Church of Sin (The Ether Book 1) (9 page)

Chapter 20

Deep underground in the basement of the City Hospital where the dead were filed, Ernst Stranger had spent the last fifteen minutes pacing
frantically up and down. Occasionally, he dared to glance at the dreadful thing he had unveiled inside a bag that should have contained the body of young, dead girl. He had managed to get his breathing under control and was now trying to work out what to do next.

In ordinary circumstances, Ernst was supposed to report any abnormality to his line manager. In two years, he had done that only once, when he was left with the body of an old man who died from cancer. Ernst had noticed cuts on the wrist and wondered whether anyone else had spotted them.

But Ernst wasn’t supposed to look at the bodies.

Ernst was supposed to just tag them, store them and log them on to the hospital database.  Ernst had been shouted at that day. He had almost lost his job. Ernst didn’t want to lose his job.
Not again. And the shouting reminded him of the school bullies. He had cut deep into his skin that day. So what else was he supposed to do?

Also, what if this was something to do with him? What if someone knew what he was doing down here in this decaying isolation? What if someone knew about his... his fondness for his subjects? So they sent him a message. A joke, maybe. That was possible. Telling people about it meant he would be caught out. So he wouldn’t tell. He wouldn’t.

Finally, there was also the question of the tag and the message written on it.

Ernst peaked under the bag for the fifth time, hoping desperately that this time he would see the corpse of a young girl and not the
mangled wreck of flesh that stared back at him the first time around.

It was a dog, he thought. But its body had been so savagely ripped open that it was no longer recognisable as a dog. It was putrid. An eyeball had been squeezed out of its socket and a large chunk of flesh had been torn away from the creature’s mouth exposing its yellow teeth in a permanent, menacing grin.

He hadn’t noticed it, but he had dug so deeply into the scratch on his neck that fresh blood was freely trickling down the back of his shirt. Fortunately, he wore a dark blazer that covered up most of the mess he was making. The pain brought him a little comfort but not much. On the fifth time he looked at the dead dog, he noticed a green tag stuck to one of its hind legs that had been snapped awkwardly backwards. He quickly snipped the tag off and studied it. It simply had a name and a mobile telephone number on it and the words, “Property of...” written in red italics above. The handwriting was quite beautiful.

Ernst spent a long time studying the message. The name meant nothing to him but he couldn’t help feel that somehow he had no choice but to – what? – dial the number?

In Ernst Stranger’s head, things started to take shape.

He picked up the phone and dialled.

It rang twice before a gruff female voice answered.

“Yes?”

“Amanda Harker?”

“Yes.”

“I’ve got your dog here.”

Chapter
21

Alix hadn’t notice her hand grip Ash’s arm tightly.

The sound of the flesh flies feeding on the dead enveloped around her. They were the first on the scene. Flocking in their hundreds to the feast.

Alix had never smelt death before but she knew what it was. Our ancestors had no other way of protecting themselves against disease than interpreting the chemical reactions in their brains associated with the smell of death as something
bad
, something to be avoided. That same response survives today and it is the reason why death is instantly recognisable to us even when sensed for the first time.

It was repulsive and she clasped her hand to her mouth and
felt her stomach churn violently.

The pile of bodies was stacked before the altar. Man and woman
dumped unceremoniously on each other in a bloody mass of mangled flesh. Their clothes had been torn from their bodies. Dried blood stained every exposed limb; every bulging, fat stomach; every repugnant wound. The bodies were so tightly packed in the human pyre that it was impossible to tell what appendage belonged to what torso; what foot to what leg; what head to what neck. Areas where deep wounds had been opened revealed parts of organs, intestine, tissue and muscle. The victims appeared to have been horribly mutilated before being dumped together.

Alix
’s eyes glazed over and she thought for a moment that she might faint. Nothing could have prepared her for the rush of fear and horror that had jolted her so intensely and so intimately. She found it difficult to focus on any particular part of the macabre jumble of cadavers. To her, it just looked like one pulsating, deformed entity; an indistinguishable mass of pinks, whites, reds and purples. Occasionally, part of a face peered out, the expression contorted in the way that a face would contort when staring through into the valley of Hell. An automated response flickered at the back of her mind. It was a statement, a bold and unequivocal statement.

She collapsed on
a pew and slid towards the far end of the building. She had wrapped her arms tightly around her as if in some way it protected her from the revulsion she had witnessed. The sudden force of sitting down, the blood rushed from her head and the feeling of nausea overwhelmed her. She bent forward and vomited. 

Ash had stood beside the final pew staring blankly at the pile of naked bodies for several minutes before speaking. Keera had been right. He had never seen anything like this.

“Does anyone else know about this?”

“Not as far as I know.”

“Get on the radio and get me as many people up here as you can. I want roadblocks stopping all access to this village. I want warrants to search every house, farm, shed and building. I want a forensics team. I want Maurice Reid leading it and I want the coroner here. I want a list of every resident in this Hell-hole and I want some identification to start.”

Keera nodded and turned to walk away before stopping and l
ooking at him over her shoulder.

“By the way,
your girlfriend spewed on a pew.”

Chapter 22

“I’m sorry,” she said
, slightly out of breath. “It was the smell.”

Ash had led her out to the porch where there was some shelter from the wind. He put his hand on her shoulder, examined her face. She looked very small and pale all of a sudden
. He resisted the urge to put his arm around her. PC Fenn was sat on the other side looking just as pale but at least he was managing to drink from a bottle of water.

“You okay?”
Ash asked.

“Ye
ah, I’m fine.” She smiled wanly, liking the fuss but not liking the fuss. Then suddenly she felt guilty. Ash needed to be doing his job, not sitting with her.

“O
kay. I need to get hold of the DCI. You gonna’ be okay for a moment?”

“Yes. I’ll be fine.” She felt relieved he wasn’t lingering.

He touched her arm lightly; she felt the contact and smiled. He disappeared out into the snowstorm, phone already at his ear.

She looked around the porch. At the faded newsletters with pictures of smiling children, at
the leather-bound hymn books discarded in the corner. Everything was caked in dust. Above the arch over the interior doors, some wording had been carved into the stone. The work was crude, the letters jolty and misplaced:

Damn the flesh that depends on the soul. Damn the soul that depends on the flesh.

She considered it for a while but the scripture meant nothing to her. Religion had always held a strange position in Alix’s life. Her mother had been Catholic, her father indifferent. Their differing views had caused a strain in their marriage anyway. And Zara was the last exertion of force that snapped the wires holding them altogether. It wasn’t long before her mother succumbed to illness and drifted away, both physically and emotionally from all of them. She filled her time in between asking God why her child had been taken from her. Asking for her to be returned. It was her father who had led the campaign for Zara’s return. Press conferences, interviews, appeals for information, charity events, private investigators. There was even talk of a book deal at one point. Thank goodness he never went through with it. But for all the time that Vaughn Franchot invested trying to find his youngest daughter, he let his eldest slip quietly away from him.

She felt stupid, annoyed with herself for causing a scene.
She was supposed to be helping and so far she had pissed off a leading Q.C., stormed out of her first meeting with her new boss, got them all taken off a high profile job and puked up on a crime scene.

“Good start,” she mumbled under her breath.
The mistake, perhaps, was drinking that can of Dr Pepper this morning.

She sighed heavily, knowing that she would have to go back into the church if she were to salvage any dignity from today. Keera Julian brushed past her as if she weren’t even there as she walked to the back of the church.
She slurred something inaudible as she past. It was unlikely to be a compliment on her dress sense, Alix concluded.

From the back of the church, the human pyre loomed high above the altar like some deformed demon, a mash of mangled flesh fused together with congealed blood and gristle. A few tortured faces were visible, their eyes seemingly locked on to her. It was just her and the bodies. And the flies.

She approached the front of the church apprehensively, pausing a moment at the crossing. The bodies were piled in front of the altar, in an area of the church known as the apse. To her left and right the church building hollowed out into two rooms – the north and south transept – to form the cross. She took a deep breath and stepped beyond the final pew, walked forward, close enough to reach out and touch.

Wedged through the centre of the pyre, hung inanimately over the edge,
was a boy of no more than fourteen. There was a deep gouge under his neck. Alix put her hand up to him. She had no intention of touching but she felt that she needed to acknowledge this child in some small way other than by staring at him. The cut was deep enough to have killed him. And yet it was clean, meticulous. Surgeon quality.

Execution. Not the work of a psychopath. Or at least not one who was completely out of control.

She shivered. The boy must have a family; parents; people he loved; people who loved him. Now he was no more different than the meat in a butcher’s window. She swallowed hard, brushed the flies from her face and knelt down so she was level with him.

“Who did this to you?” she whispered.

She looked further in; the face of the boy blurred as her eyes refocused to the distance. The altar was splattered with blood. Defiling the altar: a metaphor for the disobedience of God. But there was nothing metaphoric about what had happened here. Symbolic perhaps, but not metaphoric. It was a challenge to God’s power. The church was not just a convenient forum to accommodate this act, she thought. It was the very purpose of it.

“Beautiful isn’t it?”

Alix jumped. She hadn’t heard Keera Julian walk up behind her but she stood now at the crossing, her arms folded defensively, her thin lips tightened and creased.

“Beautiful?” said Alix, bemused. She watched as the older woman walked round, appearing at the other side of the pyre close enough so the smell of cigarettes was stronger than the stench of the bodies. 

“You don’t appreciate it? The art of killing, I mean. I find that... difficult to believe, you being a criminal shrink and all.”

There was something distasteful about the way that Ke
era spoke that put Alix on edge. She could feel the hairs on the back of her neck react as she drew nearer, like a serpent drawing in on its prey.

“No, I don’t appreciate this,” she said firmly.

“Interesting. What’s your book:
Inside the Criminal Mind
?”

“Ye
ah. Have you read it?”

“No. Too busy
catching
criminals. No time to try and guess what haircuts they might have.”

“You should read it. Probably make you better at catching them.”

She snorted loudly, a sort of forced, unpleasant noise. “You don’t get it you academics, do you? You waste so much precious time trying to
understand
what makes a murderer tick. It’s all bullshit. What makes them tick is that they like killing people and you try to justify that for us by linking it back to their childhood and whatever.”

“Hey, I didn’t ask for this conversation,” Alix pointed out, throwing up her hands and holding Keera’s gaze. Their eyes locked for a second before Keera turned swiftly away.

“Don’t get in my way,
doctor
,” she called back.

She was out of the door quickly and Alix was left alone again with the bodies.

“Building bridges,” she said quietly to herself. “Good start, kid.”

Chapter 23

Parkview Abbey had been in Ephraim Spec
k’s family for four generations although Ephraim, or Eph as most people knew him, was the first to have actually taken up residence there since the house was first acquired by his great-grandfather, Hanns Speck. The Speck family had a long and complicated history. They were predominantly German and, although Eph had lived in Parkview Abbey almost his entire life, he had retained a noticeable hint of his ancestry in his voice.

The house was not an abbey at all but the name
referred to the ruins of an ancient monastery in the grounds. It was built in the late eighteenth century and acquired by Hanns Speck in 1868 but, sensing a change in the political attitude to their heritage, the Specks moved back to Germany at the outbreak of the First World War. The Abbey was left in the hands of friends and cared for until Eph’s return as a young man in 1970.

Eph jokingly referred to the period
when the Specks lived in Germany as an exile but his quip was only partially mocking. Some family members were rumoured to have supported the Nazi party. There were close links between Eph’s father and Hitler himself. But mercifully those were matters that, generally, no longer haunted Eph.

Eph would always tell people that the house looked a lot grander than it actually was. The sweeping driveway through the elms meant it wasn’t visible from the road. The frontage spread out across a gravelled courtyard
which twisted round the west wing and lead to a set of underground garages. Few visit but those that did would find a varied collection of automobiles – from an old Triumph motorbike to a DB9.

But
despite its illustrious past, Parkview Abbey had never accepted a guest as mournful and dishevelled as Megan Laicey.

Eph had discharged the remaining full time staff some years ago in an effort to maintain more independence in his twilight years and so had set about the task of cooking up a meal of baked beans and poached egg on toast himself. When he delivered the tray into the small reception room where Megan was, he found her sat on the edge of the sofa, her hands underneath her bottom, staring at a blank TV. Her face was expressionless. She still hadn’t spoken a word.

“Hello, Megan,” Eph said with as much brightness as he could muster.

She didn’t acknowledge him. She just sat there, looking at the blank screen.

“I’ve brought you some tea.” He set the tray down next to her. He knew that when he would come back into the room later the tray would be untouched but he had decided that that alone did not justify him not being a good host. He couldn’t imagine her pain. Megan and Katelyn Laicey had spent their lives not knowing who their families were or why they had been abandoned. The only consistency they had in their lives was each other. And now she didn’t even have that. But of course it was deeper than just the loss of her sister. It was the loss of herself.

“I’ll just leave this here for you.”

He flicked on the TV; he knew it was pointless, that everything he did for her was meaningless. But it gave him a little comfort knowing that he had tried.

For a second or two, the image of Katelyn’s face flooded the screen. Eph had seen it before. It was a picture of her from when she was at St Clair’s, the orphanage in Bristol. It must have been a news bulleti
n about her dreadful murder. He fumbled with the remote and quickly changed the channel.

He found some channel that appeared to show only children’s television programmes and pocketed the remote.

“You’re safe now, Megan,” he said to her. He knew it wasn’t true and that Megan was already dead. She was nothing more than an empty, fragile little shell.

“Keep her safe, Eph,”
Harker had told him.
“You know what’s at stake here.”

And he did.

Only too well.

He had prepared for it his entire life.

Outside, the rain had washed away a lot of the snow that covered the ground. Parkview was set deep in the wilderness of the Lincolnshire Wolds, a far cry from where the worst of the winter weather had hit the south west.

That was why there were no tracks leading from the main road to the Abbey’s grounds.

That was why the malevolent eyes that appraised the mansion from the cold had so far not been seen.

But when Eph picked up the phone and found the line dead, he knew instantly that he and Megan were not alone.