Desecration (18 page)

Since he was still in police custody, Jamie knew that his flat would be empty. She was determined to find out more on his sources for the bodies he worked on and the mysterious buyer for the naked female sculpture. Tugging her leather biker’s jacket tighter around her, Jamie pulled a pair of thin gloves from her pocket. Slipping them on, she flexed her fingers and then rubbed her hands together. The night was cold and Jamie felt light-headed, her body fevered, running hot and cold. The tears had finally dried up, to be replaced by anger and determination. The thought of someone using Polly’s body in an artistic collection of mutation made her want to vomit. It was an abomination.

She was about to commit a crime by breaking in, but Jamie understood the risks she was taking. She could lose her job or even face charges if discovered, but right now, it felt like her life was over anyway. She would leave her colleagues to pursue Polly’s case in the legal fashion, but she needed to follow the less respectable route, as time was critical. This had to be connected with her own investigation of the Jenna Neville case, and perhaps, in finding Polly, she could also bring Jenna’s killer to justice.
 

Arriving at the flat, Jamie blocked the view of the lock with her body and, without looking around, picked it to gain access. There was no elaborate security at the studio. Why bother when no one would want to steal the dead bodies Day-Conti worked on, but then why steal Polly’s body, she thought. Rage bubbled again and Jamie’s face hardened with resolve.
 

Inside the flat she put on a head torch, the powerful beam stretching all the way to the high ceilings of the warehouse space. The hum of a generator pulsed gently in the background, keeping the remains cool. The smell of death seemed stronger now, disinfectant barely hiding decay. Jamie imagined the naked body of the decapitated young woman lying behind the panels, alone in the dark. She shuddered, imagining the flesh reanimated, body lurching blindly for a weapon to avenge her mutilation. Jamie shook away the thoughts. These bodies were dead flesh, preserved as an echo of reality, with not a shred of humanity left. What had defined those people was gone, back to the stars and the earth.
 

Jamie shone the torch back to the staircase that led to Day-Conti’s living space. How the man could live in such proximity with the dead, she didn’t know, for the smell must impregnate his clothes and his skin. Jamie padded across the floor and up the stairs, freezing as a creak echoed through the space. But no sound came after, no answering noise, so she continued upwards. At the top, she opened the door into the living area. Incense, some kind of heavy patchouli, hung in the room, disguising the smell of the dead but pungent with its own depth of scent. Jamie wrinkled her nose. Perhaps Day-Conti had damaged his sense of smell with all the preservatives. Jamie tried to imagine Jenna here, their intimacy amongst the dead. What had she been thinking? Had she been pursuing a similar goal in trying to discover the origin of the bodies and who wanted such specimens? Or had she really loved him?
 

Shining the torch around, Jamie could see the place was sparse and minimalist, with a basic desk in the corner and a second-hand filing cabinet against one wall. Jamie pulled it open, using her head torch to illuminate the thin folders within. One held clippings, with articles on the New York Bodies exhibition, interviews with practitioners of the plastination process and controversies over provenance of the bodies. Another file contained receipts, thrown haphazardly into paper envelopes marked with the month of spend. Jamie opened one and thumbed through the paper, looking for where Day-Conti bought his materials. The vendor of the plastics could be a lead, so she snapped a picture on her smart phone and replaced the receipt.

Jamie opened another file. In it were five separate sheets, each one an order form for an unspecified piece of art. There was only one name, Athanasia Ltd, and as the item would be picked up by courier from the warehouse, there was no delivery address. The company name rang a bell and Jamie Googled it on her smartphone. Athanasia, meaning the quality of being deathless or immortality. She took more pictures.
 

Pulling more files from the cabinet, Jamie discovered notes on different artistic projects, records and photos of stages of the plastination process for each artwork. She laid them out on the desk, scanning pages, and replacing each as she processed them. She flicked open one folder and stopped suddenly, appalled by what she saw. It was a child, no more than ten years old. A boy with deformities of the spine and twisted limbs was posed naked on a metal table that Jamie recognized as the one downstairs where the woman now lay. In the first picture the boy was lying, eyes closed, almost sleeping, as if he could wake up. The next picture showed the body turned onto its front, the spine dissected so as to demonstrate his deformity more clearly.

Jamie gulped for air, feeling the rise of vomit as her stomach clenched at the violation of the child. Seeing a door off the main room, she barged through it into a tiny bathroom. She fell to her knees, holding the toilet bowl as she heaved the meager contents of her stomach out, shaking with the effort as her head spun. She retched again, the sound reverberating around the flat and then she was dry heaving, her stomach spasming.
 

Finally Jamie lay down on the floor, placing her aching head on the cool tiles, waiting for the tremors to pass. The image of the dissected spine hovered in front of her eyes and she wished she could go back and un-see it. That little boy was tortured in life with disease and then mutilated in death. And to what end? Did the same people have Polly’s body, because that close up of the spine could have been her daughter’s. Jamie wished for a moment that Day-Conti was here and her hands clenched into fists at how she would teach him some respect for the dead.

Pushing herself up from the floor, Jamie took some deep breaths. She swilled her mouth out with water from the tap, and spat into the toilet, flushing the evidence away and pouring bleach down after it. She wiped the floor tiles with disinfectant and toilet paper and flushed that too.
 

Walking back into the main room on unsteady legs, Jamie snapped some photos of the image of the little body, trying to separate her emotions from what she was seeing. This was evidence, and this boy was dead. It wasn’t torture when the body was no longer alive, was it? Jamie replaced the files into the filing cabinet, careful to put them back in the right order. She shone the torch around the room again, preparing to leave, and the light flickered on a photo in a frame next to the bed. Rowan and Jenna, lit by the summer sun, sitting by Camden Lock and eating ice-cream. Rowan’s arm was around her shoulders and Jenna’s smile was wide, natural and at ease. Jamie felt sure that he wasn’t responsible for her murder. He might well be guilty of other crimes, but not this one, and she wondered again what strings Cameron had pulled to get him arrested while the Nevilles walked free.
 

Next to the photo was a diary, just a small one, easily overlooked. Jamie picked it up and opened it to the past week. Day-Conti had TG as a regular Friday night appointment and sometimes TG O. TG must be Torture Garden, the club that Day-Conti frequented, but who was O, and would they be there tonight? Jamie looked at her watch. Just before midnight. She replaced the diary next to the bed and slipped down the stairs into the night.
 

Chapter 17

Jamie cruised past the entrance to Torture Garden, slowing down on her bike to get a look at the crowd entering the club. Everyone was dressed up or carried bags, presumably with costumes, that were being searched by the bouncers. Parking a few streets away, Jamie used the mirror on the bike to apply heavy kohl eye makeup, and for good measure, did her lips in black as well. She let her hair swing loose. With pale, feverish skin and deep shadows under her eyes, she looked ghoulish, and black leather suited any occasion. Polly wouldn’t like this look, she thought, and a lance of pain thrust through her with the realization that her daughter would never judge her outfit again.
 

Pushing the heaviness aside, Jamie tried to assume the persona of a sexy party-goer. She tried a smile in the mirror, knowing she had to get into the club because it was the only place she had left to go. Still no good, she thought. She pulled off her biker’s jacket and took off her long-sleeve t-shirt, revealing her black bra underneath. She’d lost weight with the last few months of worry, but she still had enough cleavage to attract some attention. It would have to do. She pulled the jacket back on and strode towards the club.
 

Torture Garden was one of the world’s largest fetish and body art clubs, a place where people could indulge in fantasy and experiment on the edge of extremity. Sex had been the last thing on Jamie’s mind over the last few years of Polly’s illness. There were moments in tango when she felt the thrill of attraction, pressed against a hard body and reveling in the intensity, but that ended when the dance finished. This place was a little outside her comfort zone, but then she was only here to hunt for those who might know Rowan Day-Conti. She had his more recent mugshot in her pocket, but she was aware that this wasn’t the kind of place where people wanted to talk to the police. She was here as a seeker, and right now, she felt on the edge of her own sanity. Jamie looked around at the queue of people and thought that perhaps this was exactly where she belonged.
 

With not much more than a cursory look at her revealing outfit, the bouncers waved Jamie through. She walked into the club as dance music pumped through the atmosphere, making her heart beat in time. Jamie bought a bottled beer and stood on the edge of the dance floor, watching the crowd. There were plenty of people in skin-tight rubber, many with cutouts revealing nipples and buttocks. Couples gyrated in suspended cages, some simulating sex, others presumably doing it while dominatrixes prowled, whipping gimps in face masks. Women danced in little more than string, bound flesh poking from their bonds, but nothing was shocking about the BDSM scene anymore. Most of these people were bankers, lawyers and consultants in the city, taking pleasure in the slick darkness and then returning to work the next day with their secrets intact.
 

The perfection of the human body was on show, along with every variation on the spectrum of bizarre. Once the eye was used to so much flesh, nudity wasn’t interesting anymore and the eye wandered. Jamie was more interested in the people who had crossed the line into true fetishism. A fat man wrapped in Mummy-style bandages stood at the edge of the dance floor, a parody of plastic surgery, dotted lines drawn over the bandages and blood seeping through the female pubic hair drawn over the groin area.
 

A figure close to Jamie in the full ruffles of Elizabethan dress turned towards her and she saw that the face was an alien mask, a vertical gaping mouth with razor teeth and no eyes, just purple bleeding flesh. Jamie couldn’t help but shrink back as a woman in a latex SS officer’s uniform pressed herself against the alien creature, her breasts pushed up, nipples revealed by artful holes. Jamie watched the figure’s hand go under the woman’s short skirt and begin to thrust and rub. She turned away, not wanting to watch the strange coupling as the music faded to a backbeat and then segued into an oriental track.
 

The crowd turned towards a central stage as the lights dimmed. A spotlight focused on a naked woman standing with her back to the audience, her hands wrapped around a shining silver pole. The bulbous head of an octopus inked in pitch dominated her back with its tentacles winding around her body. The music lifted and she began to dance. As she undulated, the octopus seemed to be moving her limbs, as if she were a puppet unable to escape its grasp. One tentacle wrapped up around her neck, entwining in her hair, another draped around her waist and dipped down between her buttocks. The work was intricate, each sucker on every tentacle finely drawn, the craftsmanship breathtaking. This was truly using the body as a showcase for art, a canvas for creation. Jamie thought how daring the woman must be, to use her body in this way, to make it a physical display and allow people to judge her.
   

As the woman turned in a slow dance, the full extent of the tattoo was revealed. More tentacles circled her small, tight breasts, one curving around a nipple and the other seemingly caressing the underside. The woman lifted her arms towards the audience, offering herself and it seemed the limbs of the octopus moved with her. One tentacle caressed her stomach and wound down between her legs, tattooed as if it penetrated her there.
 

The woman used the pole to swing her body up and then hang upside down, stretching her legs wide apart into splits. She tilted her hips towards the audience, showing that she was fully tattooed between them, her sex hairless but black with ink. Jamie could only imagine the pain that this woman had gone through to have her body marked this way, yet there was a surprising lightness in her face as she danced. She wore only pale makeup, keeping the attention on her body, but the slight lines around her eyes suggested that she was in her mid-thirties. Her hair was pixie-cropped, almost white and cut close to her skull. She kept her eyes closed, almost as if she were dancing for an unseen god instead of this hungry crowd. There was a brutal sexuality in the perfection of her body under the lights, but in her face there was only peace. Jamie felt a strange pang of jealousy. This woman was free of expectations, behaving as she wanted and empowered to use her body as she desired. The liberation must be extraordinary, and Jamie felt humbled by the gift that this woman offered, a glimpse into another way of living. Her own freedom seemed so far out of reach.
 

As the music rose to a crescendo, the woman draped herself away from the audience, leaving the spotlight on the head of the octopus on her back. Jamie presumed that this must be O, the name from Day-Conti’s notebook and she was determined to meet her. As the music ramped up the beat and the floor thronged with dancers, Jamie edged around the club toward where the woman had left the stage and slipped into the side corridor away from the main club.