Soul Seeker (27 page)

She had sounded distraught, but that was only the scantiest of comfort and it sounded in his ears very like the words of one who has made a decision but earned a guilty conscience as reward.
I'm sorry, John . . .

Which was a sorrow for a number of things – for reneging on what she had promised him, for shitting on his parade, for feeling uncomfortable, for feeling like a shit – but he did not gain pleasure from this. How could he? He did not feel vindictive towards her merely because she had done what so many had done before her; his logical mind told him that the one constant – John Eisenmenger – must be the one at fault.

Yet what could he do? He was what he was, and he did what he did. He did not feel that he was evil, nor even unpleasant, although he admitted that he was not ordinarily bothered by unpleasant things; did that make him so difficult to love? Apparently it did, at least as far as Charlie was concerned. He was well aware that pathologists had a reputation for coldness, for disconnection, even for strangeness, but he had always hoped that this could be divorced from the rest of his life, that it could be inserted firmly into a compartment and the lid closed, so that for at least some of his life he could consider himself normal, and have others consider him likewise. Yet it had never yet proved so. There was ever seepage of one into the other, a tainting of his non-professional life by what he did in daylight hours; it was as if the evil that men did not only lived after them, but was a contagion that he had caught and of which he could not be cured.

Even Charlie, who had at least had professional training in aspects of the world in which he found himself, could not cope, it seemed. If she could not, could anyone? Was he doomed to choose between marrying another forensic pathologist or a life alone?

Yet Helena had, at least for a while, endured him . . .

For the first time for many months, he really
thought
of Helena.

He saw her, remembered her, experienced her as if she were still with him.

She became real, just for an instant, as she had not been for so long, not since before she had died.

He had not argued with Charlie, had not even thought of doing so. He had the emotional awareness of a codfish, but even he had experience enough to appreciate that this was not a debate that could be won by intellectual acumen, that she was not putting forward a proposition, that he had just been given a description of how it was.

He began to weep.

What did he have now? Where could he go?

Just what was he?

Without prior awareness of the intention, he suddenly stood up and went to the kitchen to find some whisky; he had unexpectedly discovered that he intended to get himself thoroughly fucking drunk.

‘Go home.' With these two words, Beverley stood and went to the door, opened it and stood to one side. ‘Go home and go to sleep. You're on sick leave as of now.'

Lancefield stared at her; she did not get out of the chair and did not appear to be about to. ‘Sir . . .'

‘You've lost your mother, inspector. Even a bitch like me wouldn't have a problem with you taking compassionate leave.'

But Lancefield did not move and did not even change her facial expression. She said slowly and firmly, ‘I don't want to go home.'

‘You aren't in any sort of emotional state to do your job properly. I don't need someone wandering around like a zombie, bumping into the furniture.'

‘I know I haven't been pulling my weight, but I promise I'll pull myself together. Don't make me go home.' She was pleading and Beverley was both surprised and rather disgusted by the realization.

‘It would be for the best.'

But Lancefield was vehement. ‘No, it wouldn't be. I have no one to talk to there.'

‘What about your father? He's still alive, isn't he?'

‘We . . . don't see eye to eye.'

Which found Beverley nonplussed. She considered. Losing Lancefield would be a temporary problem whilst someone else was drafted in, but it was not insurmountable. On the other hand, Lancefield was normally efficient and reliable – if anything, too efficient. She said, ‘No more fuck-ups, Lancefield. If I let you stay around, you behave normally. It's your decision to carry on working, which means no special treatment, OK?'

Lancefield nodded. ‘I appreciate that, sir.'

‘You fucking better, Lancefield. I can't afford to cock this investigation up, and that means I can't afford to have anyone – anyone at all – not functioning at full capacity. If you let me down, I'll flay you alive and then throw you to the wolves; I've done it before, and I'll do it again, if I must. Understand?' Lancefield said nothing but it was clear from her expression that she understood only too well. Beverley continued to stare at her for a full thirty seconds more; then she said, still without dropping her gaze, ‘Now, first I want you to find out all you can about a place called Colberrow. It's in the north of the county.'

‘What do you want to know?'

‘Everything, inspector. Absolutely everything.'

‘What then?'

‘Keep digging for a connection between the victims we've so far managed to identify.'

Which Lancefield thought was a waste of time. Nothing had come up so far and she strongly suspected it never would. ‘Anything else?'

‘You can go through those Internet postings again.'

An inexplicable spurt of panic ran through her at this. ‘Again? But . . .'

‘Yes, Lancefield. Again.'

Lancefield was about to ask why, then decided against it; she guessed that it would not be a wise move.

Lancefield found that she could not stop herself watching the Internet postings again and again. It had started as merely her obedience of a superior's orders but, as awful as the images were, it imperceptibly became a compulsion. A voice in her head kept telling her not to, kept telling her that there was perversion in her desire to see what the killer had seen, seek what the killer had sought, but she could not desist. And with each showing she trod deeper and deeper into a mire that sucked at her soul, that insinuated itself into her being and corroded it. This killer scared her but beckoned her somehow; he whispered to her, sought what she sought, wondered the same things that she wondered. She felt a dreadful affinity for him, a hypnotic entrancement by his thinking . . .

Abruptly she pulled herself from the brink.

But brink of what?

She was cold, she suddenly realized; cold, hungry and ragingly thirsty. It was past midnight and darkness had fallen in her small terraced house without her realizing it.

It was with a feeling of nauseous fear, as if she had looked into the mirror and seen a corrupted vision of herself, that she turned the computer off at the wall, eager to see that screen fade to black. She was hungry, but she knew that she could not eat that night.

FORTY-NINE

E
isenmenger rang his secretary at eight thirty the next morning, claiming sickness; it was not altogether a lie, because he had indeed vomited twice. He felt almost overwhelming guilt at this subterfuge, yet at the same time, and considering what was happening to him, he tried to reason that he had some right to take a break; such reasoning, however, sounded to him specious and had the sound of sophistry in his ears. He was well aware that he was dumping his colleagues in it, and he did not like to do things like that. Yet, he just could not find it within himself to carry on as normal, as if his personal life had not just been blown asunder; if normally the stiff upper lip was not far from his face, today it was absent without leave; it was on someone else's face, perhaps, someone who did not feel as if one of the legs on which his life was based had just been blasted away by a shotgun.

Having phoned in his apologies, he made some coffee and retired to bed on a breakfast of caffeine and paracetamol. For the next two hours he drifted in and out of dreams that were soon forgotten yet left an aftertaste of unpleasantness, before becoming suddenly awake. It was quite abrupt this transition, and it found him without a headache, although with a dry mouth and sore throat. He got up, and tried to fight the feeling of guilt that he really should have gone into work, that he had let himself down. More coffee down and he debated whether to go to work, but decided against it; Charlie would presumably be in the hospital and, although it was unlikely they would meet, he did not want even to chance it. Besides, he felt something at the back of his head, something about the murders that was there to be seen, but had so far eluded him.

Accordingly, he settled down in his small study with a cafetière of fresh coffee and began to collate all the findings on all the bodies thus far found.

Feeling much better, Antonia was up early the next morning. Andrew who, since his retirement, had become something of a late riser unless he had to be otherwise, joined her in the kitchen at just after nine thirty. ‘What are you doing today?'

‘I need to take the children into Hereford to get them new clothes for school. What about you?'

‘Cutting the grass. If I get the time, I'll start pruning the roses out the front.'

‘Would you? They desperately need it.'

There was a period of companionable silence as he munched muesli and she took delicate, perfect semicircular bits of brown toast and apricot jam, while someone read out the Radio Four book of the week and told them all about life during the London Blitz. They drank the breakfast tea that she liked and could only get in Waitrose. It was too early for the paper or the post, so she read a magazine and he a book on the history of gynaecology.

The doorbell rang. It was Ellie Taylor to pick up Darren. It took a few moments, but when it sank in with all concerned that the boys were missing and had been all night, panic bloomed like a devouring plague.

The news of the missing boys had broken in Inspector Smillie's office at eleven o'clock that morning. He had an unfortunate manner that did not endear him to his colleagues, and he was well aware of this, but this did not mean that he was a bad or incompetent police officer. Far from it, in fact. He had constantly impressed superiors wherever he had been stationed and, the scuttlebutt predicted confidently, he was destined for great things, perhaps even for a post as Chief Constable. He went straight to the small village of Colberrow to question Ellie Taylor and Antonia and Andrew Barclay. He then organized house-to-house enquires of the entire village.

At three minutes past twelve, Eisenmenger stood up from the desk, stretched, winced and sighed. He had not moved beyond his despair at Charlie's phone call, but he had at least found a distraction. In fact, after reading and rereading his reports, making copious notes all the while, he now thought he had found an altogether very interesting distraction. He looked at his watch and decided that he and the environment in general would benefit if he took a long shower. Then he would contact Beverley and see if she agreed that he had found something useful.

He had a feeling he had.

FIFTY

‘
I
t's not all bad news.'

‘Go on.'

Eisenmenger could hear weary cynicism in Beverley's voice. She had spent most of the morning collating all that she had, and had found it was precious little; she felt like someone who had just gone to get money from the bank, only to find that the account was overdrawn. ‘The DNA tests confirm that the head in the slurry pit and the body from outside the mortuary match; likewise, the head with the body from the mortuary matches the body in the compost bin.'

‘How is that good?'

‘It's conclusive proof that I was right and you don't have to look for two more headless bodies and two more bodiless heads.'

She was patently less than impressed and showed this with a soft grunt and with no change in expression. ‘At the rate that other types of dead bodies are turning up, that's little comfort, John.'

‘None of the victims is known to the national DNA database, though.'

‘You surprise me,' she said with irony that was so heavy it left him slightly winded. ‘I've yet to find any victim or suspect who is.'

He shrugged. ‘I suspect the mathematics are that you need a DNA database in order of magnitude bigger than the one we've got before you see real benefits.'

She looked less than content, saying only sourly, ‘Thanks.'

‘And all the toxicology has come back completely negative so far, although we're waiting on the results from the last two.'

‘No drugs, no alcohol?'

‘Nothing in the blood. As I said, they'd been given Rohypnol at some point, but when they died, that had passed out of their system. They were completely compos mentis when they were killed.'

Under her breath, he heard her say,
Shit.
More loudly, she then observed sourly, ‘Lucky bastards.' A snort, then: ‘I thought you said it wasn't all bad news. Where's the good in any of this?' He was surprised; she was not usually so morose. The Beverley Wharton he knew well was driven, cocksure, almost arrogant; this one was hung around with a necklace of defeatism. Interestingly, she did not seem quite so attractive now, he thought, and that was a shame. ‘Haven't you got anything at all to help me?'

‘You've got four of the victims identified. Sooner or later that ought to highlight a common theme.'

She picked up four pink cardboard folders and chucked them across the desk to him. ‘This is all we've found so far on all of them. I've had Lancefield trawling again, but I doubt she'll find anything new. Go through what we've got so far, if you like. I can't see anything that links them.'