Palindrome Page 7

  He began walking along the fence perimeter. At one point he thought he heard the sound of footsteps close behind him and at one point he stopped but heard nothing. He was suddenly conscious of the cold; the drizzle seemed to hang in the darkness, solid all around him. Soon the fence, much to his surprise, disappeared and he found himself following a line of thick bushes which Gabriel judged stretched back towards one of the roads in the business park. The pavement disappeared at this point and became a dirt track formed by frequent usage; there were scattered puddles of uncertain depth along it.

  When he came to the back of the Nebotec building, he stopped behind the wire fence, which had recommenced, and stared at a boarded up window festooned with police tape. One half of the building did not have windows. Gabriel guessed this was the animal house. A metal fire door, painted red, marked the point where the windowed half of the building became windowless.

  The unlit black windows of the laboratory, like the dark glasses of a blind man, held him in fascination. He kept moving along the path. His shadow broke and reformed itself as he came in and out of areas where the soda lights penetrated through the bushes. At one point, where the path ran beside a lane at the back of Nebotec, he found himself in the path of a beam of light from an arc lamp that was posted above a fire door. He was about to turn round when out of the corner of his eye he noticed a shining source of reflected light. He bent down to pick it up; it was a piece of torn paper, shiny on one side, a little rough and slightly sticky on the other. He never scorned good fortune, however trivial, and he pocketed it just as he would have a penny coin.

  As he did so he looked over his shoulder towards the Nebotec building and thought he saw the black outline of a figure racing across the car park. He stood still for a moment, like an alarmed rabbit about to bolt. It had not occurred to him that he should not be there, that the site might be off limits to the public. Instinctively, he began quickly to retrace his steps. He was soon drenched in sweat. The reflection of the yellow soda lights in the black water of the puddles marked their location on the path. He tried to avoid them but could not help splashing into a few. Where the track became pavement he almost lost his balance, just at the last moment managing to break his fall by grabbing the branch of a bush. He suppressed a yelp but swore under his breath when the skin of his palm was pierced by thorns.

  Then he heard voices and found himself lit up by torch light. He shielded his eyes in vain as the light blinded him.

  “Where do you think you’re going?” a bulky dark figure shouted at him. “Don’t you know this is a restricted site? A crime scene...”

  Chapter 5

  Repel evil as a live leper

  “Just what did you think you were going to achieve, wandering about at night outside Nebotec?” Brook asked. “You’re lucky I saw them bring you in and stopped them charging you with something like aggravated trespass or interfering with a crime scene.”

  “But I didn’t interfere with anything. I was just curious to see the Nebotec site, that’s all.”

  “On a night like this. Are you joking?”

  In the corridor outside Brook’s office, hefty policemen walked up and down. A few of them cast unsympathetic glances in Gabriel’s direction. He felt like a zoo exhibit. He could not escape an absurd feeling that he must be guilty of some misdemeanour and that guilt showed on his face. Still more absurdly, he remembered his regular speeding through villages on his drive to work.

  “It’s a fortress here,” Gabriel commented. He spoke softly to Brook, as though he were having a private conversation, so that those who looked in should not imagine that he was being arrested.

  “It’s supposed to be.”

  “I had dinner with Palmer and Hewitt this evening,” Gabriel said by way of explanation.

  Brook looked at Gabriel quizzically before joking, “Was it particularly tasty? Did one of them confess?”

  Gabriel’s shrugged his thin shoulders. “No. Not in so many words.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Palmer almost went out of his way to point out to me at dinner this evening how much he didn’t get on with Anna Taylor, how he never really liked her. That didn’t strike me as the sort of thing a murderer might say about his victim.”

  “Possibly. Unless, of course, it was so well known that he didn’t get on with her that to claim otherwise would only draw attention to himself.” Brook paused before continuing. “Did you learn anything else at your dinner?”

  “Only that Nebotec are desperate for Palmer’s anti-palindrome drug to succeed. According to Hewitt, the future of the company is dependent on it.”

  “Hewitt’s future too?”

  “Who knows? I suppose so. Both Hewitt and Palmer sounded more sorry for themselves than for Anna. All they could talk about was how inconvenient her death now made things for them at Nebotec, delaying, as it does, their stinking profit.”

  “So they see themselves as the victims.”

  “You could say that. I imagine there is no such thing as a victimless crime but talking about Anna’s murder in those terms struck me as particularly tasteless. More arse than class.”

  Brook smiled at Gabriel’s remark. Seeing that he was tightly clutching a white handkerchief in his right hand, he asked him, “What did you do to your hand?”

  “I cut it on some of the bushes by the track. I seem to have been lucky and not been left with any thorns. Which reminds me—” Gabriel reached into his pocket and pulled out the piece of shiny paper he had found near the path.

  “What is it?”

  “I don’t know. I found it outside Nebotec. One of the edges is straight; the other is torn. It’s shiny on one side.”

  “You’d better give it here. I don’t suppose forensics will be able to do much with it now after all the rain we’ve had. Where did you find it?”

  “On a dirt track at the back of Nebotec.”

  “Hm,” said Brook after a pause. “We’re supposed to have searched near there.”

  “It may be nothing. The wind may have blown it there.”

  Brook shook his head meditatively in answer to Gabriel’s comment. Gabriel wondered if for Brook — as for most people — the difficult thing was not the working out but the solution. His voice was a little hoarse when he followed up with, “You were going to show me the slide Anna was looking at down the microscope when she was murdered.”

  “I haven’t got it here. But I do have some photos of the murder scene that show the microscope. Do you want to look at them? They’re a bit gross.”

  “I’ve done post-mortems in my time. You can’t shock me.”

  Brook reached over his desk, which was littered with stacks of files and papers, and pulled out a large brown envelope from one of them. Gabriel was impressed by the way Brook was able to cut instantly through the apparent chaos.

  “There you are.”

  Gabriel withdrew the photographs. Despite his earlier bravado, he was sickened by the sight of someone he had known so well, clearly lifeless. There were photographs taken from several angles of Anna Taylor slumped forwards, her head slightly askew, hanging limply; there was a large pool of blood on the desk on which her head had fallen. Her long black hair obscured her face in some of the photographs.

  “She was attacked from behind,” Brook commented. “The murderer probably pulled back her head suddenly and cut her throat.”

  Gabriel nodded but barely took in what he said. The photographs shocked him more than he expected, much in the way his first sight of the white-shirted victim of the firing squad in Goya’s The Third of May 1808 had a few days ago in the Prado.

  “It’s difficult to be certain how tall the murderer was from the angle at which the knife cut through the throat,” Brook sounded exasperated. “Nothing’s straightforward in this case.”

  Gabriel forced himself to look carefully at the photographs. He told himself that by closing the channels from his senses to his mind he could stand any ghastliness but he could not escape
a jolting sense of shock looking at each one of them — shock that Anna, pretty clever Anna, had been so brutally murdered.

  “That’s odd,” he said after he had shuffled through the photographs several times, returning more than once to one of them.

  “What?”

  “The microscope stage doesn’t seem to be under the lens. It’s been moved forwards.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “I don’t know exactly, but it’s odd that, if Anna was looking down the microscope, the slide on the stage isn’t directly under the lens, in the path of the light.” Gabriel’s tone was very detached; he seemed to have been infected by Brook’s own police style. “The stage has been moved forwards. Whether by her or by someone else, I can’t tell.”

  “Couldn’t she just have done that when she changed the slide she was looking at? There was a tray of slides by her microscope.”

  “You don’t know what she was looking at?”

  “No.”

  “It would be helpful if you could get hold of the slides she was examining and show them to a pathologist.”

  “They’re with forensics.”

  “See if you can find out from Palmer and co. what it was that Anna was supposed to be looking at.”

  “What are you thinking?”

  “It just seems odd to me that the microscope slide should be located where it is on the stage. When you change slides you usually leave the stage where it is or move it towards you. But, see here.” He pointed to the photograph. “The stage has been moved forward. You don’t normally do that because it makes it difficult to change the slide. It means you have to get your hands around all the lenses — which isn’t easy, or at least natural. But you might have done that if you had just murdered someone and their body was slumped over the microscope. Then you wouldn’t have been able to get at the stage easily if you wanted to change the slide.”

  Brook’s eyes sparkled with interest. “Isn’t it possible that she could have knocked the stage when her body moved forwards after she was killed?”

  “I suppose so, but it looks as if her body is a fair way from the stage in the photographs you’ve shown me.” Leaning back, as if pronouncing a diagnosis, Gabriel looked steadily at Brook and said, “It looks as if the murderer or someone other than Anna changed the slide under the microscope after she was killed.”

  “Why would anyone do that?”

  Gabriel shrugged his shoulders. “Maybe the murderer didn’t want anyone to know what Anna was looking at?” Gabriel picked up one of the photographs again.” Do you know if the slide under the microscope had just Anna’s prints on it? You said something about the murderer wearing gloves, didn’t you?”

  Brook nodded. “I’ll find out.” He gave Gabriel a rueful, suppliant look. “It would help us if you could look at that slide which was under the microscope.”

  Gabriel raised his eyebrows as if Brook’s words had prompted him to consider another possibility. “And don’t forget the slides that were in the tray by her microscope. Check the prints on them as well.”

  “Right, we’ll get all the slides for you.” Brook hesitated. He was not sure that Gabriel had fully taken in his previous words. “You will help us with looking at the slides?”

  Gabriel nodded and half-smiled. “You can join the diagnostic queue.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Palmer asked Liz Reynolds and me to step in and finish off Anna’s work.”

  “And did you agree?”

  “I’m not sure we actually said “yes”, but it was generally understood that we would do it.”

  “Well, if you find anything of interest, you will let me know.”

  “Certainly.” Gabriel nodded approval. “And what about the blocks? Do you have them too?”

  “Blocks?” Brook asked.

  “What you look at down a microscope are thin sections of tissue on a glass slide; they’re cut with a machine called a microtome from a solid block of wax in which the tissue is embedded. Blocks are usually stored separately from slides.”

  Brook nodded his head as if he understood, but Gabriel guessed that until then he had not realised the process involved in producing a microscope slide.

  “It may not be important,” Gabriel said, “but at some point it would be a good idea to check the blocks against the slides to make sure they match up.”

  He paused and added in a tired voice, “And now, if you’ll be so good, I wouldn’t mind some help to recover my car and get home.”

  “Are you okay to drive?”

  “I drank a little at dinner. Your rather hefty colleagues breathalysed me earlier. Apparently, I passed.”

  “It’s just procedure, you understand. We have a lot of red tape to go through here whenever someone is brought in. You wouldn’t believe the number of forms we have to complete.”

  Gabriel sounded polite when he replied. “Oh yes, I would. I’m in the NHS as well as the University, you know.”

  “So you blame the government as well, do you?” Brook said, attempting a joke.

  “Successive governments,” Gabriel answered, making an effort to smile. “One mob destroys what the other created and replaces it with something that’s exactly the same. Something of a palindrome there, don’t you think?”

  Horror and grief oozed from the features of the BBC newscaster on the television like oil from a leaking bottle as she announced the latest bulletin on Anna’s brutal murder. She looked as if she was about to pull out a handkerchief to wipe away the tears that were welling in her eyes. Of course, the tears never came, newscasters these days being more actors than reporters. She switched masks, her expression changing instantly into the smile required for the next bulletin — a good news (or no news) story about the Queen on a royal visit somewhere in Oxfordshire.

  There was more hypocrisy in the corresponding news on the opposite channel which Tom Duncan turned to with the remote. This included a testimonial from an overdressed elderly north Oxford neighbour with the voice of a dowager empress. “She always seemed very nice,” the empress remarked before providing the barest evidence: “She always said hullo.”

  “Is there any new news?” his wife Angela asked as she came out of the kitchen with a plate of salted crackers. It was the third time that evening Tom had watched the news. He seemed to have a kind of ghoulish fascination for news about Anna’s murder.

  Tom didn’t reply or turn round to look at her when she put down the crackers. He shook his head slightly; sticking out his lower jaw, he kept his eyes on the screen while his hand squeezed the remote.

  Angela scrutinised him before asking, “Do you think they’ll catch whoever did it?”

  “I don’t know,” said Tom.

  “It feels funny that you knew her so well.”

  “Horrible, you mean.”

  “Yes sorry, horrible.”

  She accepted his correction. She always did. That did not stop her asking, “Have the police come again to the hospital?”

  He shook his head. “Not since that one time.”

  “They didn’t speak to you?”

  “They asked if I knew her but not much more than that.”

  “Is that all?”

  He nodded. “Why should they want to know more?” “I don’t know. You went to medical school with Anna and you worked together.”

  “That was before.”

  It was clear that Tom was not in the mood to talk tonight. He looked tired. His expression was stony, a little anxious too, like that of someone who has had to wait a long time for a bus and begun to suspect that it has been cancelled. She crossed her arms and rubbed her shoulders as though she were cold then began browsing through the newspaper that he brought home every evening.

  Tom usually liked coming home to this place which had the almost antiseptic smell of a new baby, washing, ironing, clothes in piles. It did not bother him that Angela’s hair and dress suffered from the work she had at home with the baby. He liked the way she dressed simply but ne
gligently and looked after him so well when he came home dog-tired after work. She liked to keep busy and it was no surprise to him when, after eating the last salted cracker, she got up immediately and carried off the empty plate to the kitchen where she stacked it in the dishwasher before switching it on.

  They had never before had a dishwasher — never before had even a house of their own. They could afford it now — just — on his salary. He liked it more than she did. It was a tiny two bedroom Edwardian terrace with a few precious leftover period features: one fireplace, a couple of panelled doors and some old skirting. Angela would have preferred something more modern. She complained that the hallway was too narrow — there was barely enough room to take off your coat when you came in. The rooms were also too small for their old furniture. That left them with the dilemma of whether to buy new on the credit card or put up with what they had until they moved into something larger when Tom gained his promotion at Oxford.

  Tom rose from the plump settee that faced the television and walked to the window. He suddenly felt shut in, the walls too close to him, in the small sitting room. Outside it was misty and a fine rain was falling. The street lamps had a depressed droop, like wilting flowers; a shimmering halo of light hung round them but it did not penetrate very far into the sodden, dark, atmosphere. The trees were bare and the roads black and rain-slimed.

  “Don’t be so rigid in your approach,” Professor Gabriel had said to him that morning. They had been talking about a case in which he had lamentably failed to work out the diagnosis. “You’re no longer a trainee now. You’ve passed your exam. You don’t have to follow anyone’s instructions. Never mind what those who fill in the forms think the diagnosis is. You don’t have to agree with them. Don’t be afraid of upsetting them. It’s what you think that’s important. Think for yourself.”

  Not like Anna, Gabriel might have said.