Soul Seeker (20 page)

‘Uh?' Melanie Whittaker frowned, unable to understand such a complex question.

‘The tubes . . . in our arms.'

Melanie looked down – still frowning, still confused – and saw through clouds of bewilderment that crudely inserted into her left forearm was a shiny bright, smooth and almost beautiful needle, as wide as a knitting needle; it was strapped into place with parcel tape and led to a clear plastic tube that snaked away to large glass jar on the floor.

And it hurt, she came slowly to realize.

God, how it hurt . . .

There was a click that Evangeline heard, her mother didn't. The girl looked around, unable to see its source, then noticing the tube leading from her mother's arm; it was now red and this redness was splashing remorselessly into the jar by her feet. She looked down to see that her own tube, her own jar, was similarly filling with blood.

At which she point she screamed.

THIRTY-THREE

E
isenmenger was not insensitive enough to be unaware that Beverley was stressed; as he gave her the results of the body on the allotment's autopsy, he could hear her staccato, almost reflexive replies, and hear in them someone who was waiting to receive an Epiphany; and hear in them someone who was realizing that he was not its bearer. When she asked him how the search of people with mesothelioma was going – and, perhaps more to the point, he admitted that he had not yet started it – she exploded down the phone line at him.

‘Why the fuck not?'

‘I told you, Beverley. There are ethical considerations.'

‘This is murder, John. This isn't a debate at the Royal Society of fucking Medicine. This isn't an intellectual game, a parlour conversation, a late-night television chat show.'

‘I do know that.'

‘The fuck you do. You're letting me down, John. Big time.'

She had slammed the phone down on him with that, leaving him alone with a feeling of failure. Perhaps she was right. Perhaps he should stop being so limp-wristed. He had, after all, gone into dangerously unethical territory before in his career and come out alive. Perhaps he should once again consider the greater good.

Without conscious consideration, he found himself setting up the search of the pathology database almost without realizing it. It was a laborious process, since the Trust computer system was in IT terms primitive, pre-Stone Age, the era of slick user interfaces far, far in its future; he would have to run the search overnight because there wasn't enough computing power to allow it to be run when it was needed for clinics and ward-based enquiries. The Trust had been discussing a new system for several years now – had almost got one before being ordered to stop by the Department of Health because of the coming of the integrated NHS IT system, a fiasco that had wasted billions and set health-care back years.

As he entered the search parameters, the question ‘why?' kept occurring, kept resounding almost in his skull. Was it purely for justice that he did this? Was he really so wedded to law enforcement and the pursuit of felons – even a felon committing crimes as heinous as these – that he was willing to break the law? Was that really his motive? Or was it some other reason? And, if so, what was it?

Did he feel in some way beholden to Beverley, so that he had to risk, potentially at least, his career? Of course, it wasn't the first time that he had broken one law in order to ensure that the breaker of another, more serious law, was apprehended; he was prone, he now saw, to a sort of intellectual vigilantism, going after criminals by any means, foul or fair, that he considered appropriate; not that he thought himself likely to turn into a true blue caped crusader, operating forever on the far edge of the law, perhaps resorting when the occasion demanded to bloodshed. Yet he was increasingly finding himself frustrated by the restrictions of modern British society where, in an effort to prevent the iniquities that arise when there are only black and white, everything had been turned into a soup of grey, without even any shades. The law of data protection was enforced more energetically than the law of theft (even aggravated theft), because it was easier to do so. Eisenmenger had a problem with that; he did not see all laws as equal, no matter what the high priests of jurisprudence might have to say, not when those charged with enforcing those laws claimed the right to choose between them.

So that was his motive.

Except he feared that it wasn't just that, because once again he was finding himself wondering just what Beverley Wharton meant to him.

Beverley slammed the phone down and everyone around her was aware that she was not a happy bunny rabbit. It was left to Lancefield to approach her and, through the open doorway of her office, ask, ‘Bad news?'

‘Eisenmenger says that the latest body died of electrocution, just like the last, only this time it was quick, as might occur in execution or accidental electrocution.'

Fisher ventured, ‘Well, at least she died quickly.' This earned him a malevolent stare and he shut up.

Beverley continued, ‘The tox results have come back on the first two deaths. Apparently there were significant levels of Flunitrazepam in the urine of both, but not in their blood.'

A question hung in the air –
And so?
– but Fisher was too scared to ask it. Lancefield, to his relief, wasn't. ‘Is that significant?'

‘It means that they were drugged to get them wherever they died, but they were fully awake and aware when they died. Flunitrazepam is Rohypnol, the date rape drug.'

This
they understood. Lancefield said with consideration, ‘It's not a lead, though. Rohypnol is freely available on the Internet.' It was a piece of wisdom that earned her no praise.

‘Then find me one, inspector.'

THIRTY-FOUR

As E60s – the request for a post-mortem examination received from the coroner's office – went, it wasn't bad. It was a step up from those that merely said, effectively,
Found Dead
, or those that tried to tell the pathologist what the autopsy result should be: ‘
Is believed to have had a heart attack
', or ‘
Probably struck by lightning
'. Those that worked for the coroner were not necessarily in any way medically qualified and they did their best to interpret the jargon that was fed to them; in this case, Eisenmenger felt that he had at least been given a fighting chance of a reasonable context in which to begin the autopsy.

Somewhere at the back of his head, the address struck a chime; it was where Malcolm Willoughby had been found.

Lancefield had been tasked with checking the website regularly and she found herself becoming more and more tense as, each time she did, it was unchanged. She ought, she thought, to be relieved, but she found that she couldn't be; the new posting was coming, she was certain, and all she could feel was a clock ticking down, all she could see in her head was a stream of sand running through a timer.

She had had no inkling, of course, when at last it came; she felt first shock, then elation, then relief, then dread when she saw it, all experienced in a moment, all flushing through her system one after the other, surging, singing, screaming. She looked up, saw Beverley in her office through the half-opened door, called out in a voice that was unintentionally hoarse, ‘Sir? There's a new posting.'

‘Was the flat heated?'

Mark Sheraton was a good coroner's officer; he was brilliant with the bereaved families, he understood that the pathologists wanted relevant facts that might bear on the cause of death, not meaningless gossip or random facts thrown in as if they were telling a story to a child; in the coroner's court, he read out the written reports with some fluency and authority. ‘To be honest, I don't know,' he admitted. Eisenmenger was talking to him on the phone from the mortuary office while Clive was cleaning up.

‘Find out, will you, Mark?'

‘You think it might be hypothermia?'

‘All the signs are there.' By which he meant that there was no other obvious reason why Len Barker had died that evening, and there were a few vague changes at autopsy that could have been caused by hypothermia.

‘OK, I'll make some enquiries.'

‘Until then, it's “unascertained”, I'm afraid.'

Mark Sheraton took this well, although it would mean the inquest process would be set in motion, which meant work for him. ‘I half thought it would go “forensic” to be honest. What with him writing in the blood from his head wound. Very melodramatic. The constable who was called out by the carer even got CID in, but they're happy there was nothing untoward; the flat was secure and nothing was taken. Must have been confused, I suppose.'

Eisenmenger had barely heard the last few sentences. ‘He did what?'

‘Oh, yes. I didn't tell you because it didn't seem relevant.'

For once, a coroner's officer had not put in acres of meaningless anecdote and Eisenmenger wished he had. ‘What did he write?'

‘It was fairly difficult to decipher, but it looked like a car registration number.'

Occupation: retired policeman.
Eisenmenger found himself assaulted by a feeling he knew too well, an itch deep within him, where disparate facts were coinciding.

‘And?'

‘And what?' Mark Sheraton did not understand.

‘Whose registration was it?'

‘I'm not sure.'

‘Mark, do me a favour and find out, will you?'

‘If you say so, Doc, but why? It's not going to alter things is it?'

Eisenmenger did not at first know what to say. ‘Probably not, Mark. Not in this case, anyway.'

Betty Williams had not been feeling very well for most of the day. She had no appetite and had vomited twice already. Her chest hurt, too; there was a burning in the middle of her chest but she had had that before and it was just heartburn. For lunch the day before she had finished some chicken that had been in the fridge for some time – she wasn't sure how long – and she had at first put everything down to this (‘just a drop of gippy tummy' as she remembered her mother used to say), especially when she had almost had an accident as her bowels suddenly became loose. But she had lived long enough to know that this was different, that she should not be breathless, or so clammy, or so, so tired.

THIRTY-FIVE

T
his one was ten, a hundred, a million times, worse. This one was not just two people dying, not just a snuff movie portrayed as the graphical (and graphic) illustrations for a pseudo-scientific paper on what dying is; no, this was one was a love affair with the subject, a forever-lingering caress of it, a thesis as opposed to a hypothesis.

The title – ‘Further Observations on the Physiological, Morphological and Metaphysical Changes that Occur at the Point of Death; Death By Electrocution' – was suitably turgid and the following introduction could have been describing experiments on locusts, so dry and clinical was the tone, so willing to put ‘scientific' enquiry about emotion. Indeed, so formal and cold was it, that they did not read it at any depth, for it quickly bored them. The appendices, though . . . As before there were two main ones, each detailing a death; one was rapid, one was protracted; from each of these was a large number of hyperlinks in which various physiological parameters were displayed in real time as the subjects sat in the electric chair. For one, the woman, the moment of death, as the current surged, peaked, and died within a hundred milliseconds, was brief in real time, and perhaps too brief for the author, because a further hyperlink slowed this, with all the attendant physiological reactions, down a thousandfold. For the second subject, the man, there was no need of such artifice, for his agony was so prolonged as to be a marathon of death, slow crawl of excruciation; and for this the viewer could watch all five hours, or dip in and out at will, picking the choicest morsels of a man's agonizing death.

They could not watch it all, not even Beverley. Fisher gave in first, perhaps because of his youth and innocence, perhaps because of a less eroded humanity; then Lancefield left, when the atmosphere in the room had grown dark and dense with dread, and disbelief and shock. They both mumbled apologies, but they need not have done and, indeed, were barely heard. In the end, Beverley had to skip through the last two hours, a dreadful parody of sporting highlights, and even she felt sick at the end, drained to the point of exsanguination, saddened to the point of despair. She had in her career come into contact with men and woman who were scarcely human in their depravity, who would think nothing of rape, of murder, of torture or mutilation, but she could not see any of them behind this; this was off the scale of inhumanity, the knob turned beyond eleven, into the realms of
un
humanity, the kind of thing an interested extraterrestrial might do, one who had lifted a rock, and found a man, and wanted to find out a little bit about him.