Soul Seeker (22 page)

‘I've had some exposure of criminal psychology, John.' Her tone had been edged with hurt honed by pride. ‘I'm not completely unused to this sort of thing.'

But she had insisted and he did not want to push her away, not after what she had said over dinner, and so they sat side by side in front of the computer screen. That they were slightly drunk and each had a glass of red wine, only added to a sense of unreality; it might have been a scene from Buñuel, the bourgeoisie at play. They read through the ‘paper', he making notes, she adding comments.

The synopsis of the conclusions held a surprise, though. Eisenmenger pointed at the text. ‘What does that mean?'

Charlie shook her head, a frown appearing slightly asymmetrically on her face. They read on. The introduction was mostly a rehash of the previous introduction, referring back to it, and full of pseudo-scientific ponderings about the nature of life, even once referring to it as ‘vitalism'. The methods section described in uncomfortable detail what had been done to Malcolm Willoughby and the as yet unidentified female; the voltage and current used in her killing, the rate of increase of both in his. It told of their height and weight (and thus the all-important body mass index), although it did not mention their ages, or any other datum that might have helped identify them. All the physiological parameters that were monitored were listed.

And then to the results section, as any good scientific paper would do but, unlike a conventional paper, constant reference was made to the appendices, to the video recordings of the subjects and the parametric readings. It soon became clear that they were going to have to keep accessing these, although Eisenmenger said nothing until Charlie said, ‘Shouldn't we be looking at these hyperlinks? The text keeps referring to them and I think we'd have a better chance of understanding what's going on if we saw them.'

‘I'm not sure . . .'

‘If we're going to understand this psychopath, the more material we study, the more chance we have.'

He sighed. ‘OK, but not the visual recordings.'

‘Why not? The text refers to specific events, especially during the course of the male subject's death, which are correlated with the physiological readings.'

‘These are snuff movies, Charlie. They depict people being killed for real.'

‘I've got a strong stomach, John. I enjoy gore in the cinema as much as most other people. There's no need to namby-pamby me.'

‘There's a difference between watching a Hollywood horror film and witnessing someone being executed, someone suffering real pain.'

‘Please, John, I am not a child.'

He did not want her seeing the videos but her voice was becoming strained again. He had found the first posting hard going and Lancefield's warning coming on top of this had given him the heebie-jeebies; was he willing to let Charlie experience something so awful, so unique? Yet, she was right; he had no right to act as her guardian, to mollycoddle her; she was an adult, and an intelligent one who was trained in understanding the mind. Perhaps, he decided, he should not be so protective.

And so, he agreed.

THIRTY-EIGHT

R
ebecca had always thought her parents' bedroom was gloomy but now that her mother lay dying in it, she realized how wrong she had been; it was funereal now and it had always been so. It was as if it had been waiting for a death, as if they had decorated and furnished this slightly drab, slightly dingy room, a tableau from the seventies, with this scene specifically in mind. Her father had always been a man who was careful with money – always second-class stamps, Christmas wrapping paper reused year after year, socks darned and redarned – and he had never knowingly used a sixty-watt bulb, but the ceiling light seemed to be giving out little more than a candle's glimmer, so that the shadows were barely distinguishable, as if they were hiding in plain sight.

There had been no eye contact between them, not when she had entered the house, nor since; his head had been kept low, as had his voice; the curiously atonal quality of this near-whisper gave an air almost of worship and respect, as if they were in the presence of something supernatural, but she had known in reality it was all a charade; they were in the presence of something dying, was all; they were scared; too scared to bicker for once.

And in this all-too-apt gloom, her mother laying breathing stertorously, thin and pale, eyes half closed and filmed, mouth open. Lancefield had watched her mother imperceptibly lose humanity over the past five years, but never before had she seemed to be so empty, so inanimate; was this the dementia or the onset of death, she wondered. Was this woman – try as she might, she could not come to convince herself that here was her mother – alive or dead? That she was breathing was beyond doubt, but was it a purely mechanical thing that this body did, as decerebrate as a headless chicken?

On the other side of the bed, her father held his wife's hand and she could see that his grip was tight enough to show his knuckles white, as if he hoped that pain would bring her back to sentience, the long sought-for remedy for Alzheimer's. She had given up holding her mother's hand, gaining nothing from it other than the inescapable thought that it was too dry and too inert to be of any comfort to either of them, as if she were trying to commune with a mannequin. She spent most of her time either looking down at the bedcover – it was a sea of memories for her – and when that palled she stared at the photographs on the bedside table to the left of her father; photos that were old because they were of the young, that were nothing more to her then than reminders; reminders of how their lives had gone in both senses of the word.

They had sat there for four hours now.

They would sit there for many more.

Eisenmenger felt that, at last, he was beginning to understand what was going through this killer's head; a feeling of displacement came over him, one that was familiar. He would not go so far as to say that he came to identify with a murderer, he could not get inside the mind, but he could start to see why the murderer did certain things, what the murderer was perhaps seeking, either to find or to demonstrate. And never before had he had such a text to work on as this, so much information to sift. There was the overarching theme of
why
the murderer was doing these awful things – and that was potentially illuminating enough – but there was also the extent to which the text betrayed the beliefs, the experiences, the hopes and the fears of this particular madman. It was, in effect, a manifesto, although he was sure that it had not been intended as such. His fascination grew and, accordingly, his awareness receded, and so he did not appreciate Charlie's increasing discomfort.

It started off well enough. Where the text referred them to particular time points in the various readings – EEG wave patterns, ECG complexes, oxygen saturation, respiratory rate, systolic and diastolic blood pressure, skin resistance – they followed the link; when it referred them to various points in the video presentations – and there were twelve camera views in each – Eisenmenger was at first very aware of Charlie's reactions. The execution of the as yet unknown woman had been slowed a thousand fold, so that reference in the text could be made to points in the course of her death separated by less than a hundredth of a second, and because of this, she hardly seemed to move as the current surged through her and overwhelming agony had overcome her. As far as Eisenmenger could see, Charlie seemed to cope with this, maintaining an objective demeanour, her remarks pertinent and made in a controlled voice. He had begun to relax, to think that he had been unnecessarily protective of her; and, in so doing, had begun to lose himself in the task.

What was this particular mad man after? To capture the point of death was the obvious, trite response to that, but why? Why the desire to chase down something that, to Eisenmenger at least, seemed as elusive as the end of the rainbow, as real as the boundary between two consecutive seconds? Death might in the popular imagination be a single thing, or even a single entity (replete with scythe and skeleton eyes), but to a biologist, it was a fading, a gradual disequilibrium, an entropic dismemberment of homeostasis; consciousness was not a binary state – either on or off – but a property that arose from a breathtakingly large number of biochemical processes occurring at a molecular level; he knew that it was a property of chaotic systems that order would arise spontaneously, and he saw self-awareness as merely a higher level of such order. Just as it did not suddenly come into being, so it did not suddenly cease to exist.

Yet this man believed that it did, was convinced that he could demonstrate it happening.

It was with a shock of incredulity that he was jerked from semi-reverie by the last paragraph:

He sat up, and murmured to Charlie, ‘This might be interesting.'

He moved the cursor to the first hyperlink, the one that referred to the woman's death, and the screen loaded with sixteen images, some close-up video stills, many frozen readings; he examined each carefully. It took a moment but he eventually saw with some fascination that at this moment, there had apparently been a simultaneous blip in the diastolic blood pressure, a coordinated abrupt, but brief increase in activity in both theta and delta wave activity in the brain, and a rise in skin resistance; yet the photos were the most enthralling. They were of the woman's eyes – horribly bloodshot, pupils dilated to black holes without the power of sight – and in them was a tiny, violet spark. It was tiny but sharp, even at the magnification of the still; it seemed almost to curl around lazily, as if trying to bite its tail.

Was that real? Perhaps it was just a glitch in the software; yet it was symmetrically present in the depths of both gaping pupils. A reflection, then – the head was arched back, the current surge having caused extreme spasm of the neck muscles – and so conceivably he was seeing something that was on the ceiling. But what could it be?

‘Weird,' he said, half to himself, half to Charlie. She said nothing, but he didn't notice.

He turned next to the second hyperlink. The layout was similar and again the physiological readings all showed a small distinct change that, if the data were to be believed, was totally synchronous. The video images, though were harder to interpret, because they came at the end of an ordeal of nearly five hours for poor Malcolm Willoughby; his skin was browned, cracked with fissures of dried blood; his tongue swollen and black, his eyes filmed over with coagulation; he could even make out a haze between the camera and the subject, perhaps of steam. All this made detail difficult to discern but he thought that maybe he could just make out a faint violet spark deep in the pupils, underlying the frosting of the corneas, identical to that which had just been seen in the first hyperlink.

He breathed gently.
Surely not?

‘What do you think?' he asked Charlie softly without looking at her. There was no answer, but he did not appreciate this for a moment. Then he looked at her. Her face was buried in her hands, and she was weeping whilst she shook uncontrollably.

THIRTY-NINE

E
isenmenger was tired and he had a huge gastrointestinal cut-up to look forward; the last thing he needed was a phone call from Beverley Wharton at eight thirty, before he had even managed to switch on the microscope. He sat down, sighing and looking out of the window at the car park; there were not enough parking spaces, but then there never had been, and a member of the parking Gestapo was prowling. He knew what she wanted, but couldn't be bothered to think.

‘Two more bodies.'

Shit! Shit, shit, shit!
‘Where?'

‘Cotswold Water Park. I need you there now.'

He was building up a huge time debt to the Trust, he knew. It was likely he would be out most of the morning, and he could not ask his colleagues, themselves stretched by NHS duties, to cover for him. He would have to do the cut-up this afternoon; presumably the post-mortem would have to be done that evening, and the rest of his work would have to wait, perhaps until the weekend. He thought guiltily of Charlie, even as he said reluctantly, ‘OK.'

‘I'll get a car to pick you up in ten minutes.'

And that was that; no thanks, no acknowledgement, and certainly no realization that he had troubles aplenty. He sought his phone and thought about ringing Charlie, decided to text instead. She had eventually calmed down, full of apologies and, as they went to bed at two o'clock, full of whisky. He had risen again at five, successfully not waking her and aware that he had to finish looking through the web posting. He had taken her a cup of tea at seven thirty, and she had been hung-over but seemingly not too upset. How she would react to the news that he was going to have to work late, he could not say.

Just as he was about to leave the office, his phone rang again; this time it was the coroner's office. ‘You asked me to check that registration number. I'm sorry it's taken so long, but it slipped my mind.' He had forgotten as well, so could hardly criticize.