Willing Flesh (41 page)

*

Jombaugh blocks Staffe’s path to the First Aid room, says, ‘She’s adamant.’ Through the grilled window, Staffe can see Sylvie, drowned in thick red blankets, a male nurse on one knee in front of her, administering an injection. She looks up, catches Staffe’s eye and at first it seems she doesn’t recognise him. Her hair is greasy, combed back. Her eyes Balkan hollow and grey-black.

He is appalled with himself, knows he needs to hold her, to tell her he loves her and that he will never allow such a thing to happen again. He pushes past Jombaugh, who says, ‘Be careful what you say to her, Will.’

Staffe pulls open the door, not quite understanding why Jom said what he did. He takes the velvet box from his pocket, removes the emerald pendant and holds it out.

Sylvie shakes her head and, soft as a distant dove, she says, ‘It doesn’t matter what you say, Will.’

Suddenly, he understands what his sergeant meant. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘I’m better on my own. I suppose I should thank you for that.’ She removes the intaglio ring. It seems to take every last drop she has and the nurses look on as if Staffe is some ogre from fables.

He says, ‘You keep it,’ holds out the pendant. ‘I wasn’t lying.’

‘We could be at Dad’s and thinking everything was going to be just fine,’ she says. ‘But you couldn’t. I know that.’ She smiles at him. ‘Someone has saved me, Will. And it’s you.’

Boxing Day

Staffe runs the Castelnau as far as the track to the river, then down stream along the right bank to Putney Bridge. There are no ducks on the Thames. Perhaps it is a family day, on land.

Working his way through the Harbour development, he thinks of all the profit being made, up in Aldesworth, and what that can and can’t buy. He touches the paper he is carrying, tucked down the back of his tracksuit bottoms, damp from sweat, still worth the same, though.

On the Embankment, Parliament behind him now, he sees St Paul’s and the smaller domes of the Thamesbank Hotel. Gary Mulplant will be far, far away, his young wings clipped. Staffe hopes the other young man, Darius A’Court, might have been visited by his mother. He hopes she will never be made to understand her part in his downfall.

He focuses on the Thamesbank’s burnished domes, like something you would see across the Bosphorus, and he sees that beautiful and young woman, pale as death, on the moonlit floor of that hotel room. He never spoke to her, can never understand the depths of her ambition, her realised desires. Elena and Bobo will be flown home. Arabella will be getting lines on her fair face by the time Darius emerges from his sentence.

In the City, he puts in a hundred-stride sprint along Cheapside, collapses through Leadengate’s doors and into Jombaugh’s reception. Panting, he asks for Pennington. Jombaugh nods and Staffe climbs the stairs.

Pennington is looking out on a part of his domain, says, ‘You finally put it to bed, Staffe.’

‘Just the one loose end, sir,’ he says, sitting down, rubbing his quadriceps.

Pennington spins on his chair, raises his eyebrows at Staffe’s sporting attire.

‘What loose end?’

‘The bastard who killed Rebeccah. We will have to see if that confession materialises. You know how these people can go to ground.’

‘These people?’ says Pennington. ‘I guess there are things we will never understand. Do you ever think that there are other worlds, running alongside us? We don’t see them or hear them. We can’t touch them.’

‘We can smell them, sir.’

Pennington opens the drawer to his desk and takes out an envelope, lobs it to Staffe. ‘Pulford brought it in. I read it. Felt I had to, in the circumstances. But I’m showing it you now.’

The envelope is addressed to
DI Wagstaffe, Leadengate Police Station
. Inside, the letter is short and written in an ugly, thin hand.

I, John Parnell, acting of my own volition
and being of utterly sound mind, confess
the lives of Rebeccah Stone and myself.
She was executed for violations against
society and I undertook to kill her
independently. My reasons go to my
grave. Both killings are absolutely a
matter of honour, in ways neither you
nor the legal system can understand. May
God forgive me, and you, and all of us.

John Parnell

25 December 2009

‘You say Pulford brought the letter.’

‘It was in Parnell’s flat. Pulford followed the other one there, but lost him. The body was found in the garden of St Philip Neri, just before midday.’

‘Ironic,’ says Staffe. ‘Suicide is a sin.’

‘He was shot in the head. There were no prints at all on the gun. He wasn’t wearing gloves.’

‘An execution?’ says Staffe.

‘Can this be the end of it?’

‘Not quite,’ says Staffe, standing. ‘But don’t worry. Just one final, private matter, sir.’

‘I heard about Sylvie. I’m sorry, Will. You said you might take a holiday. Where might you go?’

Staffe remembers Stanislav, driving for the port and the vast continent beyond. Sometimes, his world seems so small.

‘Another country,’ he says, leaving.

*

‘You never call,’ says Rosa, standing aside, welcoming Staffe in.

In the lounge, baby Elena bangs her toy pram into furniture. She spits bubbles and her chubby cheeks are impossibly rosy. On his knees, wiggling a doll at her and making her chortle, is the man from the photograph with the Italianate village behind him.

‘This is Mike,’ says Rosa.

Staffe looks for Mike’s wedding finger, sees it is bare. He gives the man the benefit of the doubt and a handshake, his warmest smile.

‘You look terrible, Will,’ says Rosa.

And, true enough, he feels terribly weak, utterly eroded by this case. He puts his hand out behind him, sits back heavily on the sofa. Rosa hands him a glass of water and he sips from it, hears the infant Elena gibbering nonsense.

He pushed too hard, for a woman he didn’t even know, and now he is bereft.

Staffe forces down the water, hands the glass back to Rosa. ‘I can’t stop. I’m going away, but I’ve got something for you. For Elena, really.’

He hands her the envelope marked
PRIVAT
, watches Rosa’s mouth drop open as she sees the bonds.

‘She needs someone to look after her, to be with her, all the time – at least until she goes to school.’

‘This is …’

‘It belongs to whoever holds it. It was Rebeccah’s and now it’s yours. Hold it for Elena. It’s a matter of honour.’

Extract from Book 3 in the D. I. Staffe series

Exclusive extract from the new D. I. Staffe novel

Pain of Death

Publishing May 2011

One

Staffe sinks to his knees, the floor surprisingly warm, here beneath the City. He feels the ground-water leech into his trousers and he leans close to the face of the dying woman. In this false light, her skin is the palest blue, almost neon, and her broken lips are strangely bright, like burst plums. He searches for a glimmer of life but there seems to be none. Then she moans. He could swear she does, so he puts his ear to her mouth. There is nothing, just his own drumming of life, within.

Water drips, seeping all around them. It is cold and the old stone vaults echo the constant murmur of the small generator. A camera clicks, punctuating the buzz of the crime-scene lights.

A paramedic asks Staffe to move away and another stands over the woman, drapes a blanket over her; red. It covers her body, not the face.

‘No,’ says the photographer. ‘I need her the way she was.’

Beneath the blanket, the woman is as she was: naked from the waist down, a cotton dress hoisted up around her breasts. No underwear.

A scene of crime officer in plastic overalls removes the blanket and looks away as the photographer tries to lock the scene, in time.

‘We have to move her,’ says the doctor. She wears red, patent chunky heels and her hair is done up in a swirling twist. Her plastic suit rustles in the subterranean melée and she sounds unsure as to whether she is doing the right thing by moving the woman. The night she had dressed for was in a different, brighter world.

‘You must take her,’ says Staffe, snatching the blanket from the SOCO. As he replaces the blanket, he sees the smears and clusters of blood, some dried, some fresh. It is all over the down curve of her tummy, and her legs, and between. He averts his eyes, too late, ushers the paramedics.

‘We need more time,’ says the photographer.

Staffe grabs the photographer’s camera, says to the doctor, ‘I’m sorry. Please take her away.’

The paramedics lift her onto a stretcher, as if she were a Faberge egg. Written on all their faces is the doomed concentration of people who wish to save lives, who often as not tend the new dead.

The doctor places a hand on Staffe’s elbow, grips it lightly, saying softly, ‘She might be all right. She really might.’

They smile at each other, weak as baby birds.

He watches everybody leave, taking their kit with them: the SOCOs and medics in separate groups. The photographer gives Staffe his dirtiest look.

The Inspector remains in this tunnel the Victorians designed to house the machines to build a line that never was, beneath the Thames. His chest tightens.

Far away, at the bottom of the spiral shaft that delivered them here, the iron door slams shut. It takes the last light and for a moment all Staffe can hear is his own heart. From the dark, distant, a light flickers. It slowly grows larger and as the man comes closer and closer, Staffe thinks he looks like something from Hammer, his eyes intent and narrowed. His bearded jaw juts and his thin lips are dark; a crescent of blood across one cheek. Blood on his hands and his shirt front, too.

This is Asquith, Secretary of the Underground Victorians. Staffe knows he will have to question him, will have to search for a link between Asquith and the dying woman, but this is a Historian. He found the poor, captive and dying woman and called the police. Killers don’t call, and even if they do, they don’t stick around.

‘Strange,’ says Asquith. ‘All my days, I have peered into the past, but this is now, isn’t it? They will come here, to the scene of this murder.’

‘She’s not dead. And how would you know it’s murder?’

‘This will be history.’ Asquith looks as if he can’t quite fathom a common truth, or his father’s name; certainly can’t grasp that he will be a part of somebody else’s visitations.

‘Go,’ says Staffe. He watches Asquith disappear down the tunnel, towards the streets and libraries, the hospitals and homes. Water drips, and the rats constantly scuttle and scratch. They say you are never more than twelve feet from a rat on the London streets. Beneath, you’re amongst them. He tries to imagine what it would have been like for the woman down here.

How long had she been below ground? Who had brought her and why had they done what they did: the blow to the head, the scratch marks on her arms, and all the blood – down
there
, caked on the tops of her thighs and smeared on her stomach. Her lip was lacerated, too. The doctor reckoned the woman had probably bitten through it herself.

He shivers, pulls his jacket tight around him and the tunnel becomes coffin black once again as the light from Asquith’s torch fades completely. The iron door slams shut again. It feels final.