‘Is it necessary to meet them all?’ asked May, who was not at home in theatrical surroundings.
‘It might throw some light on Miss Capistrania.’ Bryant shrugged. ‘We need to know if she was close to anyone, that sort of thing.’
Helena Parole had a handshake like a pair of mole grips and a smile so false she could have stood for Parliament. ‘Thank you so much for taking the time to come down and see us,’ she told May, as though she had requested his attendance for an audition. Her vocal cords had been gymnastically regraded to dramatize her speech, so that her every remark emerged as a declaration. May felt the hairs on the back of his neck bristle with resentment. ‘I haven’t told them a thing,’ she stage-whispered at him. ‘The spot where we found the corpse has been made off-limits, but they think it’s because of repair work on the lift. Everybody!’ She clapped her hands together and waited for the members of the company to quieten down and face her. ‘This is Mr May, and this is Mr . . .’ She leaned over to Bryant. ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t catch your name.’
‘Mr Bryant.’
‘Oh, like the matches, how amusing. Is that a nom de plume?’
‘No it’s not,’ snapped Bryant.
Helena turned back to her cast. ‘Mr Bryant,’ she enunciated, thrusting her tongue between her teeth in an effort to extend the name beyond two syllables. ‘They’re going to be asking you a few questions about Miss Capistrania. It shouldn’t cut into our time too much, should it, Mr May? We do have rather a lot to get through. Perhaps you can conduct your interviews out of the sightlines of my principals. It throws them off. I’ll have a folding chair put out for you over there, and do try to keep the noise down, thank you so much.’
Having put May publicly on the spot, she accepted his silence as agreement, thrust her hands into her baggy khaki trousers and went back to directing her cast. Bryant felt as though he had been dismissed from the auditorium. Helena’s eye rested easiest on men she found attractive, and clearly John May was in her sights. With a grimace of annoyance, Bryant stumped off to the side of the stage.
He found the goods lift separated off by wooden horses with warning boards tied to them by bits of string. The lift couldn’t have drawn more attention if Helena had given it a part in the production. The electrics had been switched off at the mains, but Bryant dug a torch from his pocket and shone it into the shaft, quickly spotting the vertical brown streaks that marred the concrete barrier between the floors. On the other side of the stairwell, another slim beam of light illuminated a crouching figure. It turned and stared at him.
‘God, Bryant, you frightened the life out of me,’ said Runcorn. ‘Must you creep about like that? I could have dropped this.’ He held up something in a pair of tweezers.
‘What is it?’ asked Bryant.
‘Muscle tissue by the look of it, probably torn from the victim’s ankle as it shattered. Don’t these lifts have fail-safe devices to halt them if a foreign body gets caught in the mechanism?’
‘It’s half a century old. Safety wasn’t a priority then. The Victorians lost a few workers in everything they built, rather like a votive offering.’
Dr Runcorn, the unit’s forensic scientist, was one of the top men in his field, but his air of superiority, coupled with the punctilious manner of a civil servant, made him disliked by nearly everyone who came into contact with him. That was the trouble with a unit like the PCU: it was destined to be staffed with the kind of employee who had been rejected from other institutions in spite of their qualifications. Dr Runcorn was especially irked by Bryant, whose intuitive attitude to scientific investigation seemed at best inappropriate and at worst unprofessional.
‘I haven’t finished here yet,’ he warned, ‘so don’t start walking all over the area touching things.’
‘I wasn’t going to,’ said Bryant, affronted. ‘You surely don’t think it was an accident, do you?’
‘A damned odd one, I agree, but stranger things have happened.’
‘Hard to see how her feet ended up on a chestnut brazier, with that hypothesis,’ Bryant pointed out.
‘Oswald Finch took receipt of the cadaver from West End Central and has already run a few tests on it, reckons she might show positive for some kind of drug, possibly self-administered. These artistic types are noted for it.’ Runcorn sniffed, rising from his crouched position and cracking his back. ‘I don’t know why he can’t test for more obvious causes of death first like any normal person: heart failure, stuff like that. I just know that her feet were cut off and she didn’t struggle. There are a couple of scuff marks here on the landing, the heel of a shoe, nothing particularly out of the ordinary. Suggestive, though.’