Soul Seeker (11 page)

Eisenmenger's primary job was as a consultant cellular pathologist – coronial and hospital autopsies, together with surgical pathology – which meant that he worked as close to regular hours as it was possible for a doctor to do; Charlie, likewise, had fairly regular hours. She had problems, though, with his second profession – that of forensic pathologist – and in that Eisenmenger saw trouble ahead, for he had been there before; his marriage had ended because of it. When he was on call – and he was quite frequently – he could be called out at any time and was likely to be away for several hours; because forensic pathology was not paid for by the NHS but by the Home Office, he had to pay back the time to the hospital when he
was
called out, meaning that he was not infrequently at the hospital at the weekend and late into the night.

And now that they had a murderer with a penchant for beheadings, he knew that the hours owed to the NHS were only likely to increase, which meant that today's lunch with Charlie was especially important to him. He could tell that she was still disgruntled that he had not been able to make their date earlier in the week because of the autopsy on the body, and hoped that this would make up for it. He had booked a table at Brasserie Blanc, next to the Queens Hotel in Montpelier for one thirty, had picked her up in a taxi at twelve thirty, then been as cheesy as possible by ordering champagne; Charlie, who was a connoisseur of fine cheese, had loved it. They sat in the bar at the front of the restaurant, looking out on regency buildings, enjoying some relaxation, enjoying each other, enjoying doing nothing but drinking champagne, talking about nothing and seeing the world around them with eyes that were relaxed and happy.

Charlie had a deep, husky voice and it had been this, together with eyes that were of the palest blue, that had first attracted him to her. The colour was not deep, yet he could not penetrate beyond the surface although she herself seemed to see deeply, almost too deeply. She had been greatly hurt, he knew, by the break-up of her marriage, but he, too, had been seriously affected by the end of his relationship with Helena, made worse by events beyond his control. He felt it slightly unfair that she should not feel the need for comfort from him as much as he yearned for it from her.

‘How's Paul?' Eisenmenger had found immediate rapport with Charlie's son. He was gangly and thin, with a sense of humour that chimed with Eisenmenger's.

She nodded. ‘He's good.'

‘Steady girlfriend yet?'

She smiled. ‘He hasn't told me if he has.'

‘Would he? If he had, I mean.'

‘No.'

‘But it's going well for him? Up there?' He was aware that he was making Durham sound like a geostationary orbit.

‘He's really enjoying it. He's working on his final year dissertation.'

‘Yes?' It was only politeness that made him ask, ‘What's it on?'

She frowned, hesitated. ‘Deep surfing?' she answered hesitantly.

Which meant as little to him as it clearly did to her.

And then the waiter came over – Australian, in starched, white shirt and black trousers so creased and straight he had trouble bending his knees – so they followed him over to their table at once, ready to eat, and had just settled down to peruse the menu when Eisenmenger's mobile phone went off.

It was with a feeling of huge depression that he answered it. It was Lancefield. ‘We've found a body.'

Shit.
A third killing. ‘Where?'

‘A quarry. In a small village in the north of the county – Bromsberrow Heath.'

He'd never heard of it. ‘Can you give me a postcode for the satnav?'

She did so, then added, ‘There's something about this one . . .'

Eisenmenger had seen most things that could be done to a human being and was not about to be frightened. ‘Go on . . .'

‘It looks as though this one has been cooked.'

Wallace Parker owned twelve hundred acres, an estate he had inherited from a widowed spinster aunt over twenty years before. It was given over to sheep, cattle, arable and vineyard; he had a well-paid and extremely efficient estate manager who took care of most of the day-to-day running, whilst Wallace continued his time conducting an extremely remunerative career in the City. He met with the estate manager once a week and they planned strategy together (or at least Wallace approved the manager's plans), so that he could say with a degree of truth that he ran the operation; he saw himself as chairman, the manager as CEO and this analogy pleased him.

Inevitably, his wealth and power in the community led to hidden but nonetheless occasionally palpable resentment. Much of the village depended on the estate, which meant that they did not like it, and they did not like Wallace, although no one would ever have said so to his face. Wallace, though, believed that he was the beloved leader of this rural community and that they cherished him. He was Chair of the Parish Council, sat on the Parochial Church Council, was training to become a Justice of the Peace, and was Chair elect of the Conservatives; in his eyes, who could not be endeared by him?

Those who were not beholden to him – and therefore were not resentful of him – acknowledged that he (or at least his estate manager) had done good things. The Colberrow Estate had been looking distinctly rundown when Wallace had inherited it, but over the years the fencing had been largely repaired, new signs had been erected, hedgerows had been regrown and the styles renovated. Wallace might have been acquisitive and selfish and a tad monomaniac, but he had a vision of what a country estate should be, and he had the money to achieve it. He wanted rolling acres of tidy grazing for sheep, lakes, ordered fields of waving wheat and beet, and ancient woodland, and he felt in his bones that he was slowly achieving this.

In fact, it was the woodland that gave him most pleasure. He loved tramping through the outer reaches of his land, through trees that had been there for hundreds of years, listening to sounds that were completely human intervention, smelling sweet odours of decay and growth, catching glimpses of hidden wildlife. Of the many such copses and woods on the estate, his favourite – the one, in fact, that he let no one else enter – was Topper's Drift, in which was situated the Grange. At over one hundred and seventeen acres, it was one of the largest, most unspoilt, and oldest areas of woodland that he owned, and he had plans for it. He made sure that it was fenced off and that only he and his estate manager had a key to the single gate.

EIGHTEEN

T
he quarry's gates were closed although not locked; a police car parked across them and two policemen stood in front of it. They did not have to keep back the rampaging hordes, who consisted merely of a dozen people of all ages and sexes, for they contented themselves with peering hopefully past the official presence whilst murmuring a lot but not actually looking at each other. It was a very British crime scene. Eisenmenger showed his identity and was allowed through in his car, driving over the uneven ground.

The quarry was about two hundred yards in diameter, and reddish brown in predominant colour. Its walls rose ahead about forty feet and, on either side, perhaps thirty; to his left parked in a row were four JCBs next to a Portakabin; to his right at the far end of the quarry and tucked under the cliff was the centre of everyone's attention – the inevitable small marquee, around which were two marked and two unmarked police cars together with at least ten people. Beverley was there, together with Lancefield and Fisher, the three of them forming a small huddle around the bonnet of one of the cars. As he approached, all eyes turned to him and he thought he felt something in their looks that he had never seen before on such an occasion; he thought he saw distress. He stopped the car and was getting out just as a forensic scientist was coming out of the marquee; the look on his face was enough to make Eisenmenger pause; he was pale and sweaty, almost trembling, almost ready to cry, it seemed.

Beverley came up to him. ‘This is bad, John. Really bad.'

He had started to suspect. ‘Any identification?'

She shook her head. ‘Like the headless corpse, he's naked, and getting an ID is going to require dental records or DNA.' Which was no great shakes to Eisenmenger; a lot of bodies had gone beyond the state in which it was possible for anyone to recognize them.

He went to the boot of his car to get out his briefcase and his all-in-one suit. Beverley said, ‘It really is bad, John. I've never seen anything like it before.'

He paused in the act of putting the suit on. ‘Is it a child?' She shook her head and he said, ‘Shouldn't be a problem, then.'

She said nothing, although he was somewhat disconcerted by her expression as she nodded slowly.

He wasn't sure whether he said this aloud or merely thought it, so taken up was he by the sight that met him in that small tent. The deceased lay on his side, his hips, knees and elbows flexed at almost perfect right angles, a curious posture and one that was enshrined by rigor mortis. There were post-mortem abrasions – some of them quite deep – all over the body, and most of them were covered in dust and grit that had clearly come from the quarry. It was the body of a young white male, although the age was difficult to determine; Lancefield had not lied when she had said that it looked as though he had been cooked. The smell was one of overcooked meat; not the sickly one he knew well from the incinerated remains of car and air crashes, but an altogether more pleasant, and paradoxically more nauseating, one; a perversion of the emotions evoked by a Sunday roast.

The body was desiccated and browned, the skin turned to a hardened, leather-like consistency, like badly made crackling. The eyes were open, but they were no longer eyes by any normal measure; merely cream-brown orbs with a round dark-blue smudge where the corneas had once been. His mouth was open, his expression even in death, one clearly of agony. There were darker areas – burns, Eisenmenger quickly discovered – on the wrists and about the forehead. His hair had become brittle, blackened, while his fingers and toes were mummified. When he looked into the mouth, the jaw nearly broke, and the tongue was a charred lump.

He did not remain long, merely checking for external injuries without attempting to turn the body. Emerging from the marquee, he saw that the inevitable close-order search of the quarry floor had commenced. He joined Beverley and Fisher at the car bonnet, Fisher having been told to supervise the search of the quarry. Their eyes were nothing but curious orbs as he approached, although they said nothing and it was left to him to speak. ‘I haven't found any evidence of traumatic injury, so he was either poisoned and then heated, or just heated whilst alive.'

Lancefield looked slightly shocked at his refusal to show emotion; Beverley, who knew more of the man, could see that he had been affected just as much as the rest of them. She asked, ‘You think he's been in some sort of oven, then?'

He shrugged. ‘Maybe.' She had never yet met a pathologist who didn't use that word at least ten times a paragraph. Then he surprised her. ‘I think the body was thrown down the cliff face. I'd concentrate on looking up there.' He indicated the chain-link fence and undergrowth behind it that was about ten metres above them. Before they could ask, he explained about the post-mortem abrasions covered in quarry dust. Beverley said to Lancefield, ‘You and Fisher concentrate up there first of all. If we don't find anything, then we'll go back to the rest of the quarry.'

Lancefield left and Beverley said then to Eisenmenger, ‘You OK?'

He nodded. ‘No problems.'

She almost believed him, but she could tell something was bothering him and she wondered what it was.

Sorry about lunch. Xxx.
Charlie looked at it and did not know what to think, whether or not to be angry or frustrated, or angry
and
frustrated. John Eisenmenger had done it again.

As a qualified psychologist she recognized the type; she met them every day, counselled them, helped them through their self-imposed labyrinths. John Eisenmenger was full of positives: he was clearly of an affectionate nature, and undoubtedly believed that he was in love with her, yet – her own feelings notwithstanding – she was unconvinced that he truly was. Her training told her that fact and faith were often unconnected, that a human being was capable of the greatest self-deception, that John Eisenmenger might think that he was in love with her; was more likely to be in love with the idea of being in love. One of her lecturers had once told her that human beings liked the idea of love, but couldn't cope with its effects. Love, she had said, was as corrosive as hate, as destructive of the self as jealousy, as deadly and as addictive as heroin. In John she saw such a man; she saw someone who needed to love but did not know how to be loved, who forever sought – and was forever afraid of – the grail of the perfect symmetry of devotion, the idealized, romanticized and ultimately fictionalized love affair as told in
Tristan and Isolde
,
Romeo and Juliet
, Tom and Jerry . . .

And then there was the barbed question of whether
she
loved
him
. If it was hard enough to be objective about John Eisenmenger's psychology, it was infinitely more adamantine to be objective about her own.

NINETEEN

E
veryone who was privileged to be invited agreed that the Parkers gave such wonderful parties. They were wonderful hosts, having done the job at least once a week for perhaps thirty years, and having done so for the good and the great, new money and old, the shakers and movers, the shaken and moved. Wallace moved amongst his guests and talked with them in a small talk, a language that was as difficult to learn as Hungarian and in which fluency was as difficult to come by as it was in Ancient Greek. His gracious wife, Jane, was equally gifted in this strange tongue, always smiling, always laughing quite convincingly at the right moment, forever remembering guests' names, their children's names, their illnesses and their recent successes, no matter how small. They had three sons – Will, Greg and Harry – all of whom had attended public school in Cheltenham, albeit with greater or lesser success, three Labradors and a live-in housekeeper. Wallace had been a successful London financier even before he had inherited the estate; prior to that he had been a captain in the First Parachute Regiment, seeing action in the Falklands and even being slightly injured (by a British jeep running over his left foot). He had filled out slightly since those heady days, although he still considered himself to be relatively svelte, an opinion not damaged in its righteousness in any way by his sons' sometimes ribald comments.