade of grey linoleum in his office. The single-storeyed appearance of the building from outside was a ruse – the centre was actually built entirely below ground le
vel.

  A dozen large wooden tables on trestles were arranged on the floor and a long low stage was against the far wall. The centre of the wall was covered by a black felt curtain, probably covering a map board. In one corner a uniformed clerk sat at a radio table, headphones over his ears. He was reading a magazine and drinking tea from a thick pottery mug. To his left a doorway led to an inner office.

  The only other person in the open area was a thin officer, the twin bars of a flight lieutenant on his jacket cuff and cap under his arm. He was reading notices pinned to a corkboard on the wall beside the clerk. The man looked up as Black came through the door. He smiled, his expression breaking into several sets of conflicting laugh, worry and tension lines. He looked to be in his late twenties or early thirties but the detective knew the man was probably much younger than that. They introduced themselves and Black had to make a conscious effort not to show his amusement at the man’s flat, nasal accent. Even without the Canada flashes on his shoulders his nationality would have been obvious.

  ‘Come on into the staff office, that’s where we keep the files.’ The officer led the way into the office beside the radio operator. It was tiny, ancient filing cabinets against three walls, the remaining space barely large enough to accommodate a small desk and two chairs. There was no window and the cubicle stank of cigarettes. ‘Have a seat,’ Kent offered, waving a hand. Black sat down and watched as the Canadian flier began rummaging through the file drawers, talking while he looked.

  ‘We’ve had at least nine different squadrons based here in the past year so things get pretty mixed up, paperwise.’ He turned and flashed Black a quick grin. ‘It’s a mess.’