The Chalon Heads (16 page)
‘I had to tell her, last night,’ he said to Kathy. ‘She thought you . . .’ He scowled at the heaped food. ‘She thought I’d brought you here while Eva was away.’
‘She thought I was your bit on the side?’ Kathy tried helpfully.
‘Yes. So I told her about Eva having disappeared. I had to. And I told her you’re with the police.’
‘And this is her reaction?’
‘It’s her way of coping. She’s baking loaves of bread now. It’s crazy.’
‘Well, it seems a shame to waste this. Do you mind if I eat? I’m hungry.’
‘Go ahead.’
‘How about you?’
He shook his head and turned away to the french windows. He pushed them open, but didn’t go outside. Instead he pulled a packet of cigarettes from his pocket and lit up, his actions awkward, a tremble in his hand.
‘I didn’t know you smoked,’ Kathy said, pouring a cup of coffee from a huge jug.
‘Gave up, eleven years ago.’
Did you buy those on the way back from the airport?’
Starling didn’t answer, blowing a stream of pale smoke out towards the cloudless morning sky. He didn’t explain, and Kathy let it go. From the kitchen came a sound of banging, as if Marianna were attacking a side of beef with a cleaver.
At ten fifteen, when Kathy was on the point of leaving, there was the sound of a motorbike in the gravel forecourt of the house. The front doorbell rang, and Starling went to answer it, Kathy close behind. A messenger in black leathers and a bright-yellow helmet was pulling an envelope from the pouch on his chest. He presented it and a clipboard to Starling, who signed. The messenger made to restart his bike, but Kathy stopped him.
‘Hang on,’ she said. ‘Who’s the sender?’
‘It’s all right.’ Starling’s voice came dully from the hall behind her. ‘It’s from Cabot’s. This is their address label. Must be more papers to sign.’
‘Got the dogs tied up somewhere, have you?’ the messenger said, looking around cautiously.
‘Dogs? We don’t have any.’
‘Really? Looks like a pack of wolves has gone for that parcel at the gate.’
Kathy looked beyond him and saw the trail of torn paper leading from the gates away down the lane. ‘That’s odd,’ she said.
Behind her, Sammy said, ‘Jesus Christ . . . What’s this?’
She turned and saw that he had torn open the outer envelope of the express courier service, and also an inner envelope. He had discarded these on the floor, and was holding the contents, in one hand several slivers of paper, and in the other a sheet with printed writing like the ransom notes.
‘ “THIS MADE ME VERY ANGRY, SAMMY,” ’ he intoned.
He looked from one hand to the other in horror, then turned to Kathy. ‘What does it mean?’ She went to him, took the pieces of paper from his other hand and realised that they were the precious Canada Cover, cut to bits.
Helen Fitzpatrick is in her kitchen, preparing a lamb roast for Sunday lunch. She has removed most of the fat from the small joint, a treat, and stuck sliced cloves of garlic into the flesh. Now she is preparing the potatoes. She hears the Labradors outside the kitchen door, excited by something, not a visitor but some game they are having between themselves.
‘What are you up to, girls?’ she calls, and smiles to herself.
She has peeled the potatoes, cut them into largish pieces, and is now mixing them in a bowl with olive oil and crushed garlic.
One of the dogs, Henrietta, comes thumping through the back door, growling and dragging something by the sound of it. She doesn’t look up. This happens every now and then. The girls find something in the woods, a half-rotten hedgehog one time, a dead crow another, and they proudly bring it back to the cottage for her approval.
‘Very nice, dear,’ she says, keeping her eyes fixed on the potatoes as she spreads them on to a roasting tray and reaches for the sprigs of rosemary. ‘Now, be a good girl and take it away again, will you? Whatever it is.’
Henrietta obliges. Helen hears the dog and its burden thumping back out through the door, and the excited yelp of the other dog waiting outside. She looks down at the floor and sees a trail of slime sweeping across the tiles and out again.
Down below the cottage, on Poachers’ Ease, Kathy is following the trail of the torn parcel from the gates along the lane. First there is the outer wrapping, with a label addressed to S. Starling Esq., then the torn pieces of a grey cardboard box. She is followed by the courier, who is still anxious about encountering a pack of savage dogs, and behind him Sammy, looking bewildered, and then Marianna.
At the open cottage gate, Kathy is met by a burst of excited barking from one of the Labradors. The other one, the older and darker of the two, Henrietta, isn’t barking. She is on all fours, nuzzling something under a bush.
‘What have you got there, girl?’ Kathy asks, approaching her, and then stops as the dog bares its teeth at her and growls a warning. ‘Come on, girl. Show me what you’ve got.’
The dog flattens itself against the path, pretending to be invisible, but when this doesn’t seem to deter Kathy she suddenly snatches at her prize and leaps forward towards the lane, dragging it clumsily with her. Kathy has a glimpse of black hair, then the dog careers into the path of the courier, drops its burden at his feet and jumps back, tail thrashing. He looks down, sees a human head, and passes out cold.
Marianna’s shrill, piercing scream echoes through the woods, bringing Helen Fitzpatrick running down her front path. She stops dead at the gate, taking in the astonishing, frightful tableau in front of her, a man stretched out flat on the road, Kathy shouting into a phone, Sammy frozen, Marianna holding something in her hands, something waxen yellow with long flowing black hair, the head of Eva.
Given that it was the part of his wife’s anatomy Sammy Starling found most troubling, he is thinking how telling it is that he should end up with just her head.
It had been that way from the beginning, her face the thing that first knocked the breath out of him, standing on a blazing hot beach, muttering curses after the departing taxi, the dazzling sunlight bouncing up from the white sand like stage lighting. He looked round and was confronted by a pair of almond eyes, dark as a desert Arab’s, in a perfect golden-brown oval face, framed by jet-black hair centre-parted and drawn back across the ears. It was a face he had never seen before, and yet one he seemed to have known for ever. The sublime eyes blinked, held his stunned gaze for a moment, and turned away. Only then, as she floated off across the baking dune, did he appreciate the beauty of the long golden limbs, the bottom exquisitely highlighted by a startling yellow bikini, the curve of the shoulder, the fluid swing of the walk, the sheer bloody
class
of the whole corporeal production.
Later, even after he came to know that body in more intimate and compelling detail, the face never lost its ability to stop him in his tracks, to reduce his harshest voice to a hoarse mumble, though with time the nature of its power changed. The magic of its features, their innocent perfection, wasn’t diminished as they became more familiar. Rather they became more disturbing as he learned to recognise their variations and effects—a cool sideways look, the angle of an eyebrow, a wrinkle of the nose—and to invest them with his own shadows of meaning.
Why are you so old,
Sammy?
he believed them to say.
Why can’t you keep up with
the young men jogging along the edge of the shore? Why can’t
you ravish me all night long, as they would surely do, given half
a chance?
Her body told him that he might be young again, live for ever in a state of grace. Her face said,
Who are you
kidding, Sammy?
And now, all that is left is her face, ruined, staring up at him reproachfully from the gravel.
Why am I
in this state, Sammy? How did it come to this?
Helen Fitzpatrick has taken charge of Marianna, rocking the sobbing woman in her arms. Two patrol cars have arrived, securing the lane. The distant wail of police sirens sounds through the morning woodlands, a new species of sad cuckoo disturbing the Sunday peace.
‘How do I know you’re with the police?’ she demands of Kathy over Marianna’s sobs.
Kathy shows her identification. ‘A doctor will be here soon. Will you be all right for a few minutes?’
‘I want to know what’s happened!’ Mrs Fitzpatrick’s eyes are bright and sharp with shock and what could have been anger or distress. ‘Please!’ She reaches forward with her free hand and grabs the sleeve of Kathy’s shirt. ‘Is that really—? Tell me!’
‘Mrs Starling, yes.’
‘Where did it come from? I don’t understand. The dogs . . .’
‘It appears to have been in that box over there.’
And Helen Fitzpatrick’s eyes light up again with renewed dismay as she takes in the torn box, as if the container has taken on the horror of its contents.
‘Look, would you take Marianna back to the Starlings’ house for me, and wait for the doctor?’
‘But what’s been happening? Why are you here?’ She is almost hysterical.
Kathy sighs. ‘Mr Starling received a ransom note concerning his wife a few days ago, Mrs Fitzpatrick.’
‘She was kidnapped?’ The woman looks horrified.
‘Apparently. We didn’t want the kidnappers to know that Mr Starling was in touch with the police, which is why I couldn’t say anything to you last night. But now this has happened we will want to talk to you.’
‘What about? Surely you don’t think I . . .’ Helen Fitzpatrick stops herself and flushes deeply. ‘I mean . . .’
Marianna suddenly cries out, ‘Cold! So cold!’ She is rubbing the palms of her hands together.
‘Are you, dear?’ Helen says, her voice steadying in response to the other woman’s distress. ‘We’ll find you something to keep you warm.’
‘No!’ Marianna cries, her face contorted with despair. ‘Eva! My poor Eva is freezing!’
They seem immobilised in an unnatural silence, waiting for something to happen, local men, brought in by Kathy’s call.
‘DS Kolla,’ she says. ‘Serious Crime.’
Kathy is struck by the way their eyes keep flitting back to the thing lying between them, then away again, searching for something less disturbing to settle on.
The head of a young woman, grotesquely discarded in the middle of the roadway, impossibly out of place. The right side strikingly attractive, even after this has been done to her, her large dark eye disconcertingly open, plaintively staring up at the averted faces of the men. The left a mess, where Henrietta has been eating her.
Kathy approaches to within a couple of feet and gets down on her hands and knees, so as to see more clearly. The hair is long, very black, drawn back to a clasp on the crown of the head, some strands loose and spread across the right eye and nose; Kathy resists an urge to reach forward and draw them clear. Looking more closely, she can see that the woman’s beauty is an illusion held together by a darkly tanned complexion. Beneath it the flesh has become waxy yellow. She can tell nothing from the raw cut across her neck, although she notices that there has been little leakage of fluids on to the gravel surface. There is a faint smell of something organic, not yet bad but nauseating all the same when taken with its source.
They are observing her, she knows, as she crouches there in the middle of the lane, and she begins to find their silence irritating.
One of the men clears his throat. ‘We’re expecting SOCO any minute,’ he says, feeling the need to explain their inactivity.
They are speaking with hushed voices. Kathy has never seen men behaving like this at a murder scene. Is it because the woman was so beautiful? If it were the head of an old man would they be talking as if they were in church?
‘When DCI Brock arrives,’ Kathy says loudly, ‘tell him I’m in the house with Mr Starling. When the doctor arrives, ask him or her to get the temperature of the head first, then come to the house. OK?’
K
athy went up the curving staircase and along the upstairs corridor, picking up the sound of quiet sobbing as she approached the last door, to Marianna’s room. A bright, sunny bedroom like the others, it enjoyed the same panoramic view to the south. Helen Fitzpatrick was standing at the window, absorbed in it, the doctor sitting on the bed beside the older woman, patting her now motionless hands.
‘She’s calmer now,’ she said to Kathy. ‘I’ve given her something.’
A soft breeze ruffled the bunches of flower-print curtains.
‘I’d like to take her into Farnham and interview her as soon as an interpreter arrives,’ Kathy said. ‘See any problem with that?’
The doctor frowned. ‘She’s had quite a shock. It would be kinder to wait.’
Marianna looked up at Kathy. ‘No,’ she said, voice cracking. ‘I speak now.’
Surprised that the woman had understood her words, Kathy said, ‘If you feel up to it, Marianna. It could help us.’
Mrs Fitzpatrick said, ‘Perhaps it would be best if I came with you, and afterwards Marianna can come home with me, if she doesn’t want to come back here straight away.’
Marianna gave a little shrug, as if it was all too much for her, then said that she wanted to change from her work clothes before going anywhere. While she did this, Kathy went along the upstairs gallery to the master bedroom. There was the large four-poster bed, extravagantly decked out in swags of several kinds of fabric. The bedding was neatly made, a pair of men’s pyjamas under the pillows on one side, a woman’s silk nightgown on the other. Kathy drew on a pair of latex gloves and worked her way round the room, examining everything. From the bedroom she moved on to the dressing-room, and was admiring the labels in Eva Starling’s wardrobe—Armani jacket and slacks, Valentino satin dress, Jill Sander coatdress, Gucci navy cotton pinstripe shirt, Balenciaga and Issey Miyake— when she heard someone else come into the bedroom. She looked out and recognised Leon Desai in the silver overalls and overshoes and gloves.