Experts say that the Whitstable family have exploited profitable export connections with German delegates who are attending the conference. Recently their Hamburg office suffered extensive damage and two members of staff were injured after a firebomb was hurled through a ground-floor window.
Confronted with this fresh evidence, a police spokesperson denied any link with recent German banking offences, suggesting that the connection of the sacred flame was ‘spurious at best.’
On the morning of 14 December, Bryant and May began the second week of their investigation by facing up to two major problems in their search for information.
The first was a lack of available manpower. Theirs was the only division ranking above the existing Area Major Investigation Pools in Britain. These pools were divided by areas, and handled the majority of homicide inquiries. Typically, they were overworked and understaffed. In theory, the new unit was supposed to receive help from the pools’ senior investigating officers, but in practice it was not possible to free them from their essential ‘caretaking’ duties within the AMIPs. This left the division with a single acting superintendent, Raymond Land; two sergeants, of whom Janice Longbright was one; and an inadequate foot-force.
Their second problem was one of time. The first seventy-two hours following a homicide were the most vital. At the end of three days, a strong sense was gained of whether the case would be solved quickly or not. This time had elapsed, in the cases of Max Jacob and William Whitstable, without any agreement on motive, opportunity, or circumstantial evidence. Little had been established beyond the fact that these were three cases of unlawful homicide, with malice aforethought. Now the detectives realized that they were in for a long haul. Consequently, they decided to divide chores according to each other’s specific talents.
Bryant was to question Bella Whitstable about her brothers, while May spent time with the forensic team appointed to the case. The properties of all three victims were now in the process of being searched and catalogued, and Jacob’s family was being questioned for the second time. Witness statements were correlated by Longbright, who added them to the growing paperwork at Mornington Crescent.
Faraday, the junior arts minister, had called twice to find out why no arrests had been made, and an expert from the National Gallery had sent a detailed report on the problems that would beset anyone attempting a restoration of the damaged Waterhouse painting.
Forensic information was starting to arrive on Major Peter Whitstable’s death, but no one could spare the time to match it to the rest of the investigation. Their personnel situation was scandalous, May reflected. Worse still, their detractors in the Met might well have arranged for it to become so.
Equally frustrating was the fact that it was impossible to find time to follow up this morning’s suggestion by the Mail that German business interests were to blame for the deaths. The theory was as plausible as any other, perhaps more so, but Bryant had been forced to dismiss it until a team could be freed to investigate the allegation. And who knew how long that would take?
When he arrived at the morgue, May found Oswald Finch tabling results from his autopsy on William’s younger brother into the Grundig tape recorder that sat on his bench. The air in the white-tiled room was chilled and antiseptic, but could not hide the chemical smell that accompanied the clinical study of death.
‘I’m glad you came back.’ Finch rose to offer a thin, clammy hand. ‘How are you getting on with your snake man?’
‘Not very well,’ admitted May. ‘It would help if they could get a few readable fibres from him.’ Forensics had searched all three corpses, but had failed to find any common substance matches. Quite the reverse, in fact; they had come up with hairs and skin flakes from several different people. It seemed obvious that the murders were linked, but so far they had found no way of proving it.
‘Arthur thinks the methods of death are symbolic,’ said May. ‘They’re intended to have a theatrical effect. Why else would anyone go to so much trouble?’
‘Your partner always seems disappointed when he hears of anyone dying a natural death,’ said Finch, crossing to the banks of steel drawers set in the far wall. ‘In Jacob’s case I suppose you could be looking at suicide. It’s possible that the wound was self-inflicted. It would explain why he calmly returned to his seat and continued reading the paper. Your bomb man could have been an Accidental. He might conceivably have triggered his own device by mistake. Something has cropped up that I thought you’d be interested in.’ He unlocked a drawer and rolled it out, deftly unzipping the plastic bag in which the remains of Peter Whitstable were housed. ‘This one was more like an execution than an assault.’