Today, rather than going up to the care wards, his route took him down to the lowest regions of the hospital, and as the lift dinged open at the mortuary level he wondered if he was too early.
He should have known better. Rashid Kaleem was one of the Home Office forensic pathologists serving central London, and had to fit in postmortems and reports between calls to the scenes of suspicious deaths. This morning Kincaid was in luck. The doctor was in.
When Kincaid rapped on the open office door, Rashid looked up from tapping on his keyboard, his eyes widening in surprise. “Duncan. You’re a sight for sore eyes, mate. What are you doing here?”
“Hoping to see you.”
Rashid stood and came round his desk to shake Kincaid’s hand. “You’re always welcome in my dungeon,” he said with a grin, his teeth white against his light brown skin.
Clearing a stack of papers from the spare chair, Rashid gestured for Kincaid to sit. It had become a joke between them, the state of Rashid’s office. “One of these days, they’ll find your shriveled body buried beneath mountains of books and paper,” Kincaid said. “I thought we were in the digital age, anyway,” he added with a wave at Rashid’s workstation, which was—at least what Kincaid could see of it—certainly state of the art.
“It’s my security blanket, this stuff.” Rashid gave a moldy-looking stack of books a fond pat as he returned to his chair. “I like things that can’t vanish without a trace. And not everything is on the Internet, believe it or not. Sometimes the old anatomy books are the best.”
Kincaid thought he might prefer things that did vanish without a trace—like any record of this visit. He pulled the lapels of his jacket a little closer as he took his seat, having refused Rashid’s offer of coffee. It was always cold in here, and Rashid never wore anything other than a T-shirt, usually with a gruesome pathologist cartoon on the front.
“So, not a social call, I take it, as nice as it is to see you bright and early on a Monday morning,” Rashid said. “Is this about the Camden shooting? I thought that was pretty cut and dried.”
“Not about that one, no. And not a social call, exactly, but not on the record, either.” Kincaid took a breath, wondering if he was jumping off a cliff, then went on. “There was another shooting, one that looked similar. In March, in Hackney. I think it went down as a suicide. The victim’s name was Ryan Marsh. Was it yours?”
Rashid frowned for a moment, then shook his head. “No. I’d remember.”
“Good,” Kincaid said, feeling a surge of relief. “I think,” he added.
Rashid’s frown deepened. “It wasn’t your case, or you’d know who the pathologist was. But why haven’t you just looked it up?”
“Because I didn’t want to leave bread crumbs.”
They stared at each other for a moment, then Rashid nodded, once. “And you thought I might look up this case?”
“In the normal course of things. Yes. Perhaps comparing a similar shooting.”
“Like the one in Camden? That wasn’t a suicide.” Rashid raised an eyebrow almost to his gelled black hair. “But then you said ‘went down as a suicide,’ didn’t you? So, you don’t want to be seen looking into it, but you think the determination was a wrong call. Why?”
Kincaid laced his fingers together to keep them still. “I knew Ryan Marsh. He was an undercover cop who’d gone off the grid because he thought he was in danger. I convinced him he was safe.”
“Bloody hell,” said Rashid, when the import had sunk in. “You don’t think he would have killed himself?”
“He was working on an exit strategy, taking his family abroad. He had two little girls. He went back to his cover flat to pick up a few things. He never walked out.”
“Do you have any supporting evidence?” Rashid was all business.
Kincaid shifted in his chair, his throat suddenly dry. “I was going to see him that night. I walked in on the scene.” He shook his head. “Something wasn’t right, but I can’t tell you what it was. The uniforms were already there, but not the detectives. I didn’t hang about.”
Picking up a pen, Rashid began to doodle, drawing interconnecting circles on a scrap of paper. “You didn’t want to be associated with the victim? I’m beginning to get that.”
“No,” Kincaid agreed with feeling, “I did not.”
“And you think someone on the force might have been”— Rashid paused, as if choosing his words—“involved?”
“I don’t know anything for certain. Maybe Marsh was depressed, more desperate than we realized. Maybe he did shoot himself.” Kincaid grimaced at the memory. “Maybe the determination was totally clean. But I can’t look at the file. Because if I’m right—”
“You’re buggered,” Rashid confirmed with a nod, then gave him a sharp look. “You said ‘we.’ Who else knew about this?”
Kincaid hesitated. Perhaps he’d already endangered himself by confiding in Rashid—did he dare bring the others into it? But Rashid would guess, and if he were going to trust him, he’d better go the full Monty. “Doug and Melody. And Gemma.”
“Do they know you’re talking to me?”
“No. And I don’t want them to. I never told them I’d seen him.”
He’d driven around London for hours that night, sickened and shocked, struggling to come up with a way to explain to the others how he knew Ryan was dead. At last he’d said that Ryan’s wife, Christie, had called him with the news, and no one had questioned it.
“You should tell them.” Rashid waggled a finger at him. “Playing the hero could get you into big trouble.”
“I’m not—I don’t want them—the more they know the more danger they could be in.”
“Well, thanks for that,” Rashid said, with a return of his grin.
Kincaid wasn’t amused. “I don’t want to put you in danger, either, Rashid. I can walk out of here right now and you can pretend you never saw me.”
“Right.” Rashid turned the scrap of paper towards him and Kincaid saw that one of the doodled faces had morphed into a cat with a huge, toothy smile. “Pathologists are insatiably curious. That’s why we do it, most of us. Although maybe there are some who just like really bad smells and have no people skills.”
This time Kincaid couldn’t stop a smile. “True. But, seriously, Rashid—”
“You said Marsh thought he was in danger. Who—or what—was he afraid of?”
“I don’t know. That’s the thing. He’d infiltrated the protest group involved in the St. Pancras grenade blast.” Rashid had been the pathologist on call and it had been a nasty death. “Ryan thought that grenade was meant for him, but he would never say why.”
Rashid drew a few more interconnected circles, frowning. “It seems to me you don’t know very much. Why get involved?”
Kincaid swallowed, then said as evenly as he could, “Because he said he was in danger and I didn’t take him seriously.”
“What could you have done if you had?”
Shrugging, Kincaid shifted again. “I don’t know. But that doesn’t make it all right.”
“No. Of course not. But why dig this up now, after two months?”
“Because night before last, someone attacked Denis Childs and left him for dead.”