Soul Seeker (23 page)

‘And?'

‘It belongs to the Colberrow Estate, in the north of the county.'

‘Where the fuck is Lancefield?'

Fisher was always cheerful – perhaps because he was constitutionally optimistic, perhaps because he was stupid (and opinion in the station was fairly clear on the subject that it was the latter), but even he could see that his chief inspector was angry, and that whatever was said to her was not going to make her laugh and smile and pat him on the head. He therefore kept his answer short. ‘Don't know.'

Alas, even this did not save him. ‘What the fuck do you mean? She should have been in two hours ago.'

There was no answer to either the question or its pursuant statement. As so often before he felt at sea, and it was a distinctly choppy sea. He opened his mouth but his brain took too long pulling the levers to get his tongue, pharynx and vocal cords into operation, and so only a near-inaudible squeak was born, soon to die. Beverley continued, ‘Did she tell you she was going to be late?'

He shook his head, feeling that he was projecting a sense of guilt, although she did not seem to notice. ‘Ring her mobile. Tell her to get her arse over to the Cotswold Water Park now.'

The A417 gave a susurrating background theme to the scene, the sound of passing traffic coming over the wetlands, between the sparse trees and low bushes, above the ponds and lakes; the cars providing a sibilant treble, the HGVs punctuating this with intermittent bass roars. The road itself was nearly half a mile away, and only just visible on the horizon, which suited Beverley just fine; for once there was little chance of having a distant audience exuding prurience like pus.

The two bodies had been intertwined both with each other and with the weeds and reeds. They were bloated and pale, taking on an almost translucent appearance, slimy and dank as if made out of squid flesh. They were naked. They were difficult to consider anything more than fish food.

‘Well?' Beverley had given up politeness. She felt out of control and it wasn't a nice feeling, not a nice feeling at all; she had worked hard all her life – bent the rules and ruthlesslessly used what assets she had whenever necessary – to avoid being in situations such as this. She and Fisher had just entered the canvas tent on the bank of the pond just by where the bodies had been found. Eisenmenger was just standing there, staring at them.

‘Well, what?' enquired Eisenmenger mildly as he looked up at her.

‘What can you give me?'

He sensed her impatience, and knew well what her temper could be like, but he had troubles of his own. ‘Two females, in the water between twenty-four and forty-eight hours. One is young, the other is considerably older – perhaps fifteen to twenty years.'

‘Mother and daughter?'

‘How the fuck should I know?' His tone might have been light but there was more than a hint of irritation, and Beverley did not miss it, although she contented herself with a long, cold stare at him.

‘Very well. What else?'

‘I think it's a fair working assumption that they are victims of our Internet scientist.'

‘How do you know that?' This from Fisher. The smell in the confined space was rapidly making it even more difficult than usual for him to think clearly.

‘I don't
know
it, sergeant. I said that it was a reasonable assumption. The victims come in pairs and we have here two bodies; all the victims have been naked, as are these. All have had their heads shaved, as these have.'

Beverley had knelt down by the two blubber-white bodies. ‘They clearly weren't beheaded. Were they electrocuted?'

‘No external burn marks,' he said. ‘Although that doesn't exclude it, of course.'

Fisher had the feeling he was going to have to leave the tent pretty soon. As much as to stop himself being sick as for information, he asked, ‘Why not?'

Eisenmenger explained, ‘The electrodes could have been inserted into the mouth, or the anus, or even the vagina.' He was quite capable, Beverley knew, of delivering news of such atrocities without thinking and in a cerebral sense, as if delivering an academic treatise to fellow pathologists; yet this time she had heard more than academic detachment, this time she heard almost viciousness in his reply.

The feeling of nausea that had been sidling up on Fisher swept over him – indeed, it swept him away – and he left with a mumbled, ‘Excuse me.'

Beverley stared at the pathologist. ‘What's wrong?'

He returned the stare, his face showing passivity to the point of inhumanity. ‘Nothing.'

‘You seem out of sorts,' she offered, but he was in no mood for gifts and just changed the subject. ‘This guy changes his method of killing every two victims. I doubt whether he's used the national grid this time.'

‘So how has he done it?'

He looked for a long time at the two bodies lying side by side, companions in a cold death before saying, ‘They're pale, aren't they?'

‘Isn't that due to immersion?'

He continued to stare at the bodies; it was a characteristic Eisenmenger pose, she thought; he might almost have been communing with the corpses. ‘Maybe. And, of course, pallor is a very difficult thing to gauge – some people are naturally pale – but there are the puncture wounds in the antecubital fossae—'

‘The what?'

‘The crooks of the elbows.' He knelt down and raised the older corpse's arm. ‘See?'

‘They've had blood taken?'

He laid the arm back down, as gently as if she were asleep and he were afraid to wake her. ‘I think,' he said standing up again, ‘they've had
all
their blood taken.'

FORTY

O
utside, in the cool fresh air that was tinged with the faint but reassuring odour of exhaust fumes from the distant A417, Fisher was leaning against the side of a police car, trying not to look ill. As Beverley emerged followed by Eisenmenger, he came across to them. A family of mallards was paddling in a nearby pool, making occasional, questioning quacks, and a pair of buzzards circled lazily in the high air above a large copse a kilometre or two away.

‘I'm sorry about that, sir.'

Beverley shrugged to indicate that it was of no consequence; she was struck that Fisher looked almost as pale as the corpses and that, what with Eisenmenger's bloodlessly uncaring treatment of her inspector, she was surrounded by an army of the exsanguinated. ‘Check the missing person's reports for a mother and daughter.' He trotted off, happy to have instruction and she turned to Eisenmenger. ‘Did you look at the web posting?'

She noticed that there was something behind his eyes as he nodded and said non-committally, ‘Yes.'

‘And?'

‘And what? It's more of the same. It's someone who has an obsession, but someone who has some intellectual training. Not your usual serial killer. This one is more than an undereducated, ill-informed bigot; this one let his obsession take hold after his education.'

‘Let?'

He shrugged. ‘Anyone can allow themselves to fall prey to their obsessions; they're within all of us, just lurking, waiting.'

Eisenmenger had always struck her as somewhat dour, but today he was bleak; as bleak as she had ever known him. ‘A white-collar killer?'

‘I think so.' He then said suddenly, ‘But not a scientist, I think. Someone who admires science, and maybe has some training in it, but not who practises it as profession. A good mimic of a scientist, but not the real thing.'

She accepted this, allowing it to meld with her other data. Then she thought to break the formalities. ‘Perhaps we should have a drink some time, John. It's been a while.'

He looked surprised at the suggestion. ‘Yes . . .' A pause. ‘That would be nice.' Another pause. ‘I'm a bit busy at the moment, though.'

‘Of course. Just give me a ring when you're free.'

And so he forgot to tell her about the last testament of Len Barker.

‘Any word from Lancefield?' asked Beverley of Fisher as Eisenmenger walked back to the tent.

‘Nothing.'

Beverley said nothing, but Fisher could recognize bloodlust in her eyes when he saw it.

The results of Eisenmenger's search were ready by the time he had completed describing, dissecting and sampling the previous day's gastrointestinal surgical specimens; it was thankfully brief. In the past three months, there had been only six pleural biopsies – the definitive test for malignant mesothelioma – performed in the county. All of them were men, all between fifty-five and seventy, all of them could have been the headless man from the information that he had, but at least he had six names. His next move was to enter each name into the general hospital database, looking each one up for missed clinic appointments; this produced nothing definitive and he swore quietly to himself. What now?

He asked himself the question, although he knew the answer anyway, just didn't want to have to do it. The database held all the personal details of each patient, including their home phone numbers and he made a note of all of them. He looked at the clock. He was due to begin the post-mortem on the latest victims in three hours; then, using his mobile, he began to phone each one in turn.

FORTY-ONE

L
ancefield was sitting at her desk when Beverley and Fisher returned. She stood up at once, opened her mouth to speak but was doomed never to achieve her objective. Beverley had seen her from across the room and homed in on her much as a kestrel falls upon a dormouse. ‘You. In my office. Now.'

She swept away without a further word and without noticing how haggard her subordinate looked. When Lancefield followed, she was greeted by Chief Inspector Wharton sitting behind her desk, arms diagonally stretched away to its corners, fingers and thumbs braced, while she stared unblinkingly and malevolently at her.

‘Shut the door.' Lancefield did so, then came to stand in front of Beverley's desk; she felt light-headed, almost as if her mind were about to take wing. ‘You should have been at work five hours ago.'

‘I know . . .'

‘You haven't been answering your phone.'

‘I turned it off . . .'

‘We found two more bodies this morning.'

‘Yes, so I understand.'

‘SO YOU UNDERSTAND!!?' The explosion was perfect. She was neither overloud nor strident, nor hectoring; she was merely venomous, incredulous, instantaneous; it came at Lancefield from perfect calm and was all the more effective for it. She was immediately removed from her previous, almost languorous, exhausted numbness. ‘So you understand?' repeated Beverley. Without further pause, she continued, ‘We are in the middle of tracking down the most deranged killer I've ever come across, one who has killed at least six people, possibly more, and in the most degenerate, depraved way it is possible to imagine, and you decide to swan off for hours on end, with no prior warning and remaining completely out of touch. Do you know how unprofessional that is, Lancefield?'

Lancefield found that she didn't care how ‘unprofessional' Chief Inspector Wharton thought it was. She might have gone so far as to say that she didn't give a flying fuck what Beverley Wharton's views on the subject were, but she wasn't to be given the chance, for Beverley had yet to reach the end of excoriating her inspector. ‘I don't know what you were doing, or what you thought you were doing; there is no excuse for this type of behaviour; none whatsoever. There is nothing that can excuse unexplained and ungranted absence during the course of such an important investigation. I don't even care if your mother lay dying, you don't just disappear when you work for me, do you understand?'

Lancefield looked at her superior from eyes that were sore and with a mind that was in shock; she saw someone she despised, someone who could never achieve respect from her, much less become a close colleague. She was there not because she wanted to be, but because she was required by others to be; she owed Beverley nothing.

She had just lost her mother – or rather lost the final husk-like thing that her mother had become over many pain-filled months – and she did not yet understand it; it was a fact but not an emotion; she knew it would not be long before that changed, but at the moment, the knowledge lodged in her brain and was stifled by the tiredness of the long hours she had just spent with her father and the departing, decaying spirit of the woman she had once called ‘mother'.

She ought, she knew, to feel anger at this preposterous woman's preposterous slanders. But she couldn't be bothered. She would soon need to grieve, to negotiate her mourning as best she could, but not yet. Now, she needed to clamber gingerly back on the rocky boat that was normality. But she couldn't think clearly, could hear the words and think the thoughts, but couldn't connect with either of them.

She nodded impassively. ‘I'm sorry, sir.' Then she added before she appreciated the irony, ‘It won't happen again.'

Beverley searched for the sound of contrition in what Lancefield said; she heard almost disconnection, as if she were somehow having trouble concentrating. Was she, Beverley wondered briefly, hung-over? Yes, that was it. The stupid bitch had been on a bender and overslept. If so, there were grounds for formal disciplinary action.

But no. She certainly looked pretty down in the dumps. She would allow her one more chance, she thought. ‘Alright, we'll say no more about it. Talk to Fisher about the latest two bodies. There's a chance they could be mother and daughter, so hopefully easily identified. Go through the missing persons reports in the county, see if there are any candidates. Also, Eisenmenger will probably be doing the autopsy this evening, so I want you there, OK?'