himself a moment, and then ran for the door and shoulder-barged it.
His left shoulder exploded in pain, and he recoiled in a whimper.
‘Bloody hell, that hurt.’
Then, as he rubbed his shoulder to get some feeling back into it, he saw Camille re-appear from the nearby doorway, but now she was holding a massive sledgehammer. Where the hell had she got that from?
‘Is there any other way in?’ he asked her.
‘Not that I can see, but I found this,’ she said.
‘A sledgehammer?’
‘We need the strongest person here to smash that door in.’
‘And you think that’s me?’
‘As it happens, no, but you’d be offended if I didn’t ask you first. So please be as quick as you can, sir, we need to get in there.’
Camille shifted the weight of the sledgehammer over to a now speechless Richard and went to stand with Lucy.
Richard now realised that he was wearing a beautiful woollen suit while also holding a super-heavy weapon of destruction. The sort of super-heavy weapon he’d always seen manly men use. The tiniest hint of a smile appeared at the corner of his mouth.
He turned to face the door and took a moment to steady himself. And then, knowing that he was now holding hundreds of pounds of power in his hands, Richard opened his mind to all of the resentments he felt at being posted to the tropics. How he couldn’t get a decent pint of bitter, a slice of bread, or even a proper cup of tea. How he’d found a black scorpion lurking in one of his slippers that morning. Then Richard thought about how bloody hot it was at all times, and how desperately he craved just one morning of crisp winter, with mist hanging in the air, and frosted grass crunching underfoot. And, as he gave in to his normally-suppressed feelings of frustration at the almost infinite vicissitudes of his life, Richard felt a powerful wave of emotion rise up inside him and, before he even knew he was doing it, he was swinging the sledgehammer through the air and thumping it dead-eyed into the door just beneath the handle with a thunderous crack.
Richard exhaled. Oh, that had felt good. But had it worked?
Richard saw the door swing back an inch on its hinges, and he could see that the frame had splintered where the bolt had torn free of its housing.
Richard caught a look of wonder on Camille’s face, but she was quick to hide it when she realised that her boss was looking at her, and she pushed past him to enter the shower room. Richard dropped the sledgehammer to the ground as Lucy entered the room after Camille, and then he followed .
As he stepped into the room, Richard was almost instantly swallowed by a fog of hot steam. Remembering that Lucy had called this building ‘the shower room’, Richard guessed – and could also hear – that a powerful shower was turned on somewhere nearby.
Richard wafted the door open and shut a few times to help clear the steam, and he was soon able to see that the room was empty – although, now he was looking, he could see that there was an object slumped on the floor to the left hand side of the room.
The object looked like a human body.
A human body that wasn’t moving.
As Camille went to inspect the body, Richard was pleased to see that Lucy had kept her distance and was standing on the other side of the room.
‘Please don’t move or touch anything,’ he told Lucy, indicating that she was to stay exactly where she was, and he went over to the shower that was built into the side of the wall, and which was thumping hot water down onto the mosaic-tiled floor to the side of the body. As Richard twisted the dial on the wall to turn the shower off, he saw that the body belonged to a man.
‘He’s dead, sir,’ Camille said.
Richard saw that the dead man looked to be in his sixties. He was wearing old jeans, a cheap grey shirt that was frayed at the collar and seams, and a tatty old pair of trainers that had once been white but were now grey and falling apart. Richard also saw that the man had matted grey hair that went down to his shoulders, and a nicotine-stained beard that was similarly straggly.
But what was perhaps most noticeable was the handgun that Richard could see was loosely held in the dead man’s right hand where it lay on the floor. And seeing as there was no-one else in the room when they’d smashed the door in, Richard realised that it was pretty obvious what had happened here. The man – whoever he was – had come into the shower room, bolted the door from the inside, and then committed suicide by shooting himself with the handgun.
Before Richard rolled the body over to reveal the dead man’s face, he briefly noticed that the man lay on the floor directly between the shower and the drain that was set into the centre of the mosaic-tiled room. And although the water from the shower had run down to the old man on its way to the metal-grilled hole in the floor, his body had formed something of a barrier, and the water had gone around him on either side on its way to the drain. In other words, Richard realised, the shower hadn’t been running long enough to really drench the man’s clothes and start seeping underneath the body as it ran away. The area of floor that lay directly between the body and the drain was still bone dry.
This briefly puzzled Richard. After all, it made sense that the man would have turned on the shower before committing suicide. It was a well-known – if somewhat macabre – fact that most suicides were carried out with some consideration for those who were about to discover the body. This was why so many gun suicides happened in bathrooms. The person about to commit suicide knows that bathrooms are altogether easier to clean of blood than any of the other rooms in a house. And the fact that this man had turned on the shower and positioned himself by the drain before he shot himself suggested that this suicide was no different. The man had wanted to make sure that whatever blood he created with his death would be sluiced away afterwards.
But if the shower had been turned on before the man had taken his own life, the tiles should have been wet all the way between the shower and the drain. After all, while it was plausible that the body became a barrier to the water after it had collapsed to the floor, it didn’t seem possible that no water at all had made it to the drain before the man had killed himself. And yet, the tiles between the dead body and the drain were entirely dry. Maybe there was some kind of timer on the shower that had turned on after the man had killed himself, Richard wondered to himself. Either way, Richard filed away the puzzle of whether the shower had been turned on ante or post mortem for later consideration.
It was time to turn the body over and discover the man’s identity.
Richard took hold of the body’s shoulders, and Camille looked over at Lucy.
‘I think you should leave.’
‘I want to see his face.’
‘But we don’t know how damaged the body is.’
‘I don’t care,’ Lucy said desperately. ‘I have to see.’
Camille looked at Richard. He nodded. It was okay by him.
With a grunt of effort – cadavers were always surprisingly heavy – Richard turned the body over, but he and Camille needn’t have worried about gore. There was only the smallest of blooms of blood seeping onto the man’s grey shirt above the heart area. But,
