Kolankiewicz had one wall of his office lined in cork. He had cleared it of pins and paper and by the time Troy and Mary McDiarmuid arrived the next morning he had it covered in 10 × 8 blow-ups of thumbprints. They looked on this scale like contour maps of some mountainous country – central Italy or Transylvania or Idaho. The middle of thumb – spiralling whorls vanishing into obdiplostemonous vortices – the outer edges of thumb – formidable Apennine ridges running north to south and east to west. Across half of them he had drawn blue lines with a setsquare, and from the copies now littering the floor he had cut and pasted to assemble in the centre of the board a composite thumbprint, as neat as the face of Frankenstein’s monster, but complete. Next to it he had pinned a thumbprint marked up in red crayon as ‘Fitzpatrick’.
Even with them blown up to the size of dinner plates, he was peering from one to the other through a magnifying glass.
‘Well?’ said Troy.
Kolankiewicz did not turn. He roved across his masterpiece, reached out blindly with one hand and adjusted the anglepoise lamp to give more light. ‘Even if I have to say so myself, this is bloody good,’ he said. ‘The print is not Fitzpatrick’s.’
Even Troy could see that.
‘You never thought it was, did you?’ Kolankiewicz said.
He put his glass down and faced them.
‘There is, as we surmised, just the one digit, but in five different sections. They overlap considerably, and I think we got lucky. Your man did not set out a row of bullets on a desktop and pick them up one by one. He did what you said you would do. Palmed the lot and fed them in. This is what smudged prints on the sides of the cartridge – we have only blurs – but it also caused much twisting of the right hand, and consequently brought the thumb down at a different angle and area of surface each time. Essentially five different actions rather than the same action repeated five times. Hence the variations in pressure, density of latent image and area of print.’
‘Hence our picture.’
‘Indeed. Behold. Am I not magnificent? Am I not the Leonardo of the Yard?’
‘Did he work in Kodak and cow-gum, then?’ said Mary McDiarmuid.
Kolankiewicz smiled. Sarcasm he could handle. What he hated was ‘the great English po-face’, as he called it. And Mary McDiarmuid had none of it.
‘Believe me, Scottish person, if Leonardo had known about Kodak and cow-gum he would have used them. Now, see for yourself.’
He handed Troy the magnifying glass. Troy agreed silently that the print was pretty well complete, but beyond that he had no idea what to make of it.
‘Can you’, he asked, ‘get enough points of similarity to take into court?’
‘Similarity with what? You given me nothing to match it with!’
‘Sorry, I was getting ahead of myself. Mary, would you call Chief Inspector Blood and ask him to come in this afternoon? Say about two o’clock?’
Mary McDiarmuid seized Troy by the arm, dragged him into the corridor and banged the door behind them.
‘Are you out of your mind? I thought you thought Blood was a link, a connection. At worst guilty of bullying the witnesses. Are you saying now that you think he killed Paddy Fitz?’
‘Yes. In fact I’m almost certain he did.’
‘Why?’
‘He knew too much.’
Mary McDiarmuid tilted her head, screwed up one eye and squinted at him.
‘Cliché, Troy.’
‘Nonetheless it’s true.’
‘Percy Blood knew too much? You expect me to drag a serving member of the force off the street on the strength of that? Can you imagine the row? As things are I have a table to myself in the canteen. None of the other women want to sit with me ’cos you’re giving one of our own a hard time. Now you want to accuse him of murder?’
‘Not accuse. I just want to ask him a few questions. And to ask for a set of his prints.’
‘They may well be on record.’
‘They may, but they’ll be with the Branch and the minute we ask for them someone will accidentally put a match to them. Get the bugger in, Mary.’
She was still looking awry at him. ‘You don’t think it’s time to call in A10?’
‘It’s murder, Mary, not a protection racket squeezing a few quid out of the clubs and restaurants.’
‘Your office at two?’
‘No, an interview room at two. Let’s see how Percy likes being on the receiving end.’