Billion-Dollar Brain Read Online Free Page B

mouth was open enough to reveal his uneven upper teeth and from it blood had run along his nose and into his eyes, ending in a sort of Rorschach caste-mark in the centre of his forehead. His body was sprawled across the unmade bed with one shoetrapped in the bed-head, which prevented him sliding to the floor. Kaarna was fully dressed. His polka-dot bow tie was twisted up under his collar and his white nylon laboratory coat was smothered in raw egg, still slimy and fresh. Kaarna was dead.
    There was blood low down on the left side of his back. It looked dark, like a blood-blister, under the non-porous nylon coat. The window was wide open and, though the room was freezing cold, the blood was still haemoglobin-fresh. I inspected his short clean fingernails where the lecturers tell us we’ll find all sorts of clues, but there was nothing there that could be seen without an electron microscope. If he had been shot through the open window it would account for his being thrown back across the bed. I decided to look for bruising around the wound, but as I gripped him by the shoulder he began to slide—he hadn’t even begun to stiffen—falling into a twisted heap on the floor. It was a loud noise and I listened for any movement from the flat below. I heard the lift moving.
    Logically my best plan would have been to remain there, but I was in the hall, wiping doorknobs and worrying whether to steal the mail before you could say ‘scientific investigator’.
    The lift stopped at Kaarna’s floor. A young girl got out of it, closing the gate with care before looking towards me. She wore a white trench-coat and a fur hat. She carried a briefcase that appearedto be heavy. She came up to the locked door of No. 44 and we both looked at it for a moment in silence.
    ‘Have you rung the bell?’ she said in excellent English. I suppose I didn’t look much like a Finn. I nodded and she pressed the bell a long time. We waited. She removed her shoe and rapped on the door with the heel. ‘He’ll be at his office,’ she pronounced with certainty. ‘Would you like to see him there?’ She slipped her shoe on again.
    London said he didn’t have an office and that wasn’t the sort of thing that London got wrong. ‘I certainly would,’ I said.
    ‘Do you have papers or a message?’
    ‘Both,’ I said. ‘Papers and a message.’ She began to walk towards the lift, half-turning towards me to continue the conversation. ‘You work for Professor Kaarna?’
    ‘Not full time,’ I said. We went down in the lift in silence. The girl had a clear placid face with the sort of flawless complexion that responds to cold air. She wore no lipstick, a light dusting of powder and a touch of black on the eyes. Her hair was blonde but not very light and she’d tucked it up inside her fur hat. Here and there a strand hung down to her shoulder. In the foyer she looked at the man’s wristwatch she was wearing.
    ‘It’s nearly noon,’ she said. ‘We would do better to wait till after lunch.’
    I said, ‘Let’s try his office first. If he’s not there we’ll have lunch near by.’
    ‘It’s not possible. His office is in a poor district alongside highway five, the Lahti road. There is nowhere to eat around there.’
    ‘Speaking for myself…’
    ‘You are not hungry.’ She smiled. ‘But I am, so please take me to lunch.’ She gripped my arm expectantly. I shrugged and began to walk back towards the centre of town. I glanced up at the open window to Kaarna’s flat; there were plenty of places in the building opposite where a rifleman could have sat waiting. But in this sort of climate where the double-glazed windows are sealed with tape a man could wait all winter.
    We walked up the wide streets on pavements that were brushed in patterns around humps of recalcitrant ice like a Japanese sand-garden. The signs were incomprehensible and consonant-heavy except for words like Esso, Coca-Cola and Kodak sandwiched between the Finnish. The sky was