Soul Seeker (9 page)

TWELVE

‘
W
ell?' Beverley's tone was not abrupt or unfriendly, but it was urgent.

Eisenmenger had to pull himself out of something that might have been sleep. ‘Intriguing, Beverley. Definitely intriguing.'

‘What the fuck does that mean?'

‘The good news is that the head fits the body from the garbage bin, and the body fits the head from the slurry pit. It'll have to be confirmed by DNA, but I wouldn't be too concerned about that.'

Beverley murmured, ‘Thank God for small mercies.' She looked less than delighted, although Lancefield at least found a smile. ‘Anything else?'

She asked this more in hope than expectation, but Eisenmenger surprised her. ‘Yes.'

‘Really? What?'

‘The male had a mesothelioma.'

If he expected generalized swooning and adulation, he was soon a wiser man; there was nothing but consternation. It fell to Beverley to seek enlightenment. ‘Which is what?'

‘An exceedingly rare tumour, only occurring in people who have been exposed to asbestos.'

‘How rare?'

‘Very. And he's had a biopsy. He's been in hospital and will have medical records. He may even have missed outpatient appointments.'

Lancefield said at once, ‘I'll start checking straight away,' but Beverley stopped her.

‘Don't bother. You won't get anywhere, not if I know medics. They'll clam up, claim patient confidentiality, all that crap.' Of Eisenmenger, she asked, ‘Won't they?'

‘I expect so,' he admitted.

‘But you could find it,' mused Beverley after a moment. ‘You work at the hospital. You have access to biopsy results.'

‘Oh, no,' he said at once. ‘Data Protection Act and all that. I've signed confidentiality agreements.'

‘I'm not asking you to tittle-tattle on every patient with this type of tumour. You said it was rare, so there can't be many to find; all I want to know is if you can identify who this might be. If you can, he's dead, so no confidentiality problems.'

It wasn't as simple as that, though. He knew that he would be pushing dangerous, mined boundaries. ‘I'm not authorized to access medical records except for legitimate professional purposes.'

‘These
are
professional purposes, John. My profession is finding the sick bastard who's doing this, and I need to know the identity of that body and I need to know as soon as possible.'

Still he hesitated.

‘John . . .'

He shook his head. He was not a born subversive. ‘Let me think about it, Beverley.'

He knew that she was about to coerce him, so he said immediately, ‘Apart from that, nothing much. He had cirrhosis, although without complications so far. He had as much coronary atheroma as you might expect—'

‘So nothing useful?' she interrupted.

‘Sorry.'

THIRTEEN

E
isenmenger did not dream of Helena – for so long his lover so recently dead – as he had once dreamed of Tamsin, a child he had barely known in her life but had known so well as she burned to death. He did not need to. She remained with him in a far more constant, continuous way than merely odd visitations in the night-time, vague ghosts in the darkness, flitting reminders. Even after Helena had fallen out of love with him, he had not stopped feeling for her in exactly the same way he always had done, this emotion tempered only by consternation that it was no longer mutual, disbelief and grief. This amalgam of emotions remained with him, would do so forever, only fading, never vanishing.

And, recognizing this, he had made a conscious effort to move away from this episode in his life, this interlude that could never be relived; move
away
, mind, not move
on
; it was a compartmentalization of the memory, not a journey beyond it. It was still within him, only now it was in a room to which he had shut the door; shut it but not locked it. He did not want to lose the joys of having known Helena, and would therefore endure the sorrows that were their conjoined twins. It had been difficult to persuade himself that this was not the wrong thing to do, that he could love his memories just as strongly while finding new joy in new relationships, but he had known that it was a stupidity he had to defeat; failure would mean only entrapment in his own history.

Of course, his attachment – could he yet call it love? – had come from a direction in which he was not looking. He had originally been attracted to a gynaecology cancer nurse specialist, finding her vivacious irreverence for the lunacies of the NHS refreshing, her genuine feelings for the women in her care, touching. Yet it had not developed beyond mutual liking and, whilst he was discovering this, Charlie had come into his ken when a relatively young woman had come into the hospital with torrential vaginal bleeding. It had been Eisenmenger who, examining the tissue biopsies under the microscope, had diagnosed non-Hodgkin's lymphoma of the endometrium, a very rare condition. She had developed severe psychological problems, including obsessive-compulsive symptomatology and some self-harming; Charlie had treated her, attending the multidisciplinary team meeting, at which Eisenmenger was the pathologist, to outline the progress she had made.

She was eight years younger than him, but cheerful and optimistic, open-hearted and ebullient, something that he seemed to have been missing for a long, long time. She was single, having separated from a long-term partner eighteen months before, but the mother of a twenty-one-year-old son, Paul, who was reading computer sciences at Durham; she was not keen to enter into another long-term relationship, but he was not sure that he was either; they found the middle ground mutually reassuring and had just been taking it from there, at least until the last few weeks. Now, though, he suspected that things were changing; now, his life as a jobbing forensic pathologist was beginning to bite. The death in a fire of an elderly couple in Upton St Leonards followed in less than a week by the death of a seventeen-year-old girl from some heroin she had been given by her father; the headless corpse and unassociated head, and now another head and body, portending as they did the long haul that serial killings usually entailed, were an unwelcome addition to this litany. He could see in Charlie's eyes that she was beginning to wonder.

His muscles were twitching uncontrollably, beginning now to go into long painful cramps. He was intolerably hot, sweat soaking his clothes. He had almost lost his voice and could only now croak odd, tremulous words – ‘
Pleeassse . . . For fuck's sssaake . . . Oh, G-g-god-d-d . . .
' The tingling had long since changed from a tickling sensation through an uncomfortable pattern of pinpricks to sharp, incessant stabs of razor-thin agony, all over his body, within every cell. He had long ago lost control of his bowels, and his heart he could feel was bouncing around inside his chest, careering off his ribs and, he was certain, beginning to miss beats.

The camera lenses continued to stare, blind to his pain.

FOURTEEN

T
he summons to Braxton's office was both expected and unwelcome, and was so in equal measures. They had tried to keep the finding of headless bodies and unrelated bodyless heads quiet, but inevitably, given the sensational nature of these discoveries, things had leaked and the press were sniffing; thus the police needed to coordinate a public relations strategy. Beverley hated this side of her newly refound promotion, because it meant telling lies by telling part of the truth, misinforming by informing, being as mendacious as the scum she had to swim through every day. She found the mutually parasitic relationship of the media and the police to be somehow less honest than that between the police and the lawbreakers, in which at least there were some truths exchanged from time to time, and in which neither side was pretending to have respect for each other.

The worst of it, though, was that she actually liked Braxton, a unique feeling for her when it came to her relationship with her superiors. He had never given her the impression that he was sexually interested in her, indeed she suspected that he looked on her from a purely pastoral, purely paternal standpoint. He did not see her as a rival (he was due to retire in less than five years anyway) and consequently did not feel the need to denigrate her, insult her, patronize her or actively plot against her. She judged that he was able to look above the office politics and career ladder to concentrate more upon what, after all, they were all supposedly there for – the solving of crimes. Not that she underestimated him; his manner was mild, his voice was relatively cultured and his smile warm, but the corollary was that he gave these expecting respect and diligence in return, and woe betide those who failed to appreciate this.

His door was open when she climbed the stairs to the top floor and before she could knock he bade her come in and be seated. ‘I've read the reports,' he said without preamble.

His tone, she assessed, was that of a man who was not impressed and, accordingly, she said, ‘They don't make good reading.'

‘No.'

His monosyllabic reply gave her nowhere to hide and she had to continue. ‘We're going through the routine – missing persons, DNA, dental records . . .'

‘I know that, chief inspector. I can read, you see . . .' A trace of sarcasm but, like all the best cooks, he had added the perfect amount, especially when combined with a small smile and an almost imperceptible emphasis on the word
chief.
Stung, she was momentarily lost, unsure of what to say, and it allowed him to add with a sad but affectionate sigh, ‘Beverley, you haven't got the faintest idea what is going on, have you?'

What could she say? ‘No.'

Lambert would have exploded, or been excoriating, or just incredibly angry, but Braxton no longer had any interests beyond the furtherance of the investigation. ‘I can't say I'm surprised. Neither do I.' His smile, momentarily gone, returned and was broader but sadder. ‘Relax, please,' he suggested and the atmosphere became at once easier. He got up and went to a filter coffee machine on top of a filing cabinet, came back with two mugs, handing one to her; it was black and unsugared, as he knew she liked it. Then, as he sat down: ‘I don't envy you this one, Beverley.'

Which conveyed sympathy at exactly the same time as it smacked her in the face with the realization that he was hanging her out to dry;
solve it or else.
Perhaps, she thought, she had underestimated his capacity for viciousness; she had been perhaps naive to assume that anyone could rise to his level without being a hard-hearted bastard. She sipped her coffee, deciding that it was too weak and possibly, the greater crime, decaffeinated. ‘Can you offer any assistance?'

‘Of course,' he said quickly; too quickly. ‘We have to catch this one, especially now it's public.'

She knew better than to take this at face value. ‘How can you help me?'

‘Manpower and other resources . . .' Of course there had to be a caveat, though. ‘Within reason.'

She supposed with the bitter cynicism of experience that it was about as much as she could expect, but it was hardly a blank cheque; it could mean anything from an extra car to a promise of half the Gloucestershire Constabulary under her command; it was likely, she suspected, to be closer to the former than the latter. ‘And I could appreciate the benefit of your experience. Have you ever come across anything like this before?'

He looked momentarily astonished, the coffee cup arrested on its journey to his lips. ‘Like this? Good God, no.' He didn't quite laugh in disbelief at the stupidity of the question, but it was a damned close-run thing. ‘Mix-and-match body parts?'

A stupid question, she saw, but could not find embarrassment within her, so persisted. ‘Serial killings, though . . .?'

He did not seem to understand. ‘You've been involved with serial killers before now, Beverley. I don't see what I can contribute.'

‘But surely . . .?' She saw afterwards that she was being dense in not understanding right away, but dense she was, at least until she saw him shaking his head.

‘Beverley . . .' He paused, then almost winced, as though a sudden spasm ran through his gut. ‘You must understand. It has been suggested to me that this is your case, no one else's . . .'

She had not finished her coffee, but she put the cup down very carefully, realizations sparking around her like fireflies. ‘Oh, I see.'

He grimaced. ‘I am sorry, Beverley. Not my decision, but one that I cannot influence.'

She left his office, sadder and, if not wiser, then at least better informed.

His throat felt like fire but he no longer cared; even had it been real fire, it would have been preferable to that tingling, the one that had been filling his body for what seemed like hours now, that was slowly but inexorably intensifying, that he knew would carry on intensifying until . . .

Nothing else had changed. The light was just the same, the temperature had not changed, the silence remained; the lenses merely continued to stare impassively and at the same time menacingly. The tingling, though, increased; it became stronger and at the same time spread throughout his body, extending tendrils into every organ, every limb, eventually every cell.

Back in Beverley's office, everyone was in identical positions, it could almost have been a deliberate re-enactment of their last meeting, only this time in morning sunshine, and this time DCI Wharton was feeling even meaner.