AI Salt ground under Quinn's knee. Not the grit of forty years of dust and pigeon droppings, but a hard, crystalline crust that crackled when she shifted her weight . She scraped a thumbnail along the dead man's collar and lifted a pinch of it to her tongue.
Brine. Sharp and old.
"Don't do that."
Quinn wiped her thumb on her trouser leg and looked up. DS Marcus Deane stood at the lip of the plunge pool, hands in his coat pockets, his breath pluming in the cold.
"Three years of crime scenes and you still flinch when I taste things," she said.
"I flinch when you taste corpses. It's not a character flaw."
She rose. The plunge pool was a rectangle of pale green tiles set seven feet below the floor of the old Camden Turkish baths, drained since the seventies, its steps furred with mould. Arthur Penhale lay at the bottom in a good navy suit, arms folded, shoes polished, hair combed. Dropped there like a coat on a chair.
The building had closed decades back. The baths had sat behind a padlocked door on the mezzanine, and tonight a security guard on his rounds had found the padlock cut and the lights burning. Every lamp in the place, every one. Twelve hundred a quarter, the electricity bill.
"Tell me what I'm looking at," Quinn said.
"Forty-six. Wallet in the jacket, Arthur Penhale, address in Islington. No defensive wounds. No signs of a struggle anywhere in the building." Deane gestured at the tiled walls, the ornamental niche at the far end, the dark mouths of the boiler flues. "Somebody killed him somewhere warm and dry, then brought him here and staged it. Ritual, the papers will say. Backwards sigils on the tiles, that sort of thing."
"There aren't any backwards sigils."
"There's a whole bloody wall of them."
"That wall is 1897." Quinn climbed the steps out of the pool and crossed to the mosaic frieze, running her fingers over the blue and ochre tessera. "Ottoman revival. Crescent, star, interlaced knotwork. Half of Camden's public architecture had this on it. Some Edwardian tiler's idea of the East."
Deane looked at the frieze. Then at her. "Fine. Then it's a dumping ground. Drug debt, or a message to somebody, and they picked a place that would make the six o'clock news jump."
"The six o'clock news loves a ritual. So does the man who staged this."
"Staged," Deane repeated, drawing the word out. "You're saying it's not occult, it's pretend occult?"
"I'm saying nothing in this room is accidental." She crouched beside Penhale's left hand. The nails were clean, buffed, filed square. A working man's nails, done at a salon. "Look at his watch."
"Rolex. Copies cost you two grand on the Market."
"Look at which wrist."
Deane leaned in. The watch strap rode high on Penhale's right forearm, the face turned inwards.
"Left-handed men wear it on the right," he said. "So he was left-handed."
"Then why are his shoes tied the wrong way round?" Quinn pointed at the oxfords . The laces crossed over, not under, the bow tucked. "I've arrested a hundred left-handed men. Not one ties his laces like that. A right-handed man kneels at the foot and does it for him." She straightened. "He's dressed. Someone dressed him, and did it in a hurry, and did it wrong."
Deane took a slow breath through his nose. "Or his missus laid him out. That happens. Family gets sentimental."
"His missus is in Portugal with her sister since Tuesday. I rang her from the car."
The silence stretched. Somewhere above, a fluorescent tube buzzed against the ceiling like a fly in a jar.
"Then say it plainly," Deane said. "What's your version?"
Quinn crouched again and turned Penhale's collar down. The skin beneath was grey and papery, and along it, in a crust, the salt.
"He drowned," she said. "There's water in his lungs. The pathologist will tell you that within the hour, and he'll tell you the water was saline, and then we'll all have to have a very interesting conversation about how a man drowns in brine in a dry pool in Camden."
Deane's jaw worked. "The canal's twenty minutes away. There's a lock at Hawley. It's brackish, the tide gets up there."
"The tide doesn't get up there in September, and the lock water is brown. This is sea. This is not just mineral, this is sea." She held up her salt-blackened thumbnail. "And his cuff is crusted with it. His collar. Inside his left ear. Wherever he drowned, he went under facing left and he went under slowly ."
"You can't know it was slow from salt."
"I can know it from his hands." She turned Penhale's palms up . The fingertips were puckered , blanched white, wrinkled like a man three hours out of a bath. "That's immersion skin. That takes a long time in water. He didn't go in and come out. He stewed."
Deane pulled off his glasses, polished them on his sleeve, put them back. His hands weren't quite steady, and Quinn had known him long enough to know he wasn't frightened of corpses. He was frightened of cases that wouldn't close.
"So it's a drowning," he said at last , "in water that isn't here, and a body that someone brought here and dressed badly. That's not a story. That's a list of questions."
"No," Quinn said. "That's a story. We just haven't found the first page."
She checked the pockets herself. Keys, a handkerchief folded in quarters, a phone with no messages in it and a battery at forty per cent. No cash, no cards, no wallet notes, nothing a thief would want. Then she slid her fingers into each shoe in turn, and in the right one, wedged under the arch, her knuckle found something smooth.
She shook it out into her palm. A knucklebone, drilled through and threaded on a waxed cord, the bone stained a deep amber and polished by handling. Fine scratches spiralled its surface, too deliberate to be wear.
Something cold turned over behind her ribs. She had seen one before. Three years ago, in a bag of personal effects she wasn't supposed to open, on a night she had spent explaining to a superintendent why DS Morris had gone into a building alone.
"What is it?" Deane said.
"Nothing I'll say out loud in front of the scene log." She closed her fist . "Where's the drain?"
"The what?"
"Every pool has a drain. A sump. Where the water went."
He waved at the deep end. "Somewhere down there."
Quinn went back down the tiled steps two at a time, her heels ringing, and crouched at the deep end where the floor sloped into a shallow bowl of mould, and there in the centre, a brass grille the size of a dinner plate, set into the tile with six screws. All six bright. All six new.
She put her ear close to it. The grate breathed. Warm air, damp, moving out and pulling back, out and back, like a sleeper with a bad chest.
"Marcus ."
"What?"
"Get everyone up on the mezzanine. Now."
"Don't do that. Don't do the thing where you go strange on me and won't say why."
"Because there's air moving through a forty-year-old sump, and because someone unscrewed that grille recently, and because there's a man at the bottom of this pool who drowned in seawater in a building where the pipes were cut in 1979." She looked up at him . "And because I have been in a room marked off with tape, with a colleague I trusted, when something came through the wall."
Deane opened his mouth. Above them, the pipes in the ceiling groaned, all at once, a long complaint of old iron taking a load it hadn't taken in decades.
Then, at the far end of the pool, the tarnished copper tap over the deep-end basin turned a quarter, as if a hand had cupped it, and water began to pour into the dry bowl.
Not brown. Not rusty. Clear, and silvered, and it ran over the tiles and pooled around the drain and touched the leather of Penhale's polished shoes, and Quinn, crouching at the edge of it, smelled the whole cold sea.