Soul Seeker (14 page)

He made a face and rubbed out the symbol in the condensation on his glass; through the window he had made he examined the bubbles rising through the lager. ‘I suppose so,' he said thoughtfully.

Despite her objections, she found herself intrigued by the notion. ‘Although there have been occasions when they botched the execution,' she said slowly. ‘The condemned was to all intents and purposes cooked on a few occasions.'

‘It was just a thought,' he explained.

Beverley was enthused and he saw in her the fervour of the convert. ‘But you could be on to something, John.'

But he found himself less than wholly convinced now that he had voiced the conjecture. ‘Maybe. But if that's the motivation, then presumably these poor sods have done something to deserve it, at least in the eyes of the executioner.'

‘So we're back to identification; unless we find out more about these people, we're stuffed.'

He took a drink. ‘Wasn't it always so?'

‘Nothing ever really changes, does it?' She sounded wistful.

He laughed. ‘Human beings are afraid of change and hate it, but they would die without it, Beverley.'

Eisenmenger had the intellectual freedom to deal in such philosophizing and, had she not been perhaps in love with him, she might have lashed him with her tongue. Instead she just drained her glass and he went to the bar to get fresh drinks. As he did so, he looked at his watch; he reckoned he had time.

They were on the point of leaving when Eisenmenger admitted plaintively, ‘On this one, I really need to know the tox result, Beverley. Not out of academic interest. I just need to know that he was unconscious when he died, so I can sleep well at night.'

The boys crunched the biscuits busily for ten minutes, the darkness bringing with it a chill that they did not notice, talking through this, enjoying the delight that they had actually made a bow and actually made it fly, and that (unspoken) they might actually be able to kill something; they did not know how atavistic this feeling was, and knew only that it was good.

‘We'd better go,' said Josh at last, who was well aware that his grandmother was considerably less easy going than Darren's mother.

‘I guess.'

They stood up and with the minimum of preparation began to make their way through the undergrowth; there was just enough light left in the sky ahead of them to light their way. They had not gone far when they heard sounds coming from behind them and they stopped, suddenly afraid of discovery. They had been well aware that this world was not solely their property, but until now they had not come into proximity of those they shared it with. They did not know the identity of these others, but knew that they were adults and therefore inimical. Without saying anything, they crouched side by side, staring into the darkness behind them. The sounds – metallic and harsh – were slightly wet in the damp air, and Josh noticed a slight scent in the air that, for a moment, he could not place. They waited and the faint sounds of an engine came to them, then more metallic sounds. Within a couple more minutes, the engine was revving, becoming louder until it passed them; they could not see what was making the noise for thirty seconds more and even then only in the distance through the trees. They saw something white pass perhaps two hundred yards away, then come to a halt a little ahead of them at the padlocked gate in the stone wall.

They waited, heard a door in the van open, then only the wind in the trees and the sound of an engine idling until there was a faint clanking. The wind died, leaving only the engine to whisper into the dusk for a moment before the peace was destroyed by a door being shut quietly. The engine revved gently and the white shape moved forward for a perhaps five seconds; they heard it quieten, before there was more clanking and, eventually, the same sound of a door closing followed by the engine noise moving off into the descending night.

It was another minute before they dared to move forward to their escape from this hidden world, happy that they had not been seen, wondering what they had been listening to. Suddenly, Josh placed the scent, the realization bringing with it memories of fish and chips; it was the smell of vinegar.

Back in her flat, Beverley found herself to be oddly happy, yet strangely dissatisfied; it was the complete inverse of her normal state, and therefore uncomfortable to her. She felt as if she had an ache in her bone, as if she were sickening for something, on the verge of perhaps flu or some other virus. She had achieved in her professional life a small but significant victory – Lambert was gone, and she had finally been given a chance, without his malign influence, to redeem herself, to show that she was not just a whore, not one of the many makeweights in the CID, but an intelligent, hardworking and reliable copper, one who had what it took to make it big. So why, then, this unease?

She sat in one of the cream leather armchairs that she had recently bought and that seemed to consider themselves far too good to be sat in, a glass of Chardonnay on the small table to her left, stereo system singing something softly in the background. Her social life had been uncharacteristically quiet of late – or at least that was the phrase she used when she phoned her mother – but she knew that it was not this that was the source of her discomfort. She was not, as Lambert and some other of her superiors believed, a nymphomaniac; she enjoyed sex, but she did not crave it, although she admitted freely both to herself and others that she used it – it was, after all, an exceedingly powerful tool – to achieve what she could not achieve by other means. It was perhaps this, she suspected, that had given her a reputation, although she was cynical enough to believe that there was also a considerable amount of envy and jealousy that had gone into the making of it.

No. It was this present case, she suspected. This was her first big investigation, one that could be the making or the breaking of her, and she had enough experience to appreciate that it was going to be a bitch. She did not believe in God, did not even have time to be an atheist, really; God – indeed, any god – was irrelevant to her because she took what came at her and handled it. Thus she told herself that this, therefore, was not a test set for her; it was merely the way things had fallen.

Not that this viewpoint helped. Whether this case had been presented to her by a cosmic deity who kept constant tabs on her, or by a blind, uncaring, inconstant universe based on constantly roiling probabilities, it did not matter. She had to succeed, to prove that the quantum of faith that had been shown in her was not misplaced, to show Lambert and the others that she was more than just a vagina with legs, that she was worth a little more than a quickie in the back of the Jaguar with beery breathe and sweaty brow, and as much technique as a special needs gorilla.

But what a case!

She could already sense that here was no ordinary serial killer. Most such people were sad, grey little things, forgotten by life, forgotten by the world, forgotten even by themselves. They killed and only then did they consider what to do about the consequences of the act; their sole aim was killing, for in doing so they satisfied whatever urges preyed on them, This one, though, thought beyond the act, thought through the thrill of killing, and that made him special (and she knew it was
he
, despite what she said to others), that made him a wilier, more dangerous opponent.

This one had a motive she could not yet even guess at and, without knowing the motive, she feared she would have little chance of catching him.

TWENTY-THREE

R
ebecca Lancefield had embraced the news of her transfer to Cheltenham, and of the opportunity to work with acting DCI Beverley Wharton with something that was considerably less than enthusiasm – dread, despair, desperation, dissatisfaction, disgruntlement, disaffection and disbelief, perhaps – but nothing beyond those. It wasn't so much the rumours of her easy virtue that seemed forever to circulate around her, nor the stories about a less than rigorous adherence to the strictures of PACE and subsequent legislation formalizing policing procedures; no, it was the whispers that Beverley Wharton did not do well by her colleagues, especially if said colleagues were female. She had gathered that those who crossed Beverley Wharton, or even those that looked as though they might, were sometimes mysteriously treated by the Fates; she had also been led to believe by those same whispers that attractive female colleagues were also prone to this destiny.

Not that Rebecca Lancefield made the hubristic mistake of believing that she was strikingly beautiful; she was, she knew, too short and from that came the impression that she was chubby; also she had a slightly lopsided smile and teeth that came within a whisper of an overbite, and sometimes the freckles became not curiously alluring but curiously off-putting. Yet she was far from ugly and had not gone for want of boyfriends, some quite serious, some whom she had even loved and, she was certain, had loved her. Would that be enough, though? Would DCI Wharton take one look at her and decide that, though she might not be the very essence of pulchritude, she was still enough of a threat to warrant some form of action? She had the impression that her new boss was almost pathologically jealous of all potential sexual rivals, in which case she would only have been safe if she were a practising lesbian or a direct descendant of the gorgon.

And that was not all. The whispers spoke also of DCI Wharton's ambition, a thing that ran her sexuality a close second; Beverley Wharton had sharp elbows and no compunction about using them when it came to displacing people from the greasy pole. She was aware that if she appeared too good at her job, too liable to eclipse her DCI on intellectual grounds (even if she were in her shade on those of attractiveness), then her position was liable to be no less hazardous. To make it worse, she was fairly sure that she
was
superior to Beverley Wharton when it came to the job; she had already noticed that she seemed able to anticipate her commands, already to have thought of matters before the DCI had her brain into gear. The only area of their profession in which she felt herself deficient was that of experience, and only time could give her that; indeed, she was confident that time
would
give her that.

But only if Beverley Wharton allowed her to gain it.

TWENTY-FOUR

L
en Barker was becoming increasingly angry. He had been angry from the first moment of coming round following his stroke, but that had gradually died to dull, despairing discontent, a cold, corrosive resentment that he should have been felled so unjustly, that a punishment had been meted out upon him for no crime, no misdemeanour, no wrongdoing worse than any other human being's; why should he be like this when he looked out of his window for hours on endless end upon his neighbours and saw people no less craven, sinning and unworthy than he?

Now, though, events had transpired to surmount this low-level inquietude; Lancefield's patronizing words still lived, cruelly, within his head, still resounded with mocking disdain.
I don't suppose you saw anything anyway, did you.
Bitch! She had looked on him and seen only a cripple, a wreck, a disease with connotations of uselessness and helplessness, a thing and thing, moreover, with a past but no future. He had not slept that night, the hot shame admixed with an even brighter anger; he would show her.

Worse, one of the carers, that withered old bitch-hag Lavoisier, had started storing his wheelchair in the sitting room at night, so that he was effectively confined to his bed during the night. She had hoped to crush him that little bit more, he knew, but he would have the last say. He would overcome this fucking affliction, this cunt of a stroke, and he would let them know what he had seen. His old instincts told him that it was important, that this was a piece of information that might be small but that was as essential as the keystone in the arch, and only he could provide it. From this he sucked some drops of dry and bitter sustenance for his bleeding, limping, dribbling pride.

Charlie Sherman had pale skin to match her pale blue eyes; she believed that she had too many freckles and too many curls in her auburn hair, believed, too, that she was just slightly too chubby. She was intimidatingly bright and far too insecure for her own good; the combination of insecurity about her own looks and a brain that would not stop analysing, would never accept that some things are best left unexplored, was a dangerous one. She had for a long time accepted that all relationships end, that the best she could hope for was as little pain as possible, and this was a self-fulfilling prophesy; she knew this, yet she could not, as bright as she was, change it. She was amused that she recognized that trap that she was in and that all the brains in the world were of no use in it. In a strange way, she found it reassuring to be forever confronted by her own shortcomings, to be properly reminded that there are many different types of intelligence and that in most of them she was below average.

The signals she was getting from John Eisenmenger played into this complex matrix of emotions and doubts and false certainties. He had caught her on the rebound from a relationship with a fellow psychologist at her previous hospital but she was not, she had hoped, feeling especially vulnerable, nor desperate for male company at whatever cost. And Eisenmenger had seemed to tick most of the right boxes for her; true, he was a little cold, a little reticent, but she had never been particularly interested in macho types, nor in men who mistook monologues for conversation. Nor had he appeared frightened by conversing with an intellectual equal, perhaps an intellectual superior, something that was a refreshing change; he did not seem to mind that she could sometimes complete the crossword or Sudoku that he could not, and she suspected that this was genuine, not mere politeness.