Tropic of Death (43 page)

The nurse arrived with a trolley of metal basins, sponges and flannels.

‘Time to clean you up, Freddy,’ she announced.

‘Fuck that,’ he mumbled.

As Rita stood up to go he tugged at her skirt.

‘Thanks, Van Hassel,’ he said.

‘For what?’

‘For whacking Billy.’

Paul Giles wasn’t answering his phone so Rita drove out of town and up to the rainforest. Doubts about his motives were beginning to nag at her and she had questions for him. The hunt for the disk could wait. She wanted answers.

The drive along The Ridgeway took her past the resort construction site - deserted now, the gates chained shut, the cranes motionless - and on towards the former botanist’s home of Eden. She parked beside the front gate, got out, pressed the buzzer and waited. No response. She pressed it again, for longer this time. Still no response. She glanced up at the sharp coils of wire on top of the wall and decided not to try scaling it.

Rita was pressing the buzzer for a third time when the gate glided open. As she walked briskly down the path, through the overgrown tangle of the garden, the porch door opened ahead of her. With it came a loud blast of choir music. Bizarrely, it was a church hymn, ringing out at an almost deafening volume. Unlike her last arrival, Paul wasn’t waiting to greet her. Instead she caught a fleeting glimpse of a figure retreating inside the house.

Closing the door behind her, she walked cautiously down the hall, knowing something was extremely wrong and wishing she still carried a gun. There was a trail of bloodied footprints on the floor, broken china, empty bottles of gin and, saturating the rooms, the sound of the choir shrieking from the multiple speakers of the music system. The track, ‘Onward, Christian Soldiers’, possessed an unholy ferocity when pumped out at such a hysterical level.

And when the track stopped, it resumed again immediately from the beginning. It was being played over and over again, another sign of madness in the house.

Things in the central living space - the showpiece - were even worse. Instead of the chic interior, what confronted Rita resembled a slum. Everything was broken or overturned, the curtains ripped from the windows, shards of glass littering surfaces, and more bloodstains. The air was pungent with the odours of urine and vomit, the cream rugs soaked in human discharge. As Rita tried not to breathe it in, her gaze fell on what was left of the holographic picture. A broken gin bottle, lying below it, must have been hurled at the 3-D image. The fragments of a Pre-Raphaelite landscape flickered from the damaged lasers but a gaping hole filled the rest of the frame above a spray of crystalline splinters littering the floor. Persephone was gone.

Rita walked over to the sound system and switched off the music.

The sudden silence was a relief but her nerves were on edge. She noticed the framed photo of Paul and Audrey at her feet, its glass cracked. Picking it up, she took a closer look - a strong woman with a controlling arm around a younger man - then put it back above the white marble hearth where it had stood. In the mess on the mantelpiece were two empty pill bottles with prescription labels. She read them and swore under her breath. Now she knew why Demchak had used the word wacko. The drug prescribed for Paul was high-dosage lithium. It meant he had a serious bipolar condition, kept in check by the medication, which he’d probably stopped taking. The house certainly bore the signs of a manic-depressive breakdown.

At the sound of his voice, she spun around.

‘Have you come to arrest me, officer?’ he asked.

She was shocked at his appearance.

He was wearing nothing but soiled underpants, his face gaunt, hair matted, skin sickly pale. His thighs were slicked with stains and his bare feet were caked in dried blood from where he’d walked over glass. There was partial recognition in his eyes as he hobbled towards her, hands outstretched, ready to be cuffed. In his addled state he remembered only that she was a police officer.

The smell of his breath and the stench of his incontinence was overwhelming as he approached. She quickly turned a chair upright and sat him down on it, a hand over her nose and mouth.

It was debatable whether she could get any sense out of him, but it was worth a try.

‘Where’s your lithium?’ she asked, squatting in front of him.

‘I don’t know,’ he answered. ‘All the jars are empty and I can’t remember what I did with the pills. Maybe I flushed them down the bog. But what’s happened to the music? How would you like to hear “Onward, Christian Soldiers”? I fancy listening to that again. King’s College Choir, you know.’

‘Yes,’ she said gently. ‘I know.’

As he stared into her face, recollection glimmered in his eyes.

‘It’s you, Van Hassel. Sorry, I’m confused. I haven’t slept since your last visit.’

‘That was last week, Paul.’

‘I got excited,’ he babbled. ‘A member of the Royal Family’s planning to drop in unannounced, you see. The one who talks to plants. I wonder if they talk back to him. It’s the botany, you see. This place has a fascinating history.’

‘Yes, you told me.’

‘That’s why I got excited and wet myself. I can’t meet him like this.’

‘No. I need to get you to a doctor.’

‘It’s too late.’

‘Why do you say that?’

‘I can’t leave this house.’

Rita tried to read the subtext of his garbled logic. ‘Does Audrey know what’s happened to you?’ she asked.

‘Audrey’s gone,’ Paul said sadly. ‘She’s abandoned me.’

‘Well, you need some medication.’

He shook his head, shivering, teeth chattering. ‘Ice is gone too.

Crucified like the others.’

‘It’s terrible, yes,’ she said. ‘But you’ve still got your whole life ahead of you.’

‘I don’t think so. My work is done. I’ve been quite clever.

Bipolar people often are, as long as they don’t go high. I haven’t had an episode like this since Cambridge.’

Something he said began to worry her. ‘Why did you say they were crucified?’

‘The nails. Like the Romans used for executions.’

‘Paul, what do you know about the nails?’

‘I’m scared.’

‘Has something frightened you?’

‘Yes. In the forest.’

He unclenched his hand. In his bloodstained palm was a key.

It was large and rusty, the type that fitted in an old-fashioned mortice lock.

A sense of dread came over Rita as she looked at it. ‘What is this, Paul?’

His eyes filled with a kind of horror. ‘I don’t know what’s real anymore.’

Rita took the key from him and stood up. ‘Wait here,’ she said.

She walked through the house and out the back door. The garden at the rear was even more neglected than the one out front. Fruit trees strangled by tropical creepers sagged over layers of rotten fruit in the lank grass. Vegetable plots had gone wild.

Greenhouses, their glass panels smeared and cracked, were choked with ferns untended for decades. It was obvious that Audrey and Paul had left the grounds of the house untouched.

There was a garden shed with a rusty handle and lock, but the key didn’t fit. She pushed the door open. All it contained, among the cobwebs, was a clutter of metal implements long out of use. Beyond the shed, a path of stepping stones dotted with weeds led to where the remains of the orchard merged with the encroaching vines and saplings of tropical vegetation. The walls of the property extended back for several hectares into the rainforest itself. Rita followed the path into the deep green shade under the canopy of the trees. The stepping stones vanished beneath the forest floor, but the impression of a track veered off at a diagonal among the trunks. Up ahead, through the branches, she spotted a low building in the far corner of the wall.

When she reached it, Rita stopped. It dated from the original construction of the house. She guessed it had been a storage shed built by the German botanist. The size of a garage, it was solid brick with a tiled roof and no windows, just a single door with a mortice lock.

She took a deep breath, slotted in the key and opened the door only to jump back, startled, as a swarm of flies buzzed out over her. Rita shuddered and caught the smell of rotting flesh. The interior was too dim to make out clearly what was inside, although she saw the vague outlines of objects attached to the walls. It was enough to tell her she’d opened a door on insanity.

Rita had to back off a moment. She needed to psych herself up for what was coming next. Then, when she was ready, she went in through the door.

A hurricane lamp hung from a hook just inside. Beside it, on a shelf, was a box of matches. As she lit the lamp, its flame threw a sickly light on the exhibits lining the interior. This was as bad as anything she’d seen. The botanist’s old brick shed was now a trophy room. Tacked to boards along one wall were newspaper clippings and downloaded images from the net chronicling the Whitley murders. Lined up on a bench below were bin bags, a heavy-duty meat cleaver and a nail gun. But it was the opposite wall that bore the real horror.

Hanging from a rail were four wooden crosses with decomposing hands nailed to them. Flies crawled around the beams. The decaying flesh wriggled with maggots. Attached to the middle of each cross was a photo of the victim: images of Ice, Nikki Dwyer, Rachel Macarthur and the police e-fit of the man in the mud.

They were all there.

Rita had seen enough. This was no place to linger.

She got out quickly, closed the door and locked it before striding a few paces off among the trees, stopping to breathe forest air into her lungs. The display, nauseating though it was, showed that Billy Bowers had been wrongly awarded the posthumous title of serial killer. Just as she’d thought all along, the deaths were linked to the research base. Only it wasn’t the connection she’d expected.

Her discovery obviously impinged on national security and research base protocols, so this time she had no choice but to inform Maddox.

She got out her mobile and called him.

‘I’ve found something,’ she said.

‘The disk?’ he asked impatiently.

‘No, a room lined with body pieces.’

‘Where are you?’

‘Paul Giles’s place.’

‘Okay, stay there. I’ll come with a team.’

‘And bring an ambulance. Giles will need it.’

Rita walked back to the house with a bitter taste in her mouth and a feeling akin to despair. When she opened the back door, it was to a renewed blast of ‘Onward, Christian Soldiers’
.
That hymn would never be the same for her. She found Paul where she’d left him, rocking in the chair to the music.

She switched it off.

‘I was enjoying that,’ he said.

‘Forget the music. You need to tell me about what’s in the forest.’

‘I can only tell you it’s over.’ He gave her a weak smile. ‘It doesn’t seem real to me. But looking at it objectively, you can see why I would have done it.’

‘Why?’

‘To protect Audrey.’

‘You mean her project?’

‘Audrey
is
the project.’

Rita was losing patience with him. Whether or not he was clinically insane, the trophy room had filled her with disgust and she was out of sympathy.

‘You’re talking gibberish.’

‘Sorry,’ he said, chastised. ‘But this might help - something I stole from the master control room.’ He handed her what looked like a memory stick. ‘Plug it into your computer.’

‘What is it?’

‘A VPN key for level-seven access to Panopticon. Don’t tell Maddox.’

She hesitated, weighing up the risk. ‘Okay,’ she said dubiously, pocketing it.

‘All you need is the password - Descartes, as in the French philosopher.’ He slumped back in the chair. ‘Can we listen to the choir again?’

‘Why the hell not,’ she said. ‘But not so loud.’

‘Let’s hear “Onward, Christian Soldiers”. Don’t you love it?’

he enthused. ‘The theme song for the war on terror. The crusade against the infidels who threaten the American Empire. Christian fundamentalism versus Islamic militants! The battle hymn of the religious right, marching as to war!’

The hymn was still playing when Maddox arrived with a contingent of jeeps, black vans and an ambulance.

Rita let him into the hall at the head of a dozen guards and handed him the key.

‘What have we got exactly?’ he asked.

‘A brick shed in the forest - with the hands of murder victims nailed to crosses as souvenirs.’

‘Process it,’ ordered Maddox, passing the key to the guards.

As they filed out through the rear of the house, Rita took him into the main living area.

‘What’s with the church music?’ he asked, hands on hips, looking at the pathetic figure of Paul, rocking quietly in a chair.

‘How should I know?’ Rita answered. ‘It’s not as crazy as what’s in the shed.’

‘It’s all strictly classified, of course,’ said Maddox. ‘None of this can get out.’

‘I can see the virtue of a cover-up.’

‘It means you’re seeing sense at last. About fucking time.

Keeping you on a leash is a chore I could do without.’

His mention of a leash reminded her of Billy’s threat.

‘Let me tell you something, Maddox,’ she said, turning on him with repressed fury. ‘Push me once too often and I’ll have nothing to lose. Career or no career, I’ll use every connection I’ve got to expose how you operate.’

‘You’re wasting your breath,’ he sneered. ‘Anything new on the disk?’

‘Fuck the disk!’

‘Come on, Van Hassel. Stay on board. Did you get anything at all?’

‘Nothing that’ll help you.’

‘Tell me anyway.’

She sighed with exasperation. ‘Stonefish arranged for it to be delivered to one particular person. He kept the name secret, but it’s someone who’ll make use of it - someone he described as “an idealist with balls”
.
That rules you out, Maddox.’

‘I’m not an idealist but I’ve got balls.’

‘Yeah, for brains.’

He grunted. ‘The sooner you’re out of my face, the better. But in the meantime, I want you to follow up your contacts with the protesters. Sounds like the disk could be heading their way.’

‘Tomorrow.’

‘Why the delay?’