Soul Seeker (2 page)

One that disturbed her oddly.

She screwed her eyes to stop the pain that looking into the light brought, to try to see beyond the brilliance. In doing this, she made out . . . something.

It was angular and bright.

It was sharp.

She began to scream, almost without thinking about it, once more thrashing from side to side, even though she knew that she could not break free. Her terror made her do it, was in total charge, stifling rational thought that had had its chance and lost. She was reverting to animal because there was nothing else left for her.

Something flickered to her right, catching her attention, stalling her panic. A large flat-screen television was suddenly alive, showing . . . showing what? For a second she thought that it was her – a naked figure, covered in electrodes, and strapped down on a table – but she saw almost at once that this was an elderly male figure. Like her, this man lay under the threatening blade of a guillotine and, like her, his head was shaven. There was no sound, but she could see him thrashing from side to side, his mouth opening in what was clearly anguished pleading.

She watched for long minutes, horrified and therefore fascinated, mesmerized despite her own situation.

The end when it came was shockingly quick. The man had quietened, gasping for air, clearly exhausted . . .

And then the blade fell.

She screamed.

The body convulsed, the head fell backwards, blood spurted once, twice, three times in dying arcs from the neck as the fading sight of the eyes looked directly at her.

‘Noooooo!!!'

She screamed again, screamed so that it hurt and somehow that pain was good, and the words were completely incomprehensible, even to herself. She thrashed and strained at her bonds, unconsciously a perfect imitation of what she had just seen on the screen.

Her eyes looked up at the blade just as it started to fall and the automatic shutters of the cameras caught every part of every second as her head came off.

Her scream, bouncing off the walls, outlived her. Far above, hidden in the darkness, five more high-speed cameras – one directly above, one in each corner of the cavernous room – concentrated on the head, watching long after the eyes had clouded and blood had ceased to pump from the neck and ooze from the head.

TWO

A
nother day, another dollar, another head.

Acting Chief Inspector Beverley Wharton had had trouble raising enthusiasm when she had learned of its discovery – indeed, she had trouble raising horror, disgust, surprise or even boredom at it. It was not the first head that had come into her orbit, crying in mute enquiry to be reunited with the body with which it had been born; usually such unnecessary flamboyance was the work of gangs, related to turf wars over drugs, warnings to the cognoscenti and the innocent alike that there were people about who were not to be trifled with. The only exception to this rule had been a butcher who had been suffering paranoid schizophrenia and had become convinced that his wife had been a gorgon, her hair a head of snakes, her ugliness enough to blind (he took to wearing sunglasses when in her presence). Mr Bone – no, really, Mr Bone – had been sectioned but had absconded one day, swung by the retail establishment to pick up a few tools of the trade, and thus made Mrs Bone safe for family viewing.

She judged it unlikely that this case would be as macabre.

And not for the first time, she could not have been further from the truth.

Still, it was a job, although not an everyday kind of job, not a job that would suit many, not one that was particularly safe, either for peace of mind, or the body. She still felt the pain, the humiliation, the burning anger at what had happened to her just six months before; the
violation
, the feeling of humiliation and total subordination that she had endured as she had been raped. She still felt the pain and, make no mistake about it, it still hurt, but not enough to go in for the counselling that the medical officer had so strongly advised. She
wanted
to feel it; she wanted to keep it there, motivating her, reminding her of just how evil, how depraved mankind – a man – could be, and what she had to do to endure, to survive.

Survive, though, she would.

She had even profited. Promotion – temporary but with the hint of permanence, should she keep her nose and other bodily parts clean – had come unexpectedly with the sudden disappearance of Lambert; apparently a promotion for him, but superintendent in the Cinderford Station was not considered the cream of appointments and she guessed that it was one that Lambert would rather not have taken, had it not been politically expedient.

So she
should
be one happy bunny, she reckoned. Lambert had been her nemesis for so many years, an implacable foe, forever sneering, forever undermining, working tirelessly to ensure that she stayed down, cowed, that she suffered merely for being the kind of person he disliked. And now he was gone and, if he wasn't gone forever nor gone a great distance, at least he was far enough away for her to begin to make some headway once more.

The car she was in pulled off the main Gloucester-Ledbury Road, running westwards into the small village of Bromsberrow Heath. The speed limit was thirty miles per hour, but the driver ignored that and she did not choose to reprimand him; they had an appointment with a disembodied head, which trumped the regular global emails from the chief constable droning on about ‘respect for all aspects of the law', and ‘ensuring that we cannot be criticized for only obeying those laws which suit us'. It was a pretty village, she decided, as far as such villages went; having been brought up in an urban environment, she still looked on rural Gloucestershire as a strange land and she a stranger in it. Mostly bungalows, she noticed, and mostly well kept; biggish gardens but too much chintziness, too many garden gnomes, stone storks and wicker arches; too many called things like ‘Dunroaming' and ‘Cherry Blossom Cottage'.

There was a distorted crossroads at the heart of the village with a village store and post office at one corner, a bus shelter at the other, then they were past and heading out into open countryside. Open farmland, a row of poplars to the right, a chapel converted into a home on the left. They swung sharp left just past this and continued along a road that became narrower and rougher, more and more like a track. Eventually one more turn to the left and they were approaching Home Farm. Approaching, too, she decided, the eighteenth century.

Gloucestershire, she had long ago decided, was a patchwork of times, ranging through the centuries from near medieval to near modern; not totally modern, mind, not bang-up-to-the-moment, so new it's too hot to touch, but close. Most of it, though, was time-warped into a past that people thought ought to have existed, that existed in actuality only for American tourists and senior citizens, that was as fake as the wooden beams in most people's ceiling. This farm seemed to have stopped somewhere around the time that Marie Antoinette had shown spectacular underestimation of her situation and opted for a career in dietary advice.

‘Who owns this place?'

She asked this not of the driver but the woman next to him – Detective Inspector Rebecca Lancefield. Looking over her right shoulder, Lancefield replied, ‘Owen Gardner. Sixty-seven years old, widowed, no children. Been farming here all his life. No convictions, except two for tax evasion on red diesel.'

Which, as far as Beverley was concerned, summed her up. Efficient, but efficient only to help herself; efficient only to gain a purchase on that oh-so-greasy, oh-so-high pole. Worse, she was
nice.
Beverley knew how to react to
shitty
–
shitty
was her currency, after all; she worked in
shittiness
almost every hour that she was awake, whether it be dealing with criminals or her real enemies, her colleagues – so she was well versed in it. She could close her eyes and recite
shittiness
without employing much more than one percent of her mental capacity.
Niceness
, though, required some thought;
niceness
was underhand because it might be genuine, might well be a subterfuge.
Shitty
people were straightforward, they did what it said on their tin; she was fairly sure that
nice
people split fifty-fifty down the middle, half being cunts, half being stupid.

She had yet to decide about the curly-haired, snub-nosed blonde who was looking at her now with wide-open, friendly brown eyes, but she wasn't about to give her the benefit of the doubt. Accordingly, she was getting on extremely well with her new detective inspector.

‘Good work,' she said and no one would have known.

They stopped in the middle of a farmyard that was no more than ten metres across; it was immediately obvious that Owen Gardner was of the breed of farmers who had no interest in aesthetics; animals made him money, but they also made faeces and if there was no need to clear it up, he wasn't about to bother. Beverley waited in the car while the driver got out and fetched wellingtons from the boot; they weren't Hunters, but she said nothing. When she stood up in the yard, her feet sunk into nearly ten centimetres of some sort of animal shit and the smell that had been permeating the universe since they arrived intensified. She found herself longing – and not for the first time – for concrete, tarmac and halogen lighting, for odours of Indian takeaways and car exhaust.

There were derelict pig-sheds on their left, open countryside to the right, the view broken only by a barn that was empty except for two ancient tractors, some tyres, a lot of barbed wire and a pile of sacks full of farm-type things. Straight ahead of them was a three-storey farmhouse in red brick; it was like a thousand others in the county, except that it was considerably more neglected than most; nine windows, each divided into twelve, and of the one hundred and eight panes, perhaps a quarter were broken and filled in with cardboard, while the curtains behind them (although poorly seen) seemed little more than dirty blankets. The paint could easily have been the original – although there was little left to judge by – and the small garden in front had become something akin to no-man's-land at the battle of Ypres. There were three police cars and two unmarked cars already there, but no sign of human life, until a uniformed constable trudged his weary way around the right-hand side of the farmhouse. His progress was slow and, Beverley noticed, the suctioning effects of the viscous manure had produced its toll upon the blue serge of his constabulary trouser ware; his salute was tired and his tone equally so when he announced in a voice that was half respect, three quarters pissed off, ‘It's round the back, ma'am.'

‘It', she noted. Lancefield asked, ‘Has anyone touched it?'

Beverley found herself wondering how many times she had heard that question. The uniform – too callow, too scared-looking, just too bloody innocent, she thought – shook his head with the kind of nervous certainty that comes only from terrified uncertainty. ‘No.'

They followed him around the building. Beverley noted a kitchen through the windows, one that she recognized from costumed dramas on the box, and a small back parlour in which there were a widescreen plasma television and a big hi-fi system, items in a small pocket of the new millennium. Owen Gardner, then, was apparently not completely immersed in the wrong century.

One side was metal fencing with a gate in, opposite this was a concrete, prefabricated milking parlour, whilst across from the back of the farmhouse was a slurry pit. Beverley could think of nothing she'd rather see first thing of a morning when she looked out of her back door; it was a large one, too, almost full, a hazy kaleidoscope of various shades of bilious green, browns and greys.

It was also the centre of attention. A quick glance told her that there were four uniforms and three plain clothes police clustered around it, to all intents and purposes just aimlessly milling, ants without the queen to direct them.

As soon as Beverley appeared, one of them turned and came hurrying towards her; it was Fisher. Beverley was not a fan of obesity, in neither women nor men, whatever their age, but there was also a certain kind of thinness that she found disturbing; it was a sallow, unhealthy kind of emaciation and Fisher – newly promoted to detective sergeant – personified it. Clothes, no matter how small, seemed to hang off him, his collar touched his neck only ever at one point, his eyes peered out at the world from two moulded caves.

His expression was one of great relief. ‘Chief Inspector! Good to see you.'

Of course he would think it was good to see her. Until their arrival, he had been the senior officer and therefore in charge of the crime scene; responsibility sat on him rather as his dandruff did; it was a coating, nothing more, and something of an embarrassment. Fisher's promotion had been a surprise, and not just to Beverley. He was not venal, nor was he lazy which, she supposed, put him about a fairly large distance above the competition, but he was thick. Beverley had long ago concluded that brains weren't necessary for much of police work; indeed, in the execution of the overwhelming majority of tasks that the police were required to perform, brains were a positive disadvantage. No army wanted infantry that was intelligent, cannon fodder that could think and thus maybe decide that there was more to life than being in the front line and getting hurt. You'd only want brains in those giving the orders; evolution had decided for a very good reason that it was better to have the brains stored in the head than in the hands. She looked at Fisher, looked into his eyes, and suspected that he was a revolutionary dead end. The
Sun
quick crossword was his intellectual zenith, and that only rarely accomplished.