‘It’s rat excrement. I scraped some from the heel of that woman found dead beside the canal at York Way. The canal rats feed mostly on discarded junk food, but those samples contain grain. There’s not much loose grain in King’s Cross, so I guessed she was moved from somewhere else and dumped after dark. The rats had fed on a particular type of red split lentil used in Indian cooking. We tracked the ingredient to a factory in Hackney.’
‘I still don’t understand,’ Finch admitted. ‘What’s it doing on the windowsill?’
‘Oh, Alma told me it was good for growing mustard cress. I love ham-and-cress sandwiches.’
‘You are quite astonishingly disgusting. No wonder I never come up here from the morgue.’
‘Too much paperwork, no doubt.’
‘No, too many stairs. I was wondering if you’d heard anything about the equipment I was supposed to be getting. I’ve been promised new tanks, a small-parts dissection table fitted with a decent stainless steel drain and a second mobile instrument cart for seven months now, and the cover is still off my extractor fan. Plus, one of my refrigeration cabinets is on the blink. I suppose it was you who left several wine boxes and a tray of sausage rolls in there.’
‘They’re for your send-off.’
‘Ignoring the fact that it is unsanitary and illegal to keep foodstuffs in a refrigeration unit reserved for body parts, the sausages are past their sell-by date.’
‘So are you, old bean. I thought you’d be pleased.’ Bryant narrowed his watery eyes in suspicion. ‘You haven’t become a vegetarian, have you?’
The pathologist looked troubled. ‘I have the awful feeling that by retiring at this late stage in life, I may find myself with no purpose. I can’t just wither away in Hastings.’
‘No choice, old sock. Your retirement’s been accepted and processed. You can sit on the pier and throw stones at the seagulls.’
‘But I like seagulls.’
‘After a few months of watching them you won’t. Just think of all the fun that lies ahead.’ Bryant stapled some papers together and sniffed. ‘Personally I’ve always found Hastings to be positively suicide-inducing, but I won’t be living there. I’m sure you’ll discover some advantages; it’ll be as quiet as your morgue, and you won’t have me pulling hideous practical jokes on you anymore.’
Finch gloomily picked something unpleasant from his nails. ‘I suppose that’s true. I worked it out the other day. Over a period of more than forty years, you’ve played a mean-spirited trick on me at least once a week, which comes to well over two thousand japes, jokes, hoaxes, wind-ups and pranks played out with a straight face against my person, while I am trying to carry out the serious business of ascertaining causes of death to make your department look good. You tricked me into cutting up my credit cards over the phone, nurturing a rare mollusc that turned out to be a mildewed mango seed, calling my wife to accuse her of conducting a fictitious affair with a limbo dancer and telling my son that he’d been adopted following his rescue from a Satanist cult. You super-glued my office door shut, put gunpowder in my cigarette filters, sewed prawns into my jacket pockets, dropped a live eel down my toilet, relabelled my sandwich box with plague bacillus warnings, hid whoopee cushions in my cadaver drawers and retuned my radio to receive fake “end of the world” bulletins. No wonder I’ve never had any respect around here. Poor Raymond Land, I’ve finally come to understand exactly how he feels.’