Soul Seeker (5 page)

‘It's not too bad, Clive.' They were eating digestive biscuits, a staple of Clive's mortuary for all the years that Eisenmenger had known him. ‘Not too bad.'

Clive was plugged into all the gossip going in the department and Eisenmenger knew it. He was well aware that no one did or said anything without Clive becoming fairly quickly aware of it; he was well aware also that approximately seventy percent of what Clive learned was completely untrue. He wondered what Clive had heard about him, but was not about to ask him.

‘You sure you're looking after yourself?'

‘I think I am.'

Clive was delving in the bottom of the biscuit barrel, looking for the broken ones. He didn't raise his eyes as he pointed out, ‘I've been meaning to say, you've lost weight.'

To which Eisenmenger replied smoothly, ‘No bad thing, Clive. I was getting podgy.'

Clive didn't respond directly. After dunking half a digestive in his coffee, he said a propos of nothing at all, ‘You've got to send that heart off, don't forget.'

‘I won't.'

A small, not to say microscopic, pause before: ‘Only Dr Sherman's secretary rang yesterday, wondering how things were going.'

He was referring to the death of a man with advance cancer of the maxillary sinus who had been about to undergo radical facial surgery; Charlie Sherman had been the clinical psychologist who had been talking him through the ramifications when he had been found dead in his bathroom. The question was, was it suicide or was it natural causes? Eisenmenger's initial post mortem examination had been inconclusive and the results of toxicology on the autopsy were eagerly awaited. Clive knew well that Eisenmenger and Charlie Sherman were seeing each other socially and knew that they would have discussed the case. ‘I expect she is,' Eisenmenger observed drily. He kept a straight face, knowing that Clive was on a fishing expedition and quite happy to swim around the bait and wait.

Clive nodded. The fax machine in the corner began to chirrup and then to disgorge a message. ‘Settled in nicely, has Dr Sherman,' he said eventually. ‘A very capable psychologist, so I hear.'

Eisenmenger did not bother to reply, thinking to himself that he found it unlikely in the extreme that Clive and others he came into contact with would ever have occasion to discuss the merits of a clinical psychologist.

The buzzer announcing a visitor at the main door interrupted their jousts and feints. When Clive returned it was with the Scenes of Crime officer, replete with obligatory metal briefcase and the weak but unmistakeable odour of fried onions.

Antonia's back was aching. She knew that if she told Andrew he would shake his head and say that the back was the most difficult area of medicine, that they had made more progress in curing cancer than they had in curing backache. Symptomatic relief was all that could be done in most cases; which was all very well, but paracetamol had long since failed to work and even the strongest painkillers she could get off prescription had only a slight and short term effect. So why didn't she go to their family doctor? She could not answer this, but supposed that it was a combination of the lethargy of old age, a suspicion that he would not be able to help much, and . . . something else, something that she could not define, but something that felt very like fear.

She would have to stop gardening for a moment and rest on one of the garden benches that gave a view of the entire lane until it bent sharply to the left some half a mile away. She would have to start thinking about Sunday lunch soon, anyway. From here she could see the council houses, the School House and away up on a hill, Keeper's Cottage where that strange man, Tom Sheldon, lived. She had tried to get to know him, but he had resolutely, and not always politely, resisted all efforts to integrate or be integrated into the village. There was undoubtedly something shifty about him, although she tried not to listen to the sometimes lurid gossip that circulated; she had a fundamentally forgiving and tolerant nature, one that yearned for harmony, and until she saw concrete evidence that he was anything more than unfortunate in his manner and tongue, she would give no credence to tittle-tattle.

She even had time for Ellie Taylor, who was regarded by most of the people in the area as some sort of anti-Christ, or at least a white witch. And, in their eyes, why should they not? She was determinedly an earth mother, who loudly railed against conventional medicine and who picked herbs and plants to brew her own nostrums, who was forever to be heard damning the church, who had been seen wandering through the woods of the estate late at night, some said naked, others naked and painted. Of course, Antonia knew that much of this was exaggeration, that she might not believe in organized religion and the risen Christ, that she preferred to find her own paths through illness, and could see that she was just a very independent young lady who had strong views and liked others to know them. True, she was not particularly well-educated, and she lived entirely off the state, but Antonia had been reared on caring – she had been a nurse when she had met Andrew and one, moreover, that felt she had a vocation – and refused to see superficialities.

The children were, after all, quite nice. Two of them were of ‘mixed race' as she had learned she was now supposed to call them, and the youngest was forever being beset by urinary tract infections and boils, but she did not dislike them because of this. The oldest, Darren, was Josh's age and they had struck up a friendship, which she had encouraged because she was aware that neither she nor Andrew was a substitute for contact with close family life, even if that family did not necessarily conform to social convention.

She had been resting for perhaps fifteen minutes – time seemed to pass so much more quickly these days – when the door to the School House opened and out came Ellie, dressed as usual in a tie-dyed smock and patched cardigan with brightly coloured tights. The children followed, clearly bickering as usual, but it seemed to Antonia that it was in a friendlier, less aggravating way than her own grandchildren did.

‘Hello, Antonia.' Ellie had a nice smile, one that charmed her. She seemed to Antonia to be at base innocent, mistaken in her beliefs, but fundamentally harmless. Antonia stood up with a small effort. ‘Ellie. How are you?'

Whilst the children played around Ellie, she talked over the garden fence with Antonia. ‘Where's Josh?'

‘Andrew took them for a cycle ride. They'll be back in half an hour.'

‘Darren was hoping that Josh would be able to play later on.'

She hesitated. ‘After tea,' she said eventually. Then more certainly, ‘I'm sure that won't be a problem, as long as they're not out too late. Back before nine?' She knew that Ellie often allowed Darren out until well after Josh's ten o'clock bedtime.

‘Oh, yes.' Antonia heard something that might have been insincerity in the reply but she was willing to give her the benefit of the doubt.

Eisenmenger was not a natural showman. He could gain a modicum of pleasure from lecturing and from demonstrating, but it was merely compensation, a small morsel of comfort to help him through the experience. He did not like the idea of making an idiot of himself in front of others, felt always that one or more of them were just waiting for him to suffer a pratfall. Of course, his level of anxiety was inversely proportionate to the knowledge base of his audience and so his not infrequent tête-à-têtes with the police tended to be relatively stress-free. They listened and they accepted, but they rarely argued. This time, though, Beverley, however, was not interested in merely being a passive receiver of his pearls.

‘How can you be sure?' she demanded. ‘That bloody dog has made such a mess of it, I'm not even sure it's human; it could be Neanderthal.'

They were back in the mortuary, standing around the head that had been placed on one of the three dissection tables; of the four of them – she, Eisenmenger, Lancefield and Clive – he felt that only Clive was on his side. ‘I know enough anatomy to be sure of the species, Beverley.'

Eisenmenger had removed the brain and examined it, taking samples but not expecting much to come of this. The only sign that anything had been done was a line of stitching at the back of the scalp.

‘But the gender?'

She had a point. Fido had chewed away most of the right cheek and much of the flesh around the right orbit, including the eye itself. On the left side of the face, there were numerous deep teeth marks and areas where the dog had made tentative bites so that small gobbets of flesh were gone. Eisenmenger admitted, ‘The damned dog must have been hungry.'

Lancefield said with some disgust, ‘Gardner all but starved the poor mutt. Most of the animals on the farm are neglected, some appallingly so; we've informed the RSPCA.'

‘I don't see how you can be sure that this is a male head,' insisted Beverley. ‘The hair has been shaved off, the nose is quite fine, and there's no sign of stubble.'

‘There's no sign of stubble because he had recently shaved, or perhaps been shaved. The hair follicles are definitely of a male type and in a male pattern on the lower face. Add to that there are no ear piercings, the eyebrows aren't plucked and there's no make-up, so I think we can safely assume this belongs to a male of species homo sapiens, even if he wasn't built like the proverbial.'

Lancefield asked, ‘You said he had been recently shaved. He died in the morning then?'

Eisenmenger said, ‘He died after recently shaving or, conceivably, being shaved. That could have happened at any time of the day or night.'

‘Age?'

‘Roughly late fifties, perhaps early sixties. Terrible dentition – the maxillofacial guys are coming in tomorrow to take a formal record. I've plucked hair for DNA so you might strike lucky with the offenders' database.'

It wasn't much; not much at all. Beverley asked, ‘How long has he been dead? How long was the head buried before the dog discovered it?'

She knew what his answer would be – an exemplar of obfuscation – but she had to ask it anyway. He shrugged. ‘Not long.'

‘Which means what? Ten minutes, an hour, a day . . . what?'

In a perfectly reasonable tone, he pointed out, ‘I don't know. I might not be up on the literature, Beverley, but I don't think anyone's ever done the experiment of burying heads in cow shit for differing lengths of time.'

She played her part, asking tiredly, ‘An estimate then?'

He allowed her a smile. ‘Not long at all. Less than a day, possibly less than six hours.'

She let the bone go, but picked up another one immediately. ‘Anything else?'

‘He's been beheaded,' pointed out Eisenmenger.

Lancefield's expression was quite clear.
No shit, Sherlock.
Beverley asked, ‘Anything we don't know?'

‘Beheading people is not as easy as you might assume; cutting through the cervical vertebra can be tricky. One of the reasons it was abandoned as a form of judicial execution was because even the best of axemen tended to take two or three strokes to separate body and head. Clean, single stroke beheading was rare. Similarly, most modern day beheading – that done by terrorists, for example – is not done with a single stroke but with a see-sawing action.'

‘But this wasn't?' guessed Beverley.

At Eisenmenger's request, Clive grasped the head in glove hands and turned it on its side to expose the neck structures. With a biro that Lancefield fervently hoped was going to be soon thrown away, Eisenmenger gestured and explained. ‘This is a single, clean cut. There is no indication of trial cuts; just the one that did the business. Also, examining the edges of the cut structures under a dissecting microscope suggests that the blade was travelling anterior to posterior.'

Lancefield was lost. ‘Meaning?'

‘Front to back. He was looking up as the blade fell.' Lancefield felt sick, whilst Beverley blinked and breathed deeply and slowly. They tried to picture what might have gone on but did not want to. Lancefield asked, ‘And he might well have been conscious, or at least alive?'

He shrugged. ‘Possibly. There's not much I can get for tox from this, Beverley. Hardly any blood and most of that was contaminated. I've kept some brain, though. They may be able to use that. And we'll hopefully get something from the body when it turns up.'

What he meant was, if it turns up, and everybody knew it.

SEVEN

O
ver quite a short time, Josh and Darren had struck up a close friendship, one that had become important to them in the way that is unique to children of their age, that subsumed their whole existence, that was the first and therefore the strongest bond they thought that they would ever form. They were unaware of the eddies and undercurrents around them, of the turbulence caused by friendships and love affairs that crossed the boundaries of invisible yet ever-forceful social strata. Yet, like all such juvenile friendships, they had their secrets; indeed, their relationship was almost built upon them, cemented it, both enabled and imprisoned them within it; liberated them and yet put them happily in chains to it. Thus, their language was shot through with unvoiced messages to each other, non-verbal communications and in-jokes so obscure they were encrypted beyond human ability to decode. When they came together, they entered a world – and that world varied from day to day – that was solely theirs. Unless it was sport – football, cricket, perhaps just catch – usually it was a world of war, or sometimes one of monsters and aliens, occasionally one of police and robbers; they had never thought to play cowboys and Indians, a sign of their times. And they had a wonderful canvas on which to draw their imaginary world, one that consisted not just of their back gardens, but also of the countryside around them.