They walked back to the hallway. Ray waved the tin of cannabis in front of the three men, all of whom looked sheepishly at the floor.
“Anyone got anything to say about this?”
The man with just the shorts looked up.
“Yeah. It’s Gerald’s.”
“That’s handy. That why you were hiding it? Keep his reputation clean.”
“Speak no ill of the dead,” the man shrugged.
“What’s your name?”
“Hubert Francis, boss.”
Ray nodded and looked at the other man in the middle. “And you?”
“Errol Gordon,” the third man said faintly, keeping his eyes firmly on the floor.
“You know all three of you are going to have to come in and answer some questions about this? If your stories don’t match up, you know there’s going to be trouble.” Ray looked firmly at them. Joseph knew why. He hoped they understood the silent message. Get your stories straight and you’ll have a chance. “Van will be here shortly. The constables will watch you as you get dressed properly. One at a time. It’s bloody cold today, colder than I’m sure you’re used to. Don’t want you catching a chill.”
Ray turned, but before they could head downstairs, Vincent spoke again.
“Excuse me, sir. Can I ask a question?”
Ray turned back to face him, shoving his hands in his pockets, his coat open and chest puffed out as he did. “You can.”
“What happens now?”
“Now, you go down the nick…” Ray began, but Vincent cut him off.
“No, I mean with us, after? You see, Gerald, he was the man in charge of things for us. Sorted out the bills and all that. We paid him and he looked after it all. I mean, who do we go see about things? About paying for this place and all them other things?”
“You mean your rates and bills?”
“That’s the ones.”
Ray nodded and offered a smile. “We’ll find out.”
7.
Joseph hated Brook Hospital. All hospitals made him a little uncomfortable. He couldn’t escape that. But Brook had an extra special aura that made him anxious from the moment he set foot in it, until the moment he left.
Brook was a handsome building. The fine red-brick structure made it stand out on its corner of Shooters Hill, just south of Woolwich Common. He liked the look of it inside as well. The teak polished floors, the smooth and shiny enamel of the tiles that lined the mortuary where he currently stood. All of it looked so clean, so perfect, but that’s where Joseph’s problems began. Because, despite appearances, despite how pristine it looked, Joseph knew it simply couldn’t be.
Brook had opened originally as a hospital for infectious diseases. Mainly scarlet fever, typhoid and diphtheria. At the time, the hospital had been separated into two sections. On one side, the wards housing the patients with highly contagious ailments, whilst the other side housed the administrative staff and service buildings. There had even been two entrances. One for patients to be admitted, one for the staff not dealing with their care, and visitors.
Now a general hospital, it only retained two wards for infectious diseases. That didn’t matter to Joseph. Nor did the spotless look of the place. There had been germs here and it stood to reason that there still would be. An invisible, imperceptible film of microbes that simply had to be clinging to every surface that he could possibly come into contact with. Even if this part of the hospital had never housed ill patients, their legacy would still have been brought through, either by careless workers within the hospital itself, or when their bodies were brought to the mortuary for autopsy or incineration. It stood to reason that those people, the sickest people, who had been so poorly that they had succumbed to their affliction, would be the ones carrying the most germs, the most virulent of toxins. And all of them had come here, to this room where he stood now. The mortuary.
He sank his hands deeper down inside his pockets. If he could keep himself from touching anything, he would. He always made sure to let Ray open the doors when the two of them visited. When he had to open them, he would use his shoulder to barge through where possible. But never, ever, would he touch anything in here. It had made for an awkward moment on his first visit, when Ray had introduced him to Dr Gerald Hart, their pathologist. A well-spoken man, with curly grey hair that ran in a rim around the base of his skull, curling upwards like the tendrils of a climbing plant until it gave way to his scalp. The first time they had met, Dr Hart had extended his hand to Joseph, who had found he’d been unable to take his own hand from his pocket. It didn’t matter how much his brain willed him to follow the social norm, he couldn’t take the doctor’s hand.
To his credit, Dr Hart hadn’t made much of it. On reflection, Joseph knew he wouldn’t have been the first person to find themselves feeling squeamish about shaking the hand of someone who spent a lot of their time pulling apart the dead. Instead, Hart had looked down at his own hand, tutted at an imaginary bloodstain and withdrawn it, apologising for not noticing the invisible mark. Whether Ray had noticed the whole fiasco or not, Joseph had never been sure. None of them had ever mentioned it again, and in fact, their working relationship had been productive.
Hart was a meticulous examiner. In his late sixties but, as he often exclaimed himself, still in rude health, he had been a pathologist at the hospital for many years, originally serving as a surgeon, before moving into autopsy after the war. His work had given Joseph and Ray many invaluable leads and helped put more than a handful of terrible people behind bars. Hart’s presence made the visits to Brook bearable. Without his calming influence, Joseph knew that he’d have had to leave on more than one occasion.
“Good morning, gentlemen,” Dr Hart said as he approached them. He shot them a small, tight smile.
“Dr Hart.” Ray always kept it professional, not that Dr Hart had hinted he would take offence if they used his first name. In Ray’s eyes, a title earned was a title used. A throwback to the war and his army days. “What have you learned about Mr Trainer?”
Dr Hart turned, ushering for them to follow him as they did. Joseph’s heart sank. He knew that meant going deeper into the mortuary, beyond the foyer, to where Dr Hart carried out his work. To where the bodies were.
Joseph tried to calm himself as they walked. To not think about the bodies. If only he could act the same way he did at a crime scene. There, he could focus on the job in hand. He could be the investigator. But here, this was someone else’s domain and he had no authority. He became a passenger on a gory ride through the cadaver of some unfortunate victim. He wished Dziko could be here to comfort him; then, in the next instant, he chastised himself silently, for ever wanting to bring her to a place like this.
They entered the main theatre room in the mortuary. The air was thick with the smell of formaldehyde and cleaning products. But they never truly hid the smell of death. The sickly sweet, yet somehow salty scent of decay seeped out from beneath the layers of chemicals that had been used to hide it. It was always there, invading Joseph’s senses, reminding him of what lay hidden behind the square white freezer doors that lined one wall of the room, numbers on each. A number for each body.
Gerald Trainer had been in number 23. That door hung slightly ajar. Joseph peered nervously through the gap. No body lurked inside. Gerald Trainer had been transferred to a metal bench in the middle of the room, two large surgical lamps pointed at him, a white cloth draped over his body. Dr Hart stepped around the bench, putting on a pair of white gloves, then pulled the cloth back to reveal the now greying face of Gerald Trainer.
“Our man here took a big old knock to the back of the head.” Dr Hart reached a gloved hand behind the crown of Gerald’s head, indicating the point of impact with a finger. “We found a large fracture to the back of the skull. Big blunt-force trauma, as they say. They used a weapon of some sort. I’d be having a good old look around for that.”
“That could be anything and the likelihood is that it’s sitting on the bottom of the Thames,” Ray explained.
“And if it is, I would imagine anything that we might be able to use to link it to the crime has provided quite the feast for the creatures living in the river. So that’s a definite shot of bad news. I don’t think, however, that the blow did for our poor chap here.”
“Really?”
“Yes. It was a big old blow but not catastrophic. Not by any stretch of the imagination. When we looked further, we found that his windpipe had been crushed, quite probably by something being forced against the right side of his neck here.” Dr Hart pointed to the side of Gerald’s neck. Joseph didn’t see anything obvious, but Dr Hart carried on. “A forearm would be my guess. Knock him out, jump on top and crush the very life out of him.”
“That sounds like someone with quite the temper,” Ray remarked.
