Soul Seeker (7 page)

At which he turned abruptly away to leave and put on a white all-in-one suit and thick disposable rubber gloves; without being told, the SOCO began taking photographs and the forensic man began taking samples from the inside of the bin. When Eisenmenger returned he had a briefcase that he opened and put down by the corpse. Then he knelt down by it. He had on his left ear a small microphone into which he spoke. ‘Female, young – no more than forty, I'd say, and possibly much younger. Severe abrasion around the wrists, ankles and neck, almost exclusively on the anterior surfaces. No other obvious abrasions, lacerations or ecchymoses.'

Fisher had come up unseen and asked suddenly, ‘What's an eckymosis?'

Beverley was about to fire up the flame-thrower but Eisenmenger said without looking, ‘Medical jargon for a bruise, sergeant. You're quite right, it's unnecessary persiflage.' He carried on at once, ‘The elbows, knees and hips have been traumatized after death, presumably because rigor had set in and the murderer had to do some bending to get the deceased into the bin.'

Fisher asked, ‘Doesn't that mean you can tell us when she died?'

‘With error limits that are so wide and so contingent upon environmental factors that is practically useless.' He went then to the neck, examining it closely, causing shivers to go up Lancefield's spine when he touched the wound, even put his fingers in what she guessed was the gaping windpipe. At one point he got from his case a torch and shone it down into the tunnel. ‘Completely clean, completely smooth decapitation. No signs of any more than a single stroke.' At this, he took from the briefcase a metal tape and proceeded to measure the width, breadth and circumference of the neck. After this he stood up and said to the SOCO, ‘A few of the neck, please.' When that was done, he asked the forensics man, ‘Can you help me turn her over, please?'

This was achieved without difficulty. Eisenmenger gently wiped rotten vegetable material from the skin and uncovered, on the small of the back, a tattoo. Beverley knelt down beside him. ‘
Maureen.'
She frowned. ‘Her name?'

‘Presumably,' he said non-committally. More photos were taken, at the end of which Eisenmenger's only positive conclusion was that there were no positives. ‘OK,' he said. ‘I think I've done all I can do here. She can go back to the mortuary.'

Whilst he was stripping off the oversuit, Beverley came up to him. ‘Any idea how she died yet?'

‘Unless she was poisoned, I'd say it's odds on that having her head cut off did it for her.'

‘Shit.'

He said thoughtfully, ‘And a very professional job, too.'

She practically gaped at him. ‘You are joking, aren't you, John? There are no professional executioners any more. Certainly not in this country.'

He shrugged. He had put the oversuit into a small bin liner which he then handed over to forensics as he said, ‘I would say that people used to hefting an axe or some such ought to be considered. It's no easy job to produce such a clean cut as that.' Even as he was speaking, he trailed off, caught in the current of another possibility. ‘Unless . . .'

‘Unless what?'

His head bobbed from side to side, then he said almost apologetically, ‘Unless they used a guillotine . . .'

Malcolm woke with a start. His mouth was completely dry, his head was splitting with pain, he felt aches in every part of his body. He had had to urinate, but that was now dry, so long had he been there. His throat was sore, both through dehydration and through the long hours of shouting, pleading, questioning and just plain screaming; and it had all been to no avail, with no reaction. Through all this, the camera lenses continued to look at him without blinking, without emotion, almost without interest.

What the hell is going on?
He asked this for the thousandth time of himself and for the thousandth time he could not answer it. How had this happened? Why had it happened? Who had done it? He was in an electric chair, for God's sake. Surely they couldn't seriously be considering . . .? That would be madness.

And the fact that nothing had happened for so long, must mean that this was a huge but obscene practical joke. It had to be that. No one would be so insane as to kidnap a man and then . . . and then
electrocute him.
He didn't know what he had done to deserve this, but he was one hundred percent, totally, completely, no-doubt-about-it certain that he had done nothing that merited being fucking electrocuted.

But something told him that this was no joke. This was serious. This was perhaps the most serious thing that had ever happened to him. The panic in his head went from zero to maximum in the space of a few moments at this realization. He began to pull at the straps again, although he had been doing that for what seemed like hours already. He kicked at the restraints around his ankles so hard that he gave himself stomach pains; he jerked his head time and time again against the head strap. He tried to rock the chair, throwing himself from side to side, and crying out nonsense syllables, but the chair was bolted to the floor and wouldn't budge a millimetre.

Eventually he subsided again, exhausted, aching and raw. Trembling so violently he felt almost beyond control, he had to stop, tried to collect his thoughts back into a semblance of rationality.

He forced himself slowly to calm down, reason overcoming panic. Whatever was going on, it was not his death by electrocution. Some weirdo getting his kicks by filming his fear; some sort of psychological experiment, perhaps. He had heard about scientists doing that kind of thing.

Yes. That was what it was.

The television screen came alive and of course he looked at it, his whole life programming him always to look at it. It showed him a naked woman strapped down on a table; it might have been Malcolm's idea of pornographic heaven, except for his own situation. Her head was almost in darkness, but he could see that it was between two rising posts, their tops in darkness.

He saw her head was shaved, saw it turn to her right, as if she, too, were watching something.

He had a feeling it wasn't, but that would mean it was real . . .

The beheading came at the precise moment that the tingling in his body began.

NINE

B
everley sat behind her desk and Lancefield sat opposite her while Fisher, feeling very much like a novice, perched on the window sill. Behind him Lansdowne Road was quiet in the Sunday evening sunlight; Fisher had a hot date in the Strand at the top of the High Street and so his excitement at sitting in on his first murder conference was somewhat tempered by sexual frustration.

Beverley said, ‘Tell me what Farmer Gardner had to say.'

Lancefield consulted her diary. ‘His background you know. Regarding discovery of the body, he says that it was just a normal Sunday right up until about eleven in the morning; he'd milked the cows and fed the pigs, then spent a few hours moving the sheep to another field. He came back to the farmyard to discover the dog, Sally, with a new toy.'

‘Did she often go into the slurry pit?'

‘He says not.'

‘Had he noticed that it was disturbed at all?'

‘Ditto.'

‘Is he lying?'

Lancefield thought about this. ‘I get the impression he's going to give us the minimum help he can, but I don't think he's telling deliberate lies.'

‘What did you find in the house?'

‘It's a mess, like the rest of the farm. His wife died twelve years ago and I think it all but destroyed him; he's kept the farm going, but it's just a lifeline, nothing more. I don't suppose he's touched most of the rooms in that house since she died; he lives in a room just off the kitchen, barely eats and certainly wouldn't be interested in feeding the dog regularly. He does the minimum for the animals, too.

‘He's shot, chief. He won't deceive us intentionally, but he doesn't care enough to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but.'

In Beverley's experience, this was true of most witnesses, for whatever reason. ‘Eisenmenger estimates that the head hadn't been in there long. Chances are it was dumped during the night. What does Gardner do with the dog at night?'

‘Chains it.'

‘Would he hear it barking?'

Lancefield shook her head. ‘His hearing is none too good and there were a fair few empty bottles in his bedroom. My guess is he has several large nightcaps before turning out the lights.'

‘So anyone could have come in and buried it.'

‘He must have a strong stomach,' pointed out Lancefield.

‘“He” is beheading people; I think we can put “strong stomach” into his psychological profile without much argument,' replied Beverley as dry as an old man's skin.

Fisher, who thought he should contribute something if only for his own self-esteem, said, ‘Or she.'

Beverley didn't waste energy moving her neck muscles to look at him. ‘Fisher, if you think I have concluded that this killer cannot be a woman, then the rumours about you having brains smaller than your gonads must be correct. I have better things to do than keep talking about “he or she” every time the subject comes up. Got that?'

Fisher mumbled, ‘Yes, chief.' He decided that his self-esteem was best served by silence.

Satisfied that Fisher was back in his small, sergeant-sized box, Beverley said, ‘Check the missing person's files for anyone with the first name Maureen. Apart from that, I don't see there's anything else we can do at the moment. Do either of you?'

Neither did. As they got up to leave, Lancefield said thoughtfully, ‘It's odd, though . . .'

‘What is?'

‘The only thing we know for certain so far is that one male and one female have been killed. Pretty odd for a serial killer to switch genders like that.'

Beverley pursed her lips. ‘That was worrying me, too. Makes me wonder . . .'

But she didn't continue the thought and Lancefield knew her boss well enough by now not to press her.

The headless torso had come into the mortuary two hours before. Eisenmenger had half-heartedly suggested that, as it was now five o'clock in the afternoon, he might delay the post-mortem until the next morning, but Beverley had insisted and he could not blame her, not with two deaths to investigate, both clearly the work of a single individual. He had therefore to change his plans for the evening

‘Charlie? It's John.'

‘Are you done?' She sounded sleepy and that excited him.

‘I'm afraid not. Another corpse has turned up. I'm going to be at least three or four hours.'

‘Oh . . .'

‘Sorry.'

‘No problem.'

‘I'll ring you when I'm done. Maybe we can at least get out for a drink, if not a meal.'

‘If it's not too late.' He was fairly sure that she wasn't happy. It brought back bad memories of previous relationships; relationships that had failed because of his profession.

In the event, it took a little under three hours to complete the autopsy. Before an audience comprising two SOCOs, Beverley, Lancefield, Fisher and a coroner's officer, he performed a full examination, including a subcutaneous dissection. He took samples of heart, lung and liver, as well as aliquots of blood, stomach contents and urine, and swabs from the abrasions, from under the fingernails and the inside of the windpipe. He also scraped the wrists, ankles and neck after examining these areas with a large magnifying glass. His initial macroscopic examination had shown no evidence of a natural disease process of significance, nor evidence to suggest significant trauma other than the rather trite observation that she had no head.

He said, ‘There are no signs of refrigeration or undue heating, so she died within a time span of between ten and thirty-six hours before being found.' Lancefield opened her mouth to say something but Beverley cast her a look:
No point.
Eisenmenger had never been particularly taken by estimates of the time of death from autopsy examination. He continued obliviously, ‘The lungs aren't particularly congested or oedematous and there are no signs of asphyxia. These signs aren't foolproof – and we'll have to wait for toxicology, of course – but I would lay a small sum of money that she was fully compos mentis when the blade fell.'

He made most of the audience shiver with these words, but he had entered into intellectual mode and didn't notice.

‘Age?' asked Beverley.

‘In her thirties. She was nulliparous and had had no surgical interventions.'

Fisher had no idea what ‘nulliparous' meant but kept quiet.

‘And that's it?' asked Beverley.

‘One other thing. It's a bit odd, actually.'

Beverley was at once interested. ‘Tell us.'

He held up the corpse's hand. ‘There's something odd smeared on the skin around the wrists, ankles and neck.'

‘What?'

‘I don't know. It's slimy; some sort of gel.'

‘Is it significant?'

He smiled but said only, ‘I'll let you know what the tox guys say.'

Outside, Fisher took Lancefield to one side. ‘What does nulliparous mean?'

She looked at him pityingly. ‘Look it up, sergeant. That's if you can spell it.'