“What’s this green stuff under his fingernails?” Kolankiewicz asked.
Troy peered over the naked body of André Skolnik.
“Paint, I should think. He was a painter.”
“As in house?”
“As in art.”
“Art, shmarrt . . .”
Kolankiewicz looked to the stenographer on her stool in the corner.
“Ready?”
“When you are, professor.”
To Troy he said, “This is all very well, but when the Yard gets around to a new laboratory could we have a thing that records what I say?”
“Thing?”
“No matter. Just nag the bastards. I work with two classes of tool here—out of the ark and homemade.”
So saying, he sliced the flesh over Skolnik’s heart down to the bone. Troy handed him the rib spreader and watched as Kolankiewicz cranked the rib cage apart to see the stilled heart itself. Kolankiewicz inserted his right hand.
“It’s not here. Must be lodged in one of the chambers of the heart. Scalpel again, I think.”
Troy gave a couple more turns to the rib spreader. Kolankiewicz sliced the heart free of arteries and veins—a little, Troy thought, like prising another jewel from its setting—and laid it on the slab above the head.
“Entry wound is in the left ventricle.”
He sliced the heart open, spread the left ventricle out like a dog’s dinner, and said, “I see it now. I’ll hold. You take the tweezers and remove it.”
Troy held up the smallest bullet he’d ever seen. Air rifles fired bigger shot than this.
“Curiouser and curiouser,” said Kolankiewicz.
“Amazing,” Troy said, “that anything so small could have killed him.”
Kolankiewicz took the tweezers and bullet from him and rinsed them off in the sink.
“Anywhere else and it would not have done. Puncture a lung with this and, short of drowning in your own blood, you’d live. Almost anywhere on the torso there would be limited damage, and short of hitting your man right in the eye, I doubt such a bullet would penetrate the skull. God knows, in winter it might have bounced off his overcoat.”
“Can you match it to the gun?”
“With what? The magazine was empty. You think I have bullets like this in stock? The smallest I’ve ever seen is .17, and does this not look smaller? At that bore there’ll be no rifling. Matching a bullet, impossible. Matching a cartridge case, maybe, but that you don’t have. If this merely fits the gun, I think that will be all the evidence you need.”
So saying he took measuring calipers and read the bullet’s bore.
“Point 15 or near as damnit. 3.75mm. I do not know of anyone who makes ammunition this small.”
“The gun’s an antique,” Troy said. “Looks donkey’s years old. Perhaps they made .15 bullets once upon a time?”
“Once upon a time. How very apt, my boy. You bring me a gun that has been encrusted with jewels, that fires what I can only describe as toy bullets, and you speak to me of ‘once upon a time’—a fairy tale, is it not?”
“Maybe,” said Troy. “But you’re not telling me it’s a dead end?”
“I can do no more with the gun. I think you need to go and see Bob Churchill. But before you do, give me hand to turn the body.”
They returned to the corpse.
Kolankiewicz peered into the entry wound. For all the world it looked to Troy as though Skolnik had merely been stuck with a knitting needle.
Kolankiewicz eased in his tweezers, gently slid them out again, and held up his find with a glimpse of triumph in his eyes.
“Mashed potato,” he said almost gleefully, the bushy eyebrows rising up to meet the bald head in scornful pleasure. “Do you know what this means?”
“The potato was on the end of the gun.”
“Like . . . ?”
“Like a silencer? But . . . but would it silence the gun?”
“I don’t know. You had better take the gun to Churchill. But given the low load of cordite in the bullet and the hubbub of the London Underground, would it have taken much silencing? And that’s why your spud is part mash, part baked, and part raw. It was cooked where it was in contact with the gun and the bullet. The firing of the gun blew the potato apart, scattered it across the platform, where, without flattery, in the hands of dimmer plod—and you know how dim some of your colleagues can be—it would have been dismissed as lunchtime litter.”
“Clever, eh?”
“Perhaps. Perhaps just crude.”
The hint of schadenfreude vanished. Kolankiewicz slipped back into the routine of the job, bustling around his laboratory, leaving Troy still more than a little baffled.
“I shall do all the usual things, brain, guts . . . it’ll all be in the report.”
Troy batted back.
“Oh, I can tell you what will be in the stomach.”
“You can?”
“Five bob on Earl Grey and Battenberg.”
“Suddenly you’re cocky?”
“He’d just had tea in Hampstead.”
“So? Is Hampstead above rationing?”