Soul Seeker (25 page)

She frowned. ‘Where to?'

‘The hospital. Eisenmenger reckons we've got another victim.'

Lancefield frowned, tried to concentrate. ‘Another one? So soon?'

Beverley was already turning away. ‘An old woman's been smothered. I'm not sure it's related, but Eisenmenger tells me he's wondering, and when Eisenmenger wonders, it pays to start working on the assumption that he's right.'

FORTY-FOUR

T
he first time that Josh and Darren dared to climb the tree and drop from the thick, overhanging limb, and thus enter the inner grounds of the Grange, they were aware that it was a momentous thing, a defining act; they knew that they were doing something terrible, something heinous (although they did not know the word, they knew its meaning); yet, although they were immature in so many ways, they had already learned that this type of wrongdoing was delightfully, deliciously, deliriously attractive. They had planned the trip assiduously, getting up early one morning, collecting their store cupboard of food from the shed at the bottom of Darren's small, untidy garden (some chocolate digestives, two apples, two bags of salt and vinegar crisps, and two small cartons of juice; all carefully sequestered from their packed lunches over the previous week and in total representing a considerable sacrifice), and then cycling away up the curving lane to the estate, feeling like true adventurers, unaware that their emotions probably mirrored exactly those of Magellan, Columbus and, perhaps, Scott. They cycled for half a mile, then abandoned their bikes, hiding them behind the fence, before trekking across the open fields of the estate, following paths that they and they alone knew well, talking excitedly through the shortness of breath that their exertions brought. It was sunny but not yet warm, the dawn wind having died but the earth still cool from it.

They approached the stone wall with more care, staying low, looking around all the time for spies and snipers, the adrenaline pumping even more, the sense of adventure ringing and screaming in their ears; they saw no one. Skirting around the wall, body positions low, heads forever turning to left and right, they eventually found their secret way in, then made base camp. Whilst consuming the first of their rations – and doing so frugally lest they have to stretch them to days, possibly weeks – they rested and took their bearings, constantly watchful. After ten minutes, they set off again, deeper into the dark heart of the forest.

They arrived at the inner fence in fifteen further minutes, still scanning all around them, seeing in the depths of the woodland a thousand silent enemies, hearing in the soft wind high above them the stealthy steps of pursuers, certain that the birdsong held hidden, coded conversations between the foes. They lay upon the ground, heads down, arms tucked beneath them so that they crawled upon their elbows in the manner that they had seen in war films, skirting the fencing until they came upon the tree that would gain them entrance. Another pause to ensure that they were still unobserved, then they climbed its trunk, edged out upon the limb, and dropped quietly to the grass, the dried leaves and the twigs of the inner grounds of the Grange.

‘Did she, or didn't she die of smothering?'

Eisenmenger spent a good deal of his time as a forensic pathologist combating barristers who sought to destroy his conclusions; he spent an equal amount of time combating members of the constabulary who sought to drag from him conclusions that he was not just unwilling to give, he was intellectually incapable of giving. As he had said so often before, he now said simply, ‘I don't know.' He knew that this would provoke fury – and he did not like provoking fury – but he could give no other reply.

‘Well, can't you even give me a hint?'

‘Beverley, Beverley, Beverley . . .'

‘Please, John. I need something.'

They were in Clive's office, sipping coffee. Eisenmenger had noticed that Lancefield was looking oddly detached, and had wondered distractedly what was wrong with her. He said, ‘I know she didn't die of major trauma, but until the tox comes back, I can't exclude a pharmacological cause, and she has enough coronary atheroma to kill an elephant.'

‘So?'

He grunted, lowered his head, stared at the pencil sharpener on Clive's desk that was shaped like a small coffin. Then: ‘If you want an opinion now, I'd say she was smothered.'

Beverley let out a long sigh, as if she had been holding her breath for a hundred years. ‘Thank you.'

He looked up. ‘I might be wrong.'

She shook her head. ‘You don't believe that, and neither do I.'

He allowed, ‘I think it's likelier than not that she was smothered,' which was as definite as she knew she was likely to get.

‘But this can't be the same killer. The MO's completely different.'

‘It is, isn't it,' he agreed. ‘Yet . . .'

‘Yet, you think it is?' she guessed.

He hesitated. It was time to confess what he had discovered about Len Barker's final message to the living. He had a feeling he was about to get bollocked, and he wasn't disappointed.

‘Jesus mother-fucking Christ, John. How the hell could you forget?'

He thought that perhaps he had one or two reasons, but said nothing about them. ‘It might be nothing.'

‘The head was found not far from Colberrow, the registration that Len Barker wrote down is from a Colberrow Estate van, and now this. How can it be unconnected?'

He shrugged. ‘We don't know that Len Barker saw anything.'

‘He lived at the top of the quarry. Maybe he saw a white van; maybe he saw someone get out of a white van and dump a body.'

‘Was he interviewed at the time?'

Beverley's eyes narrowed; she knew full well who had been entrusted with that task. ‘He was, but apparently he didn't make this information known.'

Eisenmenger, ignorant of the context, was running through possibilities. ‘He was still severely disabled; it was a left-sided stroke that affected his speech; if he was right-handed, it would have destroyed his ability to write. He was confined to a wheelchair, too. Maybe he just never got the chance to tell anyone.' Beverley was thinking, Lancefield should have made sure. She should have given him the opportunity to communicate. I bet she didn't.
Eisenmenger continued, ‘He was found in the kitchen and had been there several hours. His carer put him to bed, so at some time in the night he got up, and made his way to the kitchen where he fell. If there was nothing in the bedroom, maybe he was looking for something to write with.' He paused. ‘It would have taken a great effort, given his condition, though. Would it really have been that important to him?'

‘He was an ex-policeman, and a good one by all accounts; I should think he would have been desperate to make the information known.'

‘So we can be fairly certain that the murderer has something to do with Colberrow, probably the Colberrow Estate itself.'

She gestured with her head towards the dissection room where Clive was finishing up. ‘But how is that connected?'

‘Now that is beyond me, but connected it is, Beverley.'

Her mobile went off; it played ‘Carmina Burana', Eisenmenger noticed. She said, ‘Yes?' then listened intently for a little over a minute during which Eisenmenger sent a text to Charlie, asking how she was. Beverley said to her caller, ‘What do you know about him?' The answer did not please, Eisenmenger deduced, because her reply was couched in somewhat brusque terms. ‘Well, fucking well find it out, constable. Find out everything there is to know.' She paused, listening to what Fisher had to say. Then: ‘Just do it, Fisher. And whilst you're about it, I want someone to go over the Colberrow Estate. They own a white van, registration number . . .' She read out the number that Eisenmenger had given her. ‘I want to know who has access to it and where it was the night before the body in the quarry was discovered.'

She stabbed her finger with its long, crimson nail – almost subconsciously Eisenmenger wondered if they were false – down on the phone and almost through it into her handbag. ‘That name you gave us – Trelawney – has been positively identified as the beheaded male.'

‘That's good, isn't it?' His tone was mild, almost ironic.

For a second she might have been about to rip some of the proverbial out of him, but then she seemed to find a little pocket of patience – perhaps in her capacious handbag – that she had previously overlooked, for she took a deep breath and almost smiled. ‘It's another lead,' she admitted.

‘There you are, then.'

She suddenly laughed, the tension within her relieved. ‘Maybe, John.'

FORTY-FIVE

S
omersby looked up. ‘Did you hear anything?'

Sheldon's eyes were watering because of the strong smell of vinegar that permeated the shed in which they were working; in any case, he was thinking and thinking was something he had to concentrate on, lest he lose track of things completely. He did not reply. Somersby went to the door, unbolted and unlocked it, then looked out warily. Sheldon continued with his task – stirring as he added water to the now cooling mix – either completely oblivious or completely uncaring of what Somersby was doing and saying. This was the part of the process he hated the most, and he had always to keep thinking about the money he was making, the money that made it all worthwhile . . .

Except that he was starting to wonder if it was worth it. When Somersby had come to him and suggested that he had a sure way to make a decent wage without too much effort, he had been wholly enthusiastic, had been completely believing that this was a sure-fire money-spinner, the honest-to-goodness, guaranteed, gold-plated gravy train that he had always thought was sooner or later going to come his way. Maximum money, minimum effort; wasn't that what everyone was looking for?

The effort, though, no longer seemed to him to be minimum; he always got the shitty jobs like this one while Somersby made out that his workload was just as hard and just as important, although it never seemed quite as unpleasant. When there was unloading or loading to do, it was Tom who did it, Somersby who directed him; washing the vats and utensils was always done by him, too, usually when Somersby had taken the latest batch away in the van, the van that was full because Tom had loaded it.

And he had a grievance about the money, because he wasn't allowed to spend it. ‘We'll be making tens of thousands, Thomas,' Somersby had said. ‘Maybe hundreds.' What he hadn't said was that he wasn't going to let Thomas see any of it, not for a long time. ‘We've got to be careful, Thomas. What are people going to think if you suddenly turn up one day in a Ferrari?'

They'll show me a bit of fucking respect, was what Tom Sheldon had thought, although he hadn't said it. Anyway, he wasn't stupid; he wasn't going to go mad and start buying diamonds and shit like that, but there wouldn't be any harm in getting the odd, small luxury – a new Playstation, and maybe a car that was a
little
newer than the crappy old banger he'd had ever since he learned to drive. Fucking hell, he was entitled to
something . . .

‘I thought I heard something.' Somersby, having closed the door and secured it again, was now looking out of the window. ‘You sure there was no way those kids could have got in?'

Tom stopped stirring, his resentment bubbling close to the surface. ‘I told you, didn't I? There was nothing.'

‘It sounded like a kid.'

‘I didn't hear it.'

‘You wouldn't have done, what with the noise of the stirring, Thomas.'

‘Why don't you do some stirring while I do some listening?'

Somersby knew well that Tom Sheldon was becoming increasingly aggrieved, but he wasn't too bothered and he had had a pretty good idea that a time such as this would come. He hadn't chosen Tom for his brains but for his brawn, which was not without its dangers; there were stages in the process where things could go horribly wrong – ‘horribly wrong' as in ‘explode' – and the first few times that they had worked together, Somersby had worked with his arsehole too tight to let a pin in.

He smiled at Tom; a friendly smile, one that to a man of greater intellect would have been seen as inappropriate. ‘Why don't I? And why don't you do what I'm doing, Thomas?'

He came across the shed, held out his hand for the paddle. It was handed to him, although with sudden reluctance, for Tom hadn't thought it would be this easy and his intellect wasn't
that
limited. Somersby indicated the desk at which he had been working. ‘Go on.'

His voice was so full of uncertainty, he had trouble getting any words past it. ‘What are you doing?' His face and demeanour mirrored the indecision.

Somersby replied neutrally, ‘I'm searching for suppliers of hydrochloric and sulphuric acid, acetic anhydride and chloroform. You can do that, can't you, Thomas?' But he couldn't, and he knew it and Somersby knew it. Somersby continued, ‘I've set up a dummy company, but you've got to order only small amounts, and not all from the same company.' Tom nodded; he did so slowly and could not hide his anxiety. Somersby was relentless. ‘And order in the right ratios. I don't want stuff we can't use left behind.'

‘Why not?'

‘Evidence, Thomas. Evidence.'

Tom nodded but didn't rush to the desk and the computer thereon.

‘Well?' There was a trace of viciousness in Somersby's tone now and on his face was a tight, unpleasant grin. ‘You can do that, can't you?'