‘We can’t rule that out as a possibility,’ Nero says.
‘Oh, I think we can if we choose to.’ Hagalín glares at him. ‘They’ll want a statement and we can’t put you in front of the media looking like that. I thought you were meant to be fit for work, but you still seem to be covered in bruises.’
‘I took a tumble on some ice,’ Nero says. ‘I was coming down –’
‘Yes, yes. You seem to be very accident prone. In any case, I’d ask Kassöndrudóttir to do the honours but I feel the situation needs a man’s gravitas.’
‘With respect, sir, I–’
The governor holds up a hand. ‘Spare me your thoughts on the subject of gender equality, Cavallo.’
Nero goes to speak again but Hagalín cuts him off. ‘Tell me you’re up to speed on these latest murders.’
‘Well, I’ve listened to the patrol reports and the ones from the paramedic who arrived at the factory about the same time.’
‘And?’
‘I’d say they paint a very confused picture. Look, sir, there’s no shortage of theories as to what might have happened in that place. Constable Chan is our only potential witness but she’s still receiving counselling for PTSD. We expect her to be absent for some time yet. I’ve listened to the statement she made from her hospital bed and it seems plausible to me that she was taken there having been kidnapped on her way home. She claims to have no memory of what occurred after they bundled her in there.’
‘And you believe her story?’
‘I see no reason not to.’
‘Shall I tell you what I see? I see we have a witness’s story with more holes than Swiss fokking cheese. I see those three dead vixens have now been confirmed as IBR hybrids. I see we have preliminary forensic reports that highlight more discrepancies than flies round a horse’s asshole. On top of all that, I hear there’s an undercurrent of suspicion that on the night in question not one senior homicide officer was available to attend the SOC. Not fokking one!’
‘As you know, I’d only just left hospital,’ Nero says, knowing his get-out-of-jail card is sound enough, that it wasn’t until yesterday he was officially deemed fit for light duties. ‘I believe that, at the time, Inspector Kassöndrudóttir had already reported that she was suffering from food poisoning.’ He silently gives thanks that Kass had had the presence of mind to make up that story about being laid low.
Hagalín looks around the room like a client assessing the way a decorator had failed to follow his orders. ‘I hear Ashram still hasn’t surfaced.’
‘We’re all worried sick about Rashid,’ Nero says. ‘I’m afraid to say I’m beginning to suspect the worst.’
‘And what might that worst be, Inspector?’ He gives Nero a long look. ‘I have my suspicions he may have decided a policeman’s salary was no longer to his liking. That he’d prefer a bigger slice of the pie and– ’
‘He’s dead.’ Nero’s fists curl as he closes the gap between himself and the governor. ‘At least it’s a distinct possibility. Whatever’s happened to him, I have no doubt that Inspector Ashram would have been acting in the line of duty.’
‘If you say so.’ Hagalín retreats through the door. ‘In any case, I’ve decided we need an addition to this department – a pair of fresher eyes, as it were.’
Twelve
Jue Hai’s voice in his ear says, ‘Nero, I know you’ve only just got back in the saddle.’ He pauses, maybe expecting him to laugh at this feeble pun on his name. Getting no reaction, the pathologist clears his throat. ‘But the thing is, I really think you need to see this with your own eyes.’
Nero rubs at the scar on his forehead. ‘Can’t it wait until tomorrow?’
‘Of course it can. By definition, everything we handle down here can wait until tomorrow and the day after that – they’re not going anywhere; but, like I said, I really think you’ll want to see this in the flesh, so to speak.’ He can hear poorly suppressed excitement in the pathologist’s voice.
‘Okay, I’m on my way.’ Silently, he adds, to yet another circle of hell.
Jue Hai greets him with a handshake followed by a far too hearty slap to the back. He’d have thought a medical man might be more sensitive to how much that particular gesture was likely to hurt someone with his recent injuries; then again, the dead don’t tend to complain. The pathologist peers at him. ‘Looks like you’ve taken up boxing.’
‘Ice,’ Nero says. ‘I slipped.’ Jue Hai loses interest. Aside from the shrouded occupants of several trollies, the two of them would appear to be alone. ‘It’s still early,’ Nero says. ‘Where is everybody?’
‘There’s just Jóra and me left,’ the pathologist shrugs. ‘The curfew’s given everyone else the perfect excuse to knock off early.’
‘We used to talk about POETS,’ Nero says, more to himself than anything else.
Jue Hai shoots him a puzzled look.
‘You haven’t heard that traditional English acronym – Piss Off Early Tomorrow’s Saturday?’
Jue Hai’s laugh is more of a giggle that’s somehow survived his school days. It amazes him that his friend can remain upbeat in the face of the things he sees down here in his working day.
‘We’ve just begun round two with those factory corpses.’ Jue Hai snaps on a fresh pair of gloves and offers him the open box – a gesture that suggests this is going to be a hands-on encounter.
As Nero pulls on the gloves, his stomach begins to churn at the prospect – a Pavlovian response he can’t seem to control.
Jue Hai leads the way. ‘First one is right over here.’ The overheads flicker on as they approach a green-sheeted trolley.
‘Circle,’ Jue Hai says, apropos nothing.
‘Excuse me?’
‘Curfew Is Real Close Let’s Exit.’ The pathologist appears to be delighted by this new game. Still smiling, he takes hold of the lower edge of the fabric. A magician’s pause. ‘It’s not the prettiest of sights.’
Bracing his legs like a man at sea, Nero nods. ‘Let’s get on with it.’
With great care, the pathologist folds the cover back along the length of Ása’s blackened corpse.
The stench of burnt flesh hits Nero’s nostrils. Her body has fixed itself into a stiff pose – she seems caught in the act of attempting to sit up, her fleshless jaw open in a frozen scream of outrage. The corpse is recognisably human but looking down on her remains, he gets no sense of her ever being alive; much like the casts of the long dead he’d once seen at Pompeii.
Nero has to fight the same urge to cover her over, insist they leave this poor dead woman alone and arrange a decent burial for her. A flaming raft at sea would seem more appropriate than the short, in this case almost superfluous, trip to the municipal crematorium.
‘This one is the only female and by far the most interesting. Earlier, I took samples from here, here, and here.’ Jue Hai touches areas of her face and throat; his probing fingers seem proprietorial – like she’s some sort of prize.
‘I won’t bore you with the technicalities,’ he says, ‘but despite all the damage, we’ve been able to establish that parts of her throat and windpipe are entirely absent.’ His fingers point to the missing section.
Nero feels obliged to bend forward like he really wants to see all this. ‘Mmm.’ Words fail him. His gloved hand hovers a few centimetres above her singed hair. He wishes he could smooth it away from what’s left of her face.
‘Jóra’s analysis has confirmed my suspicions that the extensive photon damage actually occurred post-mortem.’ The pathologist flicks a sideways look at him. ‘Strange – yes?’
Nero nods his head as if considering the matter.
‘I’ve been asking myself,’ Jue Hai’s gaze returns to the lower torso, ‘why would someone do such a thing?’
‘Maybe they wanted to make sure she was dead.’ Nero looks away to Ása’s unblemished feet, half expecting to see a label attached reading Jane Doe. ‘Or it could have been an impassioned assault – a rival exacting reven
ge or something like that.’
Jue Hai appears far from convinced by either theory. ‘The mystery doesn’t end there,’ he says. ‘Not by a long way.’
Nero does his best to look curious.
‘There’s something else, some anomalies we’ve discovered about this woman that are unnerving to say the least.’
He looks around the room as if expecting eavesdroppers to materialise out of every corner. ‘Jóra’s just running some final tests. She’s keen to share the results with you.’
The pathologist finally folds the sheet back over the body. ‘We’ll be able to see it more clearly on her system.’
Together they walk towards Jóra Bjarnadóttir’s laboratory. Nero takes in a series of deep breaths hoping it will help. He tries to calculate how much surprise he should show; too little and both might be suspicious, too much and he’ll be exposed as a ham actor.
She looks up as they enter. ‘Well if it isn’t Inspector Cavallo, returned to us whole at last.’ The fierce light is revealing every crease, every small mark or blemish on her face as she comes forward to greet him. What must he look like? She gives him a hug, which this time leaves his back out of it. ‘Those bruises are fresh,’ she says examining his skin in some detail.
‘Slipped on some ice,’ he says.
He catches the look she gives Jue Hai.
‘Anyway,’ she says, ‘let me show you what I have been working on. Lights down.’
The reduction is easier on his eyes. ‘From Jue Hai’s samples of bone, hair and so forth, I extracted the usual nuclear and mitochondrial DNA,’ she says. ‘Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to match her polymorphisms to anyone on our system. We’re no closer to establishing the woman’s identity other than to say she’s of Chinese ethnicity. Bone and hair analysis confirms she was approximately twenty-five years old and had lived here in Eldísvík all of her short life.’
Nero wants to get this over. ‘So far, no great surprises. What was it you wanted to show me?’
At her touch, the monitor on the desk emits a projected image. Like a rollercoaster ride, they’re plunged from the rotating exterior of Ása’s corpse down into the tissue in a section of her gut. The ride takes them on and on, deeper and deeper into clusters of cells. Nero recognises the spinning double helix of DNA when it springs up. He stares at those two parallel strands twisted around each other. The whole thing continues to rotate in front of them before the image mutates into a striped ribbon and then a whole load of letter sequences.
‘What exactly are we looking at?’ Nero asks.
‘Something I have never seen in any human body before.’ Jóra’s finger enters the projection. ‘Let me say I’ve run this analysis over and over to be certain.’ She takes a breath. ‘Right here we are looking at a sequence you would normally only see in one animal – the Canis Lupus or Eurasian wolf.’
Jue Hai gasps. ‘So you were right.’
‘You’re joking.’ Nero shakes his head. ‘This has got to be a wind-up.’
She folds her arms defensively across her chest. “I’m afraid this is no joke – far from it.’
‘Then your samples must have become contaminated,’ Nero says. ‘Weren’t you studying those vixens they brought in with her? We all know they’ve all been genetically altered to include wolf genes. Couldn’t there have been some cross- contamination?’
‘I’ve been able to rule that out as a possibility.’ Nero’s never seen her look this serious.
Jue Hai walks through the projection to point an accusing hand through the doorway towards the body on the trolley. ‘Which means that, despite appearances, the woman – the corpse we were just looking at – isn’t entirely human.’
‘That’s correct,’ Jóra says. ‘We all share around 84% of our DNA with canines – in her case the percentage is a fraction higher. To put it crudely, genetically speaking she’s a hybrid – what is popularly referred to as a chimera.’
Thirteen
The expressway pod is packed with students, their collective body-heat making the atmosphere hot and stuffy. When they enter a tunnel, Bruno struggles to keep his mind in the present. His head feels too light, his back stiff from sleeping on Nero’s sagging couch. It doesn’t help that the girl sitting next to him is wearing some sweet, musky sort of perfume that’s catching in his throat.
Instead of the usual good-natured din, the pervading silence is broken only by the odd hurried whisper. Every person he looks at is actively avoiding eye contact; as soon as they catch his gaze, their eyes dart away. From the people he’s brushed up against, he’s picked up so many rumours of arrests and unexplained disappearances. There’s a tangible fear that every one of their studs is being monitored and a stray word might condemn any one of them to the same fate.
Now they’ve emerged into daylight again, Bruno’s able to catch brief glimpses of the landscape beyond the city. Today the peaks of the surrounding mountains blend with the colourless sky.
He’s restless, his underused muscles forcing his legs into jittery spasms. He wishes he could close his mind to the burden of this collective anxiety. Through the window, he spots the distinctive lozenge shape of yet another blacked-out patrol vehicle.
When the pod door slides open, he hangs back from the main rush before stepping down. Fat snowflakes instantly adhere to the front of his hair while more keep trying to infiltrate his mouth and eyes. Despite his hood, they sting his face and begin to settle along his eyelashes so he has to keep brushing them away.
Though he’s walked this exact same route countless times, today he’s sorely tempted to turn around and catch the next pod back.
No –he mustn’t give up; he’d made a promise and now he has to stick to it. Dipping his head against the weather’s onslaught, Bruno concentrates on avoiding the melt puddles as he takes the next step and then the one after that. If there’s safety in numbers, today is a day for following the herd.
Looking up through narrowed eyes, he notices the barricades have all been dismantled – the piled-up furniture and rubbish cleared away. There’s still an indentation where the brazier used to burn day and night but the fresh snow is busy covering that and any other battle scars left behind on the university’s landscaped grounds.
There are sentries on either side of the main entrance gate – a matching pair so stiff they could be statues. Unlike the rest of humanity, the bastards seem impervious to the weather. Up close, it’s impossible not to be impressed by their physiques, their immaculate military uniforms and, most of all, the array of weapons bristling from holsters back and front. It’s obvious why everyone calls this lot “the porcupines”.
Their two sets of eyes range over him as he walks through into the campus grounds. What he’d give to still be wearing that suit.
People are everywhere, but instead of the usual cries and joshing, everyone’s going about their morning in an orderly manner. If you were paranoid, you might suspect someone had planted some kind of obedience chip inside their brains.
Up ahead, more soldiers guard the exits. They seem to come in matching pairs. Bruno’s gaze is drawn away towards the walkway entrance – the place where he’d run into Kleiner for the final time.
He shuts his eyes against the memory of their encounter but can’t stop himself seeing the man’s corpse sprawled out on the frosty ground. Time coalesces; any second he expects to hear some startled cry of discovery.
Pulling himself back into the present, a shiver runs through him that could almost be explained away by the cold weather.
He has to take a heavy breath before stepping inside the faculty entrance. Joining the shuffling queue, he offers his hand up to the scanner before passing under the arch of a recently installed weapons detector. He can smell the new steel of the metal. Every cough and clank echoes in a way he’s never noticed before.
The retinal probe does nothing for his hangover – Nero had insisted they raise a toast his future.
Absurdly, the final hurdle is a manual ID check. He fla
shes the necessary but whatever the security guard sees in his face is enough to initiate an arbitrary frisk down. It’s all Bruno can do not to suggest this final indignity is linked to the man’s sexual proclivities.
He’s wordlessly waved through. Turning to his right, he decides against the alternative route and instead steps onto the crowded travallator that will take him up a gradual, curving incline to the Humanities Department. His face is burning from the rapid change in temperature – feels like his skin has been stretched too far.
Instead of adopting his usual habit of standing still, on impulse he decides to forge his own pathway.
‘Ooowww!’
‘That was my foot you just stepped on.’
‘Where’s the fokking fire, man?’
Ignoring all complaints, he takes pleasure in this enhanced forward momentum and just for a moment he allows himself the fantasy that he’s some kind of superhero striding through these mere mortals. God, how he’d love to be able to walk in here unseen, past all those soldiers and all that security crap in the entrance lobby. Nero could have let them keep a suit each – what harm would it have done?
Reaching the end of the skywalk, Bruno continues to power on, speeding up almost to a jog as he passes Magnus Jónsson’s office – the last thing he needs right now is an encounter with his old history lecturer.
He’s arrived too early. The principal’s pasty-faced assistant eventually looks up to tell him he’ll have to take a seat in a small waiting room.
Any surveillance equipment is well hidden. Even so, he daren’t use his stud, which means there’s nothing to help pass the time. He takes in the eye-narrowing view of falling snow against a blank sky.
Bruno paces back and forth. It’s not that he’s unsure of the outcome of this meeting. By one means or another he’d coerced Jón Benediktsson into letting them take that valuable boat despite a dozen regulations forbidding it – by comparison this is going to be a walk in the park. His restless legs take him this way and that. Yes, he’s confident, over-confident even, that he can persuade Professor Milton he’s turned over a new leaf or this is the start of a new page or a new chapter – whatever overused metaphor is most likely to appeal to her.
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