Soul Seeker (16 page)

Charlie asked, ‘Have you finished, Paul?'

He had. Eisenmenger stood up to help her clear. ‘I never realized, Paul.'

Paul showed some pleasure. ‘There's some seriously deep shit going on in there . . .' He ignored, or did not see, his mother's look. ‘Snuff sites, that kind of thing.'

Charlie had piled the dessert plates and cutlery, was balancing them on one hand whilst she took the remains of the tart out, but she stopped in shock as he said this. Eisenmenger, cruet and cream in hand asked disbelievingly, ‘Really? Are you sure they're not just good simulations?'

Paul also was standing. He was clearing the cloth napkins and mats. ‘A lot of them, but a lot of them clearly aren't. Really sick, perverted stuff. People being killed in all sorts of weird ways.'

‘They're foreign, though, aren't they?' asked Charlie anxiously, as if that kind of thing couldn't possibly happen in this green and pleasant isle.

But her son could not give her that reassurance. ‘They're from all over, Ma. Even this country.'

And something clicked in Eisenmenger's head.

Thus fate intervened in Eisenmenger's life.

TWENTY-SIX

‘
I
gnore all that for now.' Eisenmenger had struck Beverley as uncharacteristically tense since he had first come into her office and this was undoubtedly a command, issued in an abrupt tone. She looked up at him, then caught Lancefield's eye just before her junior said something. ‘Scroll to the end,' he told her. ‘You'll find some hyperlinks at the end. They're what you've got to see.'

And so Beverley did what she was told.

Allen Somersby knew that he had landed a good job. He had worked for Wallace Parker for six years now, coming from an estate in Scotland, one that had been five times bigger and that had been owned by a man who had been brought up to own land, who had been constantly on his back, asking why this had not been done, why that had been done that way, why his profit margins on the arable were so small, why they were getting through so much diesel . . . Finding Wallace Parker's estate – Wallace Parker, who was rich and knew a lot about city trading and therefore
thought
he knew a lot about managing an estate – had been like finding paradise. Life was so much easier now. There were so many ways in which to make a bit of money on the side, and Somersby could see no wrong in that; Parker was not the most generous of employers and, accordingly, Somersby was of the opinion that such tightwads were right for the picking. It was a game that had been played from the beginning of time: the employer paid the minimum; all that did was to maximize the ingenuity of the employees, and if that ingenuity was employed in private enterprise, then that was surely only the order of the world.

Thus over the years Somersby had entered into several lucrative but quite unofficial business dealings, although it was only the building itself – a vast, decrepit but impressive early Victorian monstrosity of four floors and many rooms – that interested him; the hundred or so acres that it sat in were just more woodland that he had to manage and that were therefore part of his official duties. A large, derelict and completely isolated building had so much more potential, so much more of interest, provided one asked no questions.

‘Jesus-fucking-Christ.'

The blasphemy was barely a whisper, and more of a plea for mercy than an attempt or desire to disrespect any God. In any case, no one reacted to Lancefield's uncharacteristic lapse into profanity; not now, not when they were looking, transfixed, at what was unfolding on the computer screen before them.

They were clustered around Beverley's desk – Beverley in the centre, Lancefield to her right, Fisher to her left; Eisenmenger was behind her, his head leaning against the wall, his eyes looking up at the ceiling. He had been up all night, helped by Paul, searching this terrible place that Paul called the ‘Deepweb'. It had taken until nearly dawn and he had almost given up before he had come across this website and, when he had done so, he had been almost paralysed by the turmoil of his sense of triumph and his sense of shock at what he saw. Having seen this show on one occasion, he was certain that it would suffice for at least one lifetime, perhaps even a dozen or more. He had to listen, though; he still had to hear the sounds, which was perhaps worse.

It was bad. Bad enough to make him feel sick, make him sweat, make him wish that tears were not such a private thing, that he could let them flow down his cheeks as they should, instead of remaining welled in his eyes, dammed by his lids. He could not stop thinking about Helena, about how she had gone; he thought, too, about Tamsin and he had not thought of her for a long time. Tamsin, who had died in his arms of the burns that her mother caused her, who had given him dreams, who had been within him for so long after her death, who had taught him – a pathologist who knew all about death – something about dying. It was his first real experience of the process as opposed to the consequences, and it had been a salutary one; yet here was his second lesson and, beside it, the first paled into a mere sickly pallor.

At last it finished, yet it left stains, foetors, tastes.

TWENTY-SEVEN

A
fter thirty years of growing vegetables, and not infrequently winning prizes at the Bishop's Cleeve Flower and Vegetable Show, Arnold Dearlove had now passed beyond the competitive phase of his gardening career, and looked on his allotment as more of a social thing, a place to come to garden, yes, but more importantly to pass the time with his comrades who, like him were veterans in the never-ending battle against ragwort, couch grass and bindweed. There was something that stirred his soul when he looked up from digging or pruning or sowing to see the wide sky above him, the buildings and houses far away, the suggestion that the works of man were somehow being kept at bay and, in this small area of twenty acres, nature was allowed at least some play. Having retired fifteen years before from a long career as a small shopkeeper (hardware – he had always had the best gardening tools at trade prices because of this), he had had no fears of languishing, knowing that his beloved allotment would be his saviour. And when Grace had died seven years ago, it had come to his rescue again; the routine of daily labour, of nurturing the seedlings, tending to the fruit trees, caring for soil, combined with the support of his friends had been vital – literally vital – to him. How could he not consider himself to be a happy man?

Every day, as he arrived at eight thirty, there was something to see. The weather varied both on a diurnal basis and on a seasonal basis; autumnal light was so different from that of spring; the smell of rain in the air brought him as much joy as the heat of the sun on the back of his neck; even snow and fog had their beauty, adding something mysterious and alien, yet reassuring to the landscape. Only torrential rain, when the allotments tended to turn to quagmire because of the clay base, and a frost so severe that he could not dig, ever kept him away from his love, and turned him into a man without a cause.

On this particular day, when the air was heavy and hot, and humidity dragged at his feet and at his chest, it was his first day for ten days, as he had only just recovered from a bout of influenza complicated by an irregular heartbeat. The allotments were unusually empty because of the same influenza, and there were only three others working as he arrived, although others would undoubtedly drift in as the morning progressed. He waved as they looked up from their labours and saw him, but none were near enough to talk to; there would be time for that later, when he stopped to have tea from his Thermos and to eat his customary digestive biscuits. He therefore walked at once onto his allotment, past the bonfire, the potatoes, asparagus bed (now tall ferns with developing berries) and the parsnips, to his shed. He felt in his pocket for his key to the padlock, hoping he hadn't forgotten it again, but he hadn't. He grabbed hold of the lock and found to his shock that the hasp came away from the door; that, in fact, it had been forced, with clean, untreated wood splinters falling to the soil. He had been robbed again!

He found himself experiencing a mix of anger and sorrow; robberies from the allotment were becoming such a serious problem, and the police never seemed to take them seriously. They asked routine questions in a desultory tone, poked around as if they were bored, then gave him an incident number to use for insurance; he knew, and they knew he knew, that they weren't going to do any actual police work. And every year his insurance went up; some of those who worked on the allotment were now being refused any insurance at all. He felt it was as much a crime as the burglary itself.

With a sigh and leaden heart he pulled open the shed door to make an inventory of what had been taken, finding to his surprise that nothing had gone. In fact, something had been added, for sitting on his camp stool – and looking for all the world as if it lived there – was the naked body of a dead woman.

‘What the fuck was that?' asked Beverley, her voice sounded small and distant, even in her own ears.

Eisenmenger was still making eyes at the ceiling; outside the window, Lansdowne Road continued, the weekday morning rush hour dissipating imperceptibly, the sunshine already becoming yellow and hot. There was a long pause before his voice needled into the shocked silence and answered her question. ‘That was, I believe, a scientific snuff video.' He found it difficult to control his voice as he would want, as he always did; found it difficult to be the detached professional, ever ready to give a considered opinion, to be cold and clinical, to be the oracle.

Lancefield's frown caused black lines on her face that were frighteningly sharp against the waxen bloodlessness of her flesh. She said slowly, wonderingly, ‘But that was nothing other than a glimpse of hell . . .'

To Lancefield's observation, Eisenmenger said only, without changing his body position, ‘“Hell is other people”.'

Beverley demanded, ‘What the fuck does that mean?'

Eisenmenger said nothing to that, for in truth he did not really believe the aphorism. They were entering shock, but he was deep in it, for he had had a few hours to consider what they had only just seen. When he had loaded the software and gone to the precise address that Paul had given him, he had found himself drawn into what had been on show. His emotions had flowed from curiosity tinged with disbelief, through disbelief tinged with curiosity, all the way to shocked unbelief mixed perfectly with despair.

The site was presented as a scientific paper, perhaps something out of the
New England Journal of Medicine
. It was dry, austere, objective, without illustrations, or gimmicks, or advertisements, or even anything other than black text on white.
A First Report on Visual, Physiological and Neurophysiological Observations Made During the Moment of Dying.

Just as in all legitimate scientific papers, the text was divided into an Abstract, an Introduction, a Methods section, Results, the Discussion and then Conclusions; there were even references cited throughout and then listed at the very end. As a parody, it failed because it was too good.

The Abstract explained that: ‘Despite the advances in medical knowledge regarding the physiological parameters that are prognostically significant in determining survival from serious disease or trauma, and similar advances made in understanding the biochemical changes that occur shortly after death, there has been little study into the phenomena that occur
precisely
at the moment of death.' It was that italicized word that chilled, that hinted softly that here was no mere money-for-hire scientist hack; here was a zealot.

It went on: ‘It is the intention of this series of experiments to fill this lacuna. The hypothesis that is being tested is that there is a soul, that death is not merely an absence of electrophysiological functioning and a breakdown in internal homeostasis, that there is a separation between body and soul, and that life is not merely a consequence of biochemical functioning.'

The introduction went into further detail on this hypothesis, quoting work that Eisenmenger did not recognize. It was the section headed ‘Methods' that led the reader into the regions of madness, however, where reason slipped from the page and left a blankness that only insanity could fill. It informed those interested that the EEG readings, the blood pressure, the temperature, the oxygen saturation levels, the ECG findings, the jugular venous pressure, and even the electrical resistance of the skin, had been measured before, during and immediately after death.

And it was at this point that Eisenmenger had found he could read no longer and was forced by a compunction borne of fear, horror and even an irresistible salaciousness to turn to the hyperlinks at the end of the paper. Which was where the real awfulness had begun. It was these hyperlinks that had just finished on Beverley's office computer, that had presented the ‘visual' results of the experiments . . .

TWENTY-EIGHT

N
either Tom Sheldon nor Allan Somersby had said anything for several minutes, but neither minded this silence between them; a tractor had driven past the cottage, and there was the dry sound of a crow in summer, but apart from that the room had been quiet. There were no clocks ticking out the time of the universe, no radio broadcasting one-sided merriment, no sound of a neighbour's baby crying. It was dark, too, the evening dying beyond the dense foliage that shaded the house even in the brightest of noonday suns. And there were scents . . .

A rambling, run-wild, decadent honeysuckle lurked just beyond the flecking paint of the cottage windows, excreting a turgid, almost oleaginous perfume that mingled with lesser tones of damp, dust, mouse and fertilizer. The chair in which he was sitting was old and uncomfortable, although Sheldon knew that it was more welcoming than his visitor's seat; Sheldon somehow fitted into it, presumably by a process of long years of slow integration and mutual accommodation. Somersby's seat was a thing that looked well over a hundred years old and beyond all available medical intervention; it looked
mean
, with lumps and springs in all the wrong places that were ready to bite; it was worn and dirty too.