‘So – easily handled or manipulated.’
‘Very suggestible,’ agreed Petty. ‘But even without someone egging him on, anything is possible. There have been numerous cases of suicides, self-mutilations . . .’
‘Anything else of note?’
‘Yes. I skipped breakfast this morning and I’m starving.’
At that moment Brook’s mobile began to vibrate. ‘John.’ He listened for a moment. ‘I’ll be right there.’
‘Rain check?’ ventured Petty.
Instead of staying to ask if she was American, Brook raised a hand in acknowledgement and headed for the door.
Brook stood staring at the Jaguar. ‘Len’s precious Jag, not even locked.’
‘The keys are in the ignition.’
‘You’ve tried his house and Alice’s.’
‘No sign. She hasn’t seen him.’
Brook moved round to the driver’s door and peered inside. He took out a handkerchief and opened the door and examined the cracked leather seat. ‘You’re right. It’s blood. You checked the boot?’ Noble answered with a mocking eyebrow. ‘Sorry.’
‘You thinking what I’m thinking?’ asked Noble.
‘That maybe someone was waiting here for him and took him.’
‘But who? Yvette?’
‘She had motive and plenty of opportunity,’ said Brook.
‘But
if she was going to abduct or attack him she could have done that at her house and she wouldn’t have had to sleep with him first.’
‘Who then?’
‘Only one other candidate,’ answered Brook. ‘Rusty.’
‘Why?’
‘Because he does have feelings for Yvette and he wants to even the score for her. Wilson’s been dealt with . . .’
‘. . . and now Len’s stopped paying the bills, he’s expendable,’ finished Noble.
‘Get a team over here. Have you canvassed?’
‘Not yet.’
‘Get Cooper to help you.’
‘Not your skill set?’ teased Noble.
‘I promised Gadd I’d run my eye over Lee Smethwick’s boat.’
B
ROOK PARKED NEXT TO THE
Scientific Support van and stepped from the car. The sun was shining and the Trent sparkled invitingly. He checked his watch – two hours until the next broadcast, maybe the final one – then stepped under the police tape. A watching elderly couple billed and cooed their excitement at living so close to a potential crime scene and gaped at Brook in wonder, as though he were the star of a film première.
‘Sir.’ DS Gadd beckoned Brook on to the narrow boat.
‘Jane. Found anything?’
‘A treasure trove of evidence – he’s got books about Egyptian funeral rites, Ancient Egyptian gods, embalming, mummification . . .’
‘All circumstantial – anything linking him to the vagrants?’
Gadd shook her head. ‘Not yet. He knew we were coming. There’s no paperwork and no hint of where he might have gone. Maybe Forensics can turn something up.’
‘You’ve worked up his background?’
‘Yes, sir. Lee Smethwick. Forty-four years old. Originally from Bradford. No wife, no children, no living relatives. He’s widely travelled with the Merchant Marine but that was nearly twenty years ago. One thing – Smethwick has lung cancer and
he found out six months ago that it was terminal.’
‘Sounds like a trigger.’
‘He’s got a year at most.’
‘The same as most of his victims,’ said Brook. ‘No criminal record, you said.’
‘No.’
‘Work record?’
‘Varied. He doesn’t seem to stay in jobs longterm. He’s worked as a chef at Derby College for the past year and before that, cooking at various pubs. He did a turn at Rolls-Royce ten years ago. Not in the kitchens though. He’s a qualified engineer, which may explain something we found on the boat.’
‘Show me.’
She ushered Brook through the only door. The boat was sparsely furnished befitting the single male – a shelf of books, a sofa which doubled as a bed, a small television, a stove and a tiny galley. Dominating the middle of the cabin was a table with a scale-model of some kind of building on it. Gadd walked over to it.
‘A model of a building,’ said Brook.
‘Yes, sir, but here’s the interesting part.’ She pointed at a doorway on the model which had a small rectangular piece of stone balanced on its end in front of it. The stone was held up by an intricate web of string which was trapped under another small block of stone, itself balanced over a hole. ‘Watch.’ Gadd removed a pin from a small hessian pouch, containing sand. The sand began to trickle out into the hole beneath the second stone. As the hole filled, the pressure of the rising sand increased on the second stone until it was lifted sufficiently to allow the string to be freed, thus lowering the first stone across the doorway. ‘Wherever he is, we think Smethwick may be
intending to seal his victims inside the building.’
‘As well as himself.’
‘Sir?’
‘The Ancient Egyptians sealed burial chambers from the inside,’ said Brook. ‘To thwart grave robbers. Usually a priest would sacrifice himself along with hundreds of slaves, who would then accompany the Pharaoh to the afterlife to do his bidding.’
‘Ah. That explains the film poster,’ she said, nodding behind Brook’s head. ‘I Googled it and it’s about precisely that.’
Brook turned. His eyes swept around the room until they alighted on the poster for a film starring a young Joan Collins. Brook’s mouth fell open.
Land of the Pharaohs
. He checked the spellings in his head. There was no mistake.
Len Poole woke with a bad back and a splitting headache. He raised his head gingerly to look over at his bedside clock. It wasn’t there. Then he remembered. The clock was at his bedside but he wasn’t.
He moved his left arm but knew without looking that his watch was gone and he dropped his head back with the thud of a ripe melon. Shockwaves of pain surged through his skull and he reached delicately back to feel the bruising and what felt like dried blood matted in his hair.
Day or night, he couldn’t tell – just that it was black as pitch wherever he was. He moved his hands around his head and massaged his neck where most of the pain was centred. Then he felt around his immediate surroundings – his bed was hard and unforgiving. He sat up and felt around some more. He was lying on cold tiles on some kind of raised plinth. He could hang his leg off the side and just touch the floor.
Poole
lifted his head again, this time ignoring the pain. He swung his legs down over the edge of the slab and held out his arms like a blind man to feel his way through the blackness. A few yards away he stubbed his toe against a hard object and felt the cold tiles of a similar plinth to his own. He groped his hands warily around the slab. Something covered in cloth lay on it. He shrank back – his muscle memory told him it was a body.
He took a breath and felt again. He found the hands crossed on the chest. He felt for the face and rubbed his fingers together after touching it. Some kind of waxy substance had transferred itself from the skin. There was a hint of perfume. Poole guessed it was some form of mortician’s preservative or cream mixed with cosmetics for use in embalming bodies. He was in some kind of mortuary, a house of the dead. He knew about those. What worried him most was that he had his own slab.
He realised with a feeling of dread that he must be in the lair of The Embalmer, the sicko he’d read about in the papers, fighting in vain for space with the Deity case. There’d been an appeal at the end of a Deity press conference and they’d shown an artist’s impression. The man who’d attacked him must be The Embalmer and this was where he did his grisly work.
Poole damped down the rising panic – he had to find a light. Groping his way around the cadaver, Poole’s left foot and knee hit something heavy. It fell with a smash and a splash and Poole fell with it, landing in a foul-smelling unction of soft spongy matter which covered his hands and knees.
A second later the smell of rancid meat and pungent salts hit his nostrils, followed by something far worse – the knowledge of what he’d fallen in.
In
his fever to get away, his hands slipped on soft, slimy objects which he realised were organs. He cast them away as he scrabbled backwards from the stench – kidneys, lungs maybe, and the shape and texture of the intestine was unmistakable. Worse, as he scrambled for distance between himself and the viscera, the intestine wrapped itself around his feet until he could wriggle his way no further without unravelling the offending gristle from his ankles.
He tried to hold back the rising dread but now he screamed long and loud – to no avail. And when he fumbled his way, hands and knees across the slimy floor, broken shards of pottery lacerated his leathery palms.
Finally he sat motionless amongst the stinking wreckage of a former human being, trying to protect his damaged hands and sobbing as the vile moisture began to soak through his tracksuit to his buttocks.
Brook fumbled for his phone on the narrow deck. As he plucked it from his pocket, it began to vibrate.
‘John.’
‘Sir, we’ve found a witness who saw what happened to Len last night. We were right. He was abducted.’
Brook received the information without answering.
‘Are you there, sir?’
‘I’m here, John.’
‘And you’ll never guess what the abductor was driving.’
Brook emitted a short, noiseless laugh. ‘Was it an ambulance, by any chance?’
There was a pause at the other end before Noble rejoined,
‘How do you do that?’
‘It’s one case, John. Smethwick and Rusty. They’re working together.’ Brook closed his eyes and shook his head. ‘Live
Forever. They’re going to embalm those kids and then they’re going to mummify them. Like Tutankhamun. The tramps were just practice so they could do a good job on their perfect young bodies.’
‘And Len?’
‘Not sure, but Poole’s a pathologist. Maybe they need him for some reason.’
‘He might still be alive then. How did you find out?’
‘I found the missing poster from Rusty’s bedroom.
Land of the Pharaohs
. It’s about sealing a dead Pharaoh safely in his tomb. Rusty knew it would tip us off so he took it down and gave it to Smethwick to keep. It’s hung on the wall of his canal boat.’
‘Jesus. What do we do?’
‘We find them before it’s too late.’ Brook rang off.
They’re dead, you know
. Gadd was suddenly beside him. ‘Did you catch that?’ She nodded. ‘Find out everything there is to know about Smethwick. Everything. I don’t care how far back you go. He’s near and we’ve got to know where he’s gone because that’s where Adele and the others are.’
Poole sat with his head bowed, trying to block out the stench of human remains with the bloody handkerchief tied around his face. It wasn’t that he hadn’t experienced such smells before, just that he’d always done so in the relative comfort of his air-conditioned, temperature-controlled Pathology lab.
Here, in the darkness, he tried to shut down all the senses he didn’t need, keeping his eyes closed and relying on his ears for sensory input. Unfortunately they registered every squelch as he shifted his position. But then his ears told him that he
might have a bigger problem than the odour of human remains. Rats.
He heard them first. Only one, then another and then another darting around to investigate the smorgasbord of offal that Poole’s clumsiness had provided. His hearing became supercharged, picking up every scurry, every squeal as the rodents went about their foul business gnawing on the bloody banquet. There were other sounds that kept him alert, gave him hope. He’d heard a distant rhythmic thud from time to time that seemed to come from the bowels of the earth. It suggested some kind of building work in progress though it never lasted more than half an hour.
He also fancied he could hear someone groaning, but not out of pain or fear but the effort of some unknown hard labour. This was always followed by a hacking cough. At least someone was near, and this gave him hope.
Training his ears on his immediate situation, however, didn’t bring comfort. The increasing volume of curious rodents confirmed his worst fears and he pressed himself nervously against the cold wall. First contact was when he felt a nuzzling against his trousers and kicked out, giving rise to an intense screech that only served to amplify the sense of urgency amongst the other bustling rodents, dashing this way and that. Something ran across his hand and he pulled them both across his chest for protection, but still they kept coming. Another ran up his leg and showed no disinclination to get off until Poole flung a hand in its direction, receiving a nip on the knuckle for his trouble.
‘Please God. Not like this. I don’t deserve it. Please.’
To his horror a rat then dropped down on to his head and squealed loudly when Poole battled to disentangle it from his
wiry thatch. Enduring the bites, he grappled with its slick furry body and quick tail, trying to get a grip before extricating its talons from his tonsure. Finally his grip locked and he flung the beast against the far wall with a piercing shriek. The rat’s colleagues, however, were not discouraged and Poole became increasingly frantic as four, five, six of them mounted their challenge for fresh meat.
‘Please God.’
At that moment a large vertical bar of dazzling white light opened on to Poole, widening rapidly to illuminate the stark and bloodied vault in which he sat. The rats scampered back to the sanctuary of dark corners and Poole felt emboldened to scramble to his viscera-flecked feet, gazing all the while at the radiance beyond. The intensity of the light dipped as a figure with an elongated head stepped in front of the beam. For a split second, Poole wondered if he were encountering an alien.
‘God is listening, Anubis,’ said a man’s gravelly voice. Poole saw a hand held out towards him holding a shepherd’s crook. ‘Fear not, mortal. I wear the Atef Crown of Osiris. Come.’
‘Do we know if it’s the same ambulance?’ asked Charlton back in the Incident Room.
‘Not for sure,’ said Brook. ‘But it is.’
‘But if they changed the number-plates, it’s not going to get picked up, is it?’ snapped Charlton. He looked at his watch. ‘Five minutes to broadcast. You think Rusty met Smethwick at college?’