The Kill Call

door getting in his way as he confused the direction of the ladder. In a gleam of light from above, he saw a white face turning slowly towards him, a floating blank-eyed face, staring and staring.
    Then his foot found the grille at the base of the shaft, and a rung of the ladder, and he was finally pushing upwards to the light. As he gulped air, he felt hands reach down towards him. Someone had lowered a rope. Voices came down from the sky that he almost couldn’t make out.
    ‘Is he dead?’
    ‘Are you all right?’
    But he didn’t know the answer to either question.

42
     
     
    Tuesday
    Juliana van Doon hovered over the body of Michael Clay, laid out on the mortuary table in Edendale. The body exuded an almost palpable aura of cold, the blue tinge to his skin strange and alien in the mortuary lights.
    ‘No, he didn’t drown,’ she said. ‘There was no water in his lungs. But he suffocated all the same.’
    Fry shivered involuntarily. A visit to the mortuary wasn’t her idea of the best way to start the day. But today it seemed somehow appropriate.
    ‘Suffocated?’ she said. ‘How can that be?’
    ‘Oxygen deprivation.’
    Tensing, Fry waited for the patronizing remark, but it didn’t come. Instead, the pathologist looked down at the body, and wouldn’t even meet her eye. Mrs van Doon seemed awkward with her this morning, almost as if she’d heard something that had changed her attitude. Fry told herself she must be imagining things. Yet still the pathologist looked away as she continued to explain.
    ‘He has cyanosis, look – the bluish discolouration of the fingers, toes and ears, and around the mouth. That’s caused by a dramatic drop in the oxygen content of the blood circulating through the body. Blood poor in oxygen is purple, rather than red.’
    ‘But he was found in a flooded bunker,’ said Fry. ‘I assumed …’
    Mrs van Doon shook her head. ‘If this bunker of yours regularly gets wet and dries out again, I imagine there was a certain amount of rusted metal around.’
    ‘Yes, there was.’
    The pathologist hadn’t even picked up on her slip, her use of the word ‘assumed’. Never assume, it makes an ass …
    ‘Oxidized metal produces carbon dioxide, and that’s lethal in a confined space,’ said Mrs van Doon. ‘Even without the hatch being closed, the victim was at serious risk. He could have passed out fairly quickly, especially if he was panicking, and exerting himself physically.’
    Fry looked at Michael Clay’s blue-tinged fingers. ‘He would have been running up the ladder, trying to force the hatch open. Shouting for help.’
    ‘Of course. No ventilation either, I suppose?’
    ‘A couple of sliding vents, but they were rusted shut.’
    ‘It wouldn’t have made any difference if they’d been open,’ said the pathologist. ‘Carbon dioxide is heavier than air. Without a pump to replenish the atmosphere, he wouldn’t have survived very long. As things went downhill, he would have become confused and disoriented, losing co-ordination. His breathing would have progressively weakened, like a fish out of water, and then he would have lost consciousness. Sometimes, people die from cardiac arrhythmia before the asphyxia.’
    ‘So he was already dead when the bunker started to flood?’ asked Fry.
    ‘Mmm.’ Mrs van Doon tapped a scalpel thoughtfully against a stainless-steel dish, a habit that Fry normally found irritating. Today, it didn’t seem to matter. ‘Perhaps not when it started to flood. It would have taken time.’
    ‘So he would have lived long enough to see the water coming in?’
    ‘I think so. It’s all a bit academic, perhaps.’
    ‘I bet it didn’t feel academic to Mr Clay,’ said Fry, trying half-heartedly to get a reaction.
    ‘Perhaps not.’
    ‘More like something out of an Edgar Allan Poe story.’
    ‘Poe?’
    ‘He was the writer obsessed with premature burial.’
    ‘I don’t remember that particular story,’ said the pathologist mildly. ‘I was always scared by the one that had the walls gradually closing in. That used to give me serious nightmares.’
    Fry shook her head. ‘For me, it’s drowning slowly, as the water gets higher and higher. Trying to get one more gasp of air, but feeling the water reach your mouth. As far as I’m concerned, it would be a blessing to pass out from lack of oxygen first.’
    Then the other woman met her eye properly for the first time. Fry felt a physical shock from the contact. Was there