Soul Seeker (6 page)

Their appreciation of ‘the estate' was unformed. They understood that it was bounded by fencing, and that it was not common ground, but they did not think of it as ‘forbidden', as ‘private', despite the notices proclaiming otherwise that were planted around its perimeter. It was part of their environment, and they had still to understand that one's environment is not necessarily one's personal playground. They did not have qualms about climbing over one of the many stiles and then dodging into the undergrowth, running between copses, shooting and dodging bullets, rolling and leaping ravines, replica guns firing or Super Soakers streaming water. They did not have qualms, but they realized that it was a secret between them, not to be divulged to adults and all the better for it.

During their months of playing together on the estate, they had discovered many secret places to play, in which to be themselves as opposed to what school, or their loved ones, or everyone else expected them to be, and their choice of any such place on any given day was reached by means unknown to them, driven by chance, by desire, by capriciousness, by joy, by last night's television, by yesterday's play, by the latest film, by . . . anything.

It was, as so many childhoods are, a wonderful time to be alive, one of total innocence, one of total omnipotence, and one of total vulnerability.

When Malcolm failed to turn up for his shift the next morning, the temporary landlord cursed him but was not surprised. It had not escaped him that the little shit was helping himself to the stocks, and he had every intention of reporting this behaviour to Stan when he called up from the Algarve to check up on things.

Lancefield took the call and went straight to Beverley. ‘A headless body has turned up.'

Beverley had been compiling a report for the chief superintendent on the reasons for the sixteen percent decrease in the clear-up rate of violent crime over the past twelve months; it was, she knew, another exercise in shit-passing; the chief constable of this fair county would, she knew, be getting flack from the Ministry of Justice and from the press, so he in turn shouted at the chief superintendent, who in turn . . . She had become adept at the jargon, the talk that obfuscated, that deceived as it appeared to inform; the excuses and the meaningless statistics, the hot air that caused the inaccuracies and downright lies to shimmer like a mirage of the truth. She was delighted to be distracted by such news. ‘Where?'

‘Newent.' Lancefield's tone was not as pleased as Beverley might have expected; indeed, she appeared to be worried.

‘What's wrong?'

‘I'm not sure this is good news.'

‘Why not?'

‘We've got some more searching to do. Not all the body parts have turned up yet.'

Beverley didn't know what Lancefield meant. How could she? She was talking garbage. They had one head and one body. End of story. ‘Why do you say that?'

Lancefield sighed. ‘Because this is a female body.'

Three hours later, Eisenmenger was in his office, dictating his findings when his phone rang; it was his secretary to tell him that Chief Inspector Wharton was on the line. She had left no more than ninety minutes before.

‘Beverley?'

‘I thought you'd like to know, we've found a body.'

‘Where?'

‘In a wheelie bin outside a house in Newent. Upside down and naked. Mrs Abricot, whose bin it was, is in Gloucestershire Royal suffering from shock.'

‘I can imagine.'

‘Unfortunately,' continued Beverley, ‘it's the body of a woman. Are you sure the head belongs to a man?' She knew he was, though.

This was met with silence for a moment until Eisenmenger said, ‘I'd better come out and take a look, then.'

Malcolm came to with a head that ached in between throbs of agony. He was very groggy but it did not take him long to understand some unrelated observations.

He was cold. He was incredibly thirsty. He was sitting but could not move . . .

He was in a padded cell.

He twisted around slightly when this jumped into his brain, but not only were his hands and feet restrained, but so was his head.

There were leather straps on his wrists, but he could feel that the one around his head was different; it was metal. And he was covered in wires – wires on his head, on his wrists, on his neck . . .

The lighting, until then low, suddenly became brighter as spotlights flicked on in the corners and he could see that the padding on the floor was covered in debris and dirt through which rats moved. He could see other things, though, that worried him even more.

Like the cameras that looked at him, one in front, one to his left, one to his right, and the large television screen directly in front of him.

Like the electric chair that he was sitting in.

Betty Williams watched Reverend Pilcher as he got out of his battered red car and walked up the uneven path that ran through the untidy garden of the unkempt house in which Tom Sheldon lived. She was in her front garden which gave her an elevated view of the road and, although her eyesight was worse than her glasses could compensate for, she still managed to see much of what went on around her house. She was old enough at seventy-nine to remember Sheldon's house being built although, oddly, she did not now recall how or when it had managed to become so dishevelled. She assumed, as did most of the village, that it had been Sheldon who had brought this decadence with him, although she could not truthfully give much detail as to how he had done it. This did not matter, though, not in a village like Colberrow, where impression was all that mattered, where there was no room for objective consideration. Sheldon did not conform with what most of the inhabitants regarded as ‘normal'; he was neither poor and communal, nor rich and aloof; the rules of his game were not obvious and thus he was a thing of suspicion. Rural communities such as Colberrow had strict conventions and strict penalties for those who transgressed them.

Not that Marcus Pilcher had exactly endeared himself to the village, she thought with a short, sharp laugh. She had lived in the village all her life, in the same house, with the same furniture and the same outlook; she had seen perhaps five vicars come and go, and most of them were seriously flawed in one way or another. Not that that had bothered her; indeed she had liked that about them, because it made them equal with the flock they sought to lead, because the whiff of hypocrisy levelled them. She thought of Jonathon Wheeler, who had had an eye for the ladies (an eye for Betty Williams, if the truth were ever to be told), and Aubrey Sinclair, who had once fallen from the pulpit during Evensong because of his overenthusiastic communion with wine, and (going even further back) of Edward Peterson, who had been the most caring man of the church they had ever had in Colberrow, but who had disappeared one night having embezzled most of the collection plates for the past six years.

Marcus was
modern
, though; he brought new ideas. Not that she thought of herself as entrenched in the past; she accepted that her grandchildren cohabited, that few people saw the need or the desire to go to church of a Sunday; she watched the television and did not mind (too much) the swearing and the sex. She even used the digital radio that her youngest son had bought her for her birthday two years before. No, her problem was that Marcus Pilcher represented ideas that were just not right, not suited to a place such as Colberrow. He wanted to allow same-sex marriage, female clergy and tolerance of divorce; he wanted not change but revolution. Change, Betty considered, happened without notice and was safe, whereas revolution occurred in front of her eyes and was dangerous.

Take Mr Sheldon. He was never going to become part of the village, would only ever be a visitor. He didn't seem to mind, though. He used the village shop but rarely spoke other than to request ham or milk from the cold cabinet, never passed the time of day; he carved odd statues – not at all to Betty's taste – and tried to sell them from the roadside outside his house. He rarely succeeded, but this did not surprise her considering the prices he demanded. She thought him rather grubby, too, with a certain swarthiness that she could never come to like. Occasionally there had been burglaries in the village and she had heard rumours that he had had something to do with them – if not actually breaking in, then perhaps supplying information to some of his former friends about who was in, who was out, what was worth the risk.

Sammy Carter came out of the front door of the cottage next door having just has his lunch; he was dressed in green overalls and heavy, dirty work boots, and he carried with him an orange flask of coffee, his refreshment for when he was working on the tractor that afternoon. She was close to Sammy, as close as a son; he appreciated what she had done for him when his wife, Carol, had died fifteen years before, and now he always had time for her, making sure that she was OK when the weather was bad or she was ill. He had even agreed to having an alarm fitted in his house that she could set off by a bell push if she became unwell. And all this despite his own problems with that feckless boy of his, forever in some sort of trouble or other. She supposed that it was not surprising – she had noticed that he had been a mummy's boy from right off – and that was always going to mean trouble. Her cousin. Arthur, had been a right mummy's boy, and no good had come to
him
.

‘Afternoon, Betty.'

‘Sammy.'

‘Nice day.'

‘It is, that.'

‘You all right for everything? I was going to the supermarket after work.'

She shook her head. ‘Thanks for asking.'

He went on his way, striding up the lane, swinging the flask from its handle and whistling. Such a good man, she thought. It made her proud to think of what she had done for him, or at least tried to do for him. It just went to show that a man was a product of nurture more than nature; neither Carol nor Sammy had a bad or lazy bone in their bodies, yet Shaun had not turned out right, not right at all. He had always been argumentative, always ready to find a reason not to do what ought to be done, forever keen to start something else before a task was done. Not ugly, not handsome either; he had his parents' features – and they were both considered a fair catch in their time – yet it had somehow not worked for him. It was, she had long ago decided, the look about his eyes; there was something in the depths that disturbed her.

EIGHT

M
rs Abricot lived in a cul-de-sac of bungalows, a relic of the Sixties, one that ought to have settled Eisenmenger's nerves and made him feel relaxed by nostalgia, but that merely made him feel uncomfortable, as if he had suppressed memories of something awful happening behind net curtains such as these, as if this eerily restful rural road was just
too
nice,
too
quiet. He could imagine awful atrocity lurking underneath the plaster coving, terrible abuse whimpering beneath the cover panes. Her house was not hard to find, partly because there were only seven houses in the road, partly because there were three police cars and seven policemen doing what policemen do at a murder scene. As was usual on these occasions, there was an audience, this time an aged one, easily kept at bay by the burly sergeant who menaced them at the garden gate.

Eisenmenger was allowed access to find a long tidy garden sloping up to the house. He felt as if he had breasted Kilimanjaro by the time he reached the bungalow and was then directed to the back garden. This was slightly shorter and thankfully on a level; most of the activity was centred at the very rear of it. Beverley was sitting on a low wall, although Eisenmenger noted that she was actually in contact only with a copy of the
Daily Telegraph
; Lancefield was supervising a fingertip search of the garden, looking worryingly enthusiastic, in vivid contrast to those in her charge – who were actually doing the hard work – who were on their hands and knees.

Beverley, by contrast, merely looked detached; she was sitting beside a white tent, rather like one in which knights would once have sat in between jousts. When she saw Eisenmenger, her face brightened noticeably and she stood and went to him. Without greeting him she began, ‘The refuse is collected from a track that runs around the perimeter of the cul-de-sac so that the bins are at the ends of the gardens, which means there would be no one around to see the murderer dump the body.' Through an open gate in the back fence, Eisenmenger could see the unmade road that was being carefully searched by three uniforms and a woman he knew to be from forensics. Beverley continued, ‘The bins are usually emptied first thing Monday morning so Mrs Abricot come up to put it outside the gate. She found her week's rubbish had been emptied out and . . . and, well, something substituted.' She gestured at the tent.

Eisenmenger went over to it, entered. It contained the wheelie bin, the cover of which had been hinged back; when he looked in, he saw a naked corpse, folded into a foetal position, head – or rather neck – down. There were a few smears of dirt and rotting vegetable juice on it, but it was otherwise surprisingly clean. He said, ‘I assume that this has been photographed?'

The woman from scenes of crime was already in the tent and she now showed him the digital images on the camera screen that she had taken. Satisfied, he said, ‘We'd better take it out, then.' Which, in the end, merely meant tipping it out unceremoniously on to a clean plastic sheet. Beverley, Lancefield, the scenes of crime woman and a chap from forensics joined him in the small tent, making a rather intimate gathering as he looked down the body. No one said anything for a moment while Eisenmenger went about his business, measuring, probing, squinting and considering, until he said in a tone that sounded half bemused, half intrigued, ‘Mmm . . .'