Soul Seeker (17 page)

Eventually Somersby said, ‘This is worrying news.'

Tom Sheldon looked at him, but only after a long pause did he say somewhat grudgingly and with little tone of remorse, ‘I'm sorry.'

Somersby sighed angrily. ‘It's not your fault.' It was clear from his tone that this was not necessarily his opinion of the truth of the situation.

‘It was fucking bad luck.'

Somersby grunted. He was looking at his thin, white hand. ‘You're sure they were outside the inner fence?' he asked slowly, his voice conveying tiredness, but the tiredness of a man who has done much and fears he might have to do much more yet.

‘Yes.' Sheldon said this sourly, affronted that Somersby treated him like an idiot all the time.

‘There's no way they can get into the Grange?' persisted Somersby.

The response to this was nothing more than a grunt and a slight movement of his thickset shoulders in an attempt at a shrug. Sheldon didn't know and didn't think he should be expected to know. Somersby eyed him contemptuously. Sheldon was not his idea of an ideal business colleague, being woefully short of functioning stuff between the ears, but necessity was a harsh mistress; anyway, Sheldon was big and strong, and had the distinct advantage of being pleasantly free from inhibition when it came to violence, and Somersby could always use a man like that. ‘Make a check of the perimeter next time you are there. Make sure that there is no possibility anyone can get into the inner grounds.'

‘Why me?' This was posed resentfully.

‘Because I'm busy, and you're not.' In these words there was the tone of a man who had come to expect obedience.

In Sheldon's silence, there was the tone of a man who did not give it easily.

Beverley was clearly intensely angry, but Eisenmenger did not mind her anger, could not find it within himself to be affronted, for he knew that it was just a way of coping. After a final perusal of the ceiling – a rather boring landscape and therefore of some relief to him, given his barely subdued sense of hysteria – he at last looked down at the three police officers. ‘You have just seen a man beheaded on a guillotine, a woman die similarly; you have seen a man cooked slowly in an electric chair, and then a woman die quickly in the same one. It was done, if we are to accept the murderer's manifesto, in the name of science. When you read the paper that accompanies these recordings, you will be led to believe that what we have here is nothing less than an attempt to determine whether or not there is a soul, and what happens to the individual at the point of death.'

‘Scientific?' said Beverley scathingly. ‘You mean this madman is trying to convince us that he's working in the name of science?'

‘Absolutely,' replied Eisenmenger after careful consideration and with slow nodding. Then: ‘Yes. That's about right. He thinks of himself as a scientist.'

Fisher, whose experience of science had ended well before he had failed a GCSE in the subject, and who read the
Star
every morning in a state of gullible grace concerning the latest research on such matters, asked incredulously, ‘You mean a boffin? Some guy in a lab coat is doing this?'

‘Fisher, don't open your mouth and then I might forget you're a cretin.' Beverley didn't even bother looking at her sergeant as she sprayed him with this acidic advice. She had returned to the introductory web page. Of Eisenmenger she asked, ‘It looks fairly convincing. Is it?'

‘At first glance, yes. It could have been reproduced from any reputable scientific or medical journal, save that the author is not named. It is in the correct format, and it presents the arguments for the research in a very structured, reasoned way.'

Lancefield's voice was of a slightly higher register than usual as she asked quietly, ‘Reasoned?'

Eisenmenger was without compunction as he rounded on her and replied at once, ‘Yes, reasoned. Ask the psychologists. This man – woman, perhaps – is not chaotic or disordered in his thinking at all; in fact, he is almost certainly far more structured than you are, than I am, than everyone else is. He is a
slave
to his thinking, cannot escape it; he has lost free will, in effect, and with it a conscience. It's because he is almost robotic in his thinking that he is capable of atrocity, just as a computer would see no difference between the killing of an ant or the killing of a baby.'

Beverley said, ‘So we can assume that he is a scientist?'

Fisher may or may not have been trying to make a joke when he murmured, ‘A mad scientist.' No one took any notice because there was a knock on the door and a female uniformed constable came in at once. She presented Beverley with a note, waited for the response – a curt nod without word or change of expression – then left. She looked across at Eisenmenger, the paper still in her hand, waiting for his answer.

‘That's one of the things that bothers me.'

‘Meaning?'

‘This murderer clearly has academic training and has read scientific literature – the primary research stuff, not the popular journalistic stuff – but I can't believe that he's a working scientist, nor ever has been.'

‘Why do you think that?'

‘He is testing a hypothesis, not a null hypothesis.' General confusion met this. He went on: ‘He isn't thinking like a scientist, more like one versed in the humanities. Someone who is intelligent and used to academia, but who does not understand the philosophy of science.'

It was left to Fisher to ask, ‘What's a null hypothesis?' There was a refreshing confidence in the innocence of his tone, one that said that he was not ashamed of his lack of knowledge.

Eisenmenger stood up, embarrassed because he was aware that he was going to sound didactic and tedious and probably unintelligible. ‘Science works by examining data – whether generated from previous experiment or from observation of natural phenomena – devising a hypothesis to explain the data, then devising an experiment to test that hypothesis.'

Lancefield asked, ‘Isn't that what this bastard's doing?'.

‘But the hypothesis that is generated by the data must be a
null
hypothesis.'

Fisher was used to hitting people who tried to be clever with him, but contented himself with a frown in deference to his newly acquired rank. It was left to Lancefield to ask, ‘What's that when it's at home?'

‘The scientist conceives his hypothesis – this is what he believes to be an explanation for what he has observed – but he must avoid bias at all costs when he performs his experiments; he must be objective and detached.'

‘You can't get more detached than this joker,' pointed out Lancefield.

Eisenmenger had suspected he wouldn't explain things very well and the facial expression of his audience told him he had been prescient; Fisher looked as if a magician had just plucked an egg from his anus, Lancefield was perplexed and irritated, and Beverley wasn't even obviously in the room. ‘The experimenter must try to reduce any room for subjective interpretation to a minimum; in order to achieve this, it is not the hypothesis that is tested, but its antithesis. If I think that drinking while driving causes an increase in accidents, then my experiment must be so designed as to try to prove that it doesn't. I then look at the results and, if they suggest that drink-driving
does
result in an increased risk of accident, I abandon that hypothesis.'

Fisher bore the same expression now as when he tried to do the cryptic crossword in the newspaper. Lancefield demanded, ‘Isn't the same thing? You disproved one idea, proved another.'

‘No!' Eisenmenger himself was surprised at the vehemence of his voice. He recognized stress in himself. ‘No, inspector. I have neither proved nor disproved anything. I have merely made one, infinitesimally small, step in the direction of Truth; but I have done so in a manner that is as disengaged as I can make it. I must now carry on to elicit further information. It appears that there may a relationship between drinking whilst driving, and accidents, but that does not prove
causation
, merely linkage. Further, interventional research must be done.'

Lancefield's mouth was opening, Fisher's merely open, when Beverley said suddenly, ‘A single piece of observational research proves nothing. Is that it?'

Eisenmenger took the line much as a drowning solo yachtsman in the middle of the South Atlantic might do. ‘That's it. It doesn't matter how big the sample, how long it took; a single experiment proves nothing.' He then saw the look in her eye, was immediately cast into a shadow thrown by a combination of puzzlement, dread and precognition. Without taking his eyes from her, he carried on: ‘It promises at the end that this is merely the first of a series of investigations. And we already have one dead body not included here.'

There was a depth and density of silence that met this, until the phone rang, making them all jump, screaming into the silence that had fallen onto them. Beverley picked it up, said nothing as she listened; her face might have been overdosed on Botox. There was a dreadful inevitability – a feeling of a great rock about to crash, of a doom approaching, about to grab them, rip them to shreds – as they waited. Then she put the phone down and sat staring at it, her expression still paralysed, and no one dared asked.

Eventually she said tiredly, almost as if asleep, ‘They've just found another body.'

‘Where is it?' asked Lancefield.

‘On some allotments in Churchdown.'

‘With or without its head?' asked Eisenmenger. She opened her mouth to reply, then closed it again; she hadn't thought to ask. He murmured, ‘Or has it been cooked, I wonder.'

She snapped, ‘You'll find out soon enough.'

She thought for a moment, but just a moment; she had been transformed from the figure of pathos that she had presented just before. ‘First, we go to the mortuary. Then we go to Churchdown.'

TWENTY-NINE

M
elanie Whittaker had waited a long time for her daughter, Evangeline, and she was not in the best of moods. ‘Where have you been?' she demanded without preliminary greeting, without even waiting for Evangeline to get completely through the glass doors of the school's science block. Evangeline was very like her mother, except for the sixteen years' difference in their ages; this difference could not, however, be disguised by modern cosmetics, despite Melanie's strenuous efforts. They were both, though, obese with small, porcine eyes, a slightly snubbed nose and full lips that could not quite cover their incisors (which in Melanie's case were nicotine stained). They had similar taste in clothes, which was unfortunate for Evangeline's mother because younger fashions did not suit her. They also had similar, incendiary temperaments.

Evangeline had been forced to stay behind after school because of a detention that should have finished fifteen minutes before; she was late from this because she had taken the opportunity to purchase something enjoyable but illegal from one of the school cleaners – a not irregular occurrence – but she was not about to tell her mother that. Melanie often partook of the ‘jazz woodbines' but drew the line at that; some illicit drugs, in her opinion, were less illegal than others. Evangeline said impassively, ‘I was looking for a book.'

Anyone who knew Evangeline might have detected a lie here, and her mother certainly knew her daughter. ‘And the rest.'

Evangeline shrugged; her mother's unbelief was of little consequence to her. ‘Where's the fucking car?' she demanded petulantly.

‘Round the fucking corner,' was the witty rejoinder.

Thus they expressed their love for each other, just as they had always done, walking away from the tatty, decayed beacon of educational excellence that was Evangeline's school. They both smoked, each of them plucking a cigarette from their own packet without any thought that they should share; they did not talk, as if smoking were enough, as if smoking were a means of communication and speech had become redundant.

The car did not have remote or even central locking; Evangeline's mother made a point of climbing in first before reaching across to let her daughter in, and doing it in a leisurely fashion. Evangeline's first act was to turn the radio to Radio One and up the volume; she did not catch what her mother said, but then did not try to. The twenty-minute journey home did not produce a single word of conversation between mother and offspring. There was, as usual, no space outside their Whaddon house and Melanie was forced to park a hundred yards away and, as usual, she spent several minutes doing so badly; the car ended up a yard away from the kerb at the back, a foot away at the front. Evangeline didn't bother to comment and exited the car as soon as it was stationary; the slam of the door could be heard three streets away.

When Melanie finally made it to the front door, Evangeline was standing in front of it, arms folded, lips pouted, jaws chewing enthusiastically on her gum. ‘Where's your key?' mother demanded of daughter.

‘Dunno.'

‘Have you lost it?'

Evangeline said casually, ‘It's in my other jacket.'

That this contradicted her previous statement and that it was, in any case, said in a tone that betrayed what was patently a falsehood, did not escape her perspicacious mother. ‘Fucking liar.'

As she pushed past her daughter, she groped in her bright yellow handbag for her own key, her form reflected blurrily in fourteen of the sixteen small squares of frosted glass in the door; cardboard clumsily taped into place completed the array. She opened the door and went straight into the minute hallway; Evangeline followed almost at once, but collided with her mother almost at once