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ahead of you are the latrines—one for the men, the smaller one for the officers. Those rusty bits of metal in the walls are where bunks were hung, for long shifts when the barracks were too far away. Those tracks in the ceiling are for moving the shells to the guns, and there would have been other rails in the floor, for the trolleys that carried the powder canisters out to the gun. That door in the front wall is where they kept the generator. A couple of the rooms I have no idea what they were used for, and there’s a puzzling piece of tunnel under the floor that seems to come out somewhere on the hillside—where, I don’t know. It may have been an emergency exit, in case of fire between the men and the exit, but there’s no knowing now because it’s half collapsed and I haven’t been able to find anyone suicidal enough to go down it and find out where it comes out.”
    “But these areas are completely unused now?”
    “Battery Wallace is used for dry storage, mostly machines and equipment someone might need someday if the park ever gets funding for a complete restoration job. An old telephone exchange, a Nike guidance system, vacuum tubes by the score. They’ll never get funding, of course, but it doesn’t cost much to keep the things dry, just in case. However, as you can see, Battery DuMaurier is too run-down to store anything in—the road’s overgrown, the last time the electricity failed they just disconnected it from the mains, and it hasn’t even been fitted with one of the unbreakable padlock housings the doors on the other batteries have. One of these days, there’ll be an earthquake or a big storm and the first visitor the next morning will find it gone. It’s a matter of priorities,” he said apologetically. “As you might imagine, the headlands runs on two dimes and a lot of volunteers.”
    Kate didn’t think he needed to explain the trials of budget constraints to a pair of cops. She said, “What was the first room used for?”
    “The room where the vic was found? That I’m not exactly sure about, since there aren’t any identifying fixtures in it. Most likely it was used as the staging area, to unload stuff going in or out, a place for the men to wait out of the rain during exercises—the gun itself was out in the open until the late Thirties. Carts or trucks would unload material just outside.”
    “But it hasn’t been used since World War Two?”
    “Before that. Seems that when they looked at it with an eye to casemating it like Wallace, they decided that the extra weight would just push it off into the sea. Since it was only a single gun anyway, in the end they just pulled it out and concentrated on Wallace and the others. You seen enough here?”
    Hawkin asked, “Did Crime Scene find anything back here?”
    “Nothing. No fresh prints, no blood spatter, no blunt objects thrown into corners. They even looked down that tunnel I told you about, but they could see old spiderwebs and so they stopped.”
    With a last play of the beam along the surrounding walls, he switched it off and they headed back to the glare of the lights.
    The two Crime Scenes were still about their labors, and mere detectives had to stand and wait.
    “He’s not as ripe as I expected,” Kate said to Williams. “The guys who found him must have good noses if they could tell he was dead by the smell.”
    “It was stronger when I first got here. I think having the door open has cleared it out, and of course there’s the stink of the generator.”
    “How’d they see him, do you think?” Hawkin asked. The room had no lights, and even if it was fully open, the door was fifty feet from both ends of the tunnel and would only have let in a dim illumination.
    “One of them had a flashlight. He thought they might get the chance to look into dark places on the tour they were going with later that morning.”
    At last, Lo-Tec, who had been working with his back to them, turned on his heels and said, “Okay, you