Full Dark House(33)

‘She’s been dead since Monday evening. Come and take a look.’ He rose and led the detectives through to a windowless green-tiled chamber behind his office. Scrubbed wooden workbenches and ceramic sinks alternated along opposite walls. One table was in use, its occupant covered with a white sheet more to reduce temperature change than to spare feelings.

Unlike most autopsy rooms, this one had variable light settings instead of bright overhead panels. The reason became apparent when May studied the laboratory’s centrepiece, a mass of counterbalanced mechanics so advanced for the time that, as yet, the results it yielded could not be considered as admissible evidence. Having developed the system exclusively for the unusual demands of the PCU, Finch was now testing the prototype in the hope that it would become the new industry standard. The unit was so close to the discovery of computer technology that, years later, John May wondered how they had not managed to stumble upon the invention of binary code. But on that day, he had been so fascinated and horrified by the sight of a dead body that he saw little else.

‘I assume you’ve definitely ruled out some kind of bizarre accident?’ asked Bryant.

‘I’m not so sure. According to your man Runcorn, she didn’t fall down in the lift, she passed out. No fibre snags on the lift wall or something; you’ll have to speak to him about it. And I don’t think loss of consciousness was caused by anything natural like a narcoleptic fit. Her medical files indicate that she was in perfect health.’

‘You’ve already raised her records?’ asked Bryant. ‘I’m impressed. We don’t even have a typist.’

‘We don’t hang about here, Arthur,’ said Finch pointedly, ‘not when you can lose half an afternoon from an air raid.’

‘Do we now have a formal identification of the body?’

‘The theatre’s registered doctor knew her. She has no family living here. We think her father’s in Vienna. We’re trying to notify him now. Look at this.’ Finch drew back the sheet to expose the body’s right shoulder, then pressed the end of a nail file against the inside of Capistrania’s upper arm. ‘Ignore the lividity. The flesh clearly retains any indentation marks you make on it. In my book that’s a sign of infected tissue. The introduction of something poisonous. My first reaction was to check for evidence of a narcotic, stuff a dancer might possibly use to improve her performance.’

‘Is that what they do?’

‘I don’t know,’ Finch admitted. ‘I don’t know any dancers.’

‘You go to that hoochie-coochie place in Clerkenwell. Forthright used to see you queuing up outside as she was going home. Anything come up in the blood samples?’

‘This equipment’s faster than most, but there’s an awful lot to test for. I started by looking at cardiac glycosides, oldendrin, nerioside, toxic carbohydrate groups, but there’s no evidence of vascular distress, no common signs of poisoning.’

‘How can you be sure?’

‘I can’t, but convulsions in such a confined space would cause bruising on the limbs and some kind of organic material deposit at the site, which Runcorn has yet to find. There’s no indication of haemorrhage, diarrhoea or vomiting. I checked the stomach contents. She’d eaten a sandwich about three-quarters of an hour before death, some kind of poultry in the filling, nothing unusual, and a type of chocolate bar, something with nuts in—don’t Barker and Dobson do one? I don’t think it’s an allergic reaction of any kind. Still, the gastric juices are disturbed, and if we assume that assimilation was rapid, causing her to fall down shortly after she’d entered the lift, I’d say we were looking at something that paralysed her muscles. There’s a lot of clenched tissue in her limbs.’

‘So you know what she didn’t die of. What’s your initial reaction?’ Bryant had come to trust Finch’s instincts, even though they were unlikely to find their way into official reports until the appearance of corroborative evidence.

‘There’s some slight inflammation and discoloration on her right knee. Dancers bruise all the time, of course, but this one’s very fresh, consistent with falling in the lift. I think she just dropped suddenly in her tracks, which suggests a fast fall in the supply of blood to the brain or some kind of synaptic disruption, but I’d still expect more electrical activity.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Limbic convulsion. Aberrant behaviour from the nerve endings. Cuts on the hands, something to indicate a bit of thrashing about.’