by James Fahy
“Finance what, exactly?” I wanted to know.
“Ways in which to make people more… efficient,” he replied, evasively, I thought.
“You mean soldiers.”
“I mean… the betterment of humankind,” he grunted. “In case you haven’t noticed, Doctor, we are surrounded by other species. The vampires, the Tribals, the Bonewalkers, and more. All of which are faster, stronger than us.” He was bristling. “The days are gone when humanity could rest comfortably at the top of the food chain. These days we must fight for space on the branch we cling to.”
“William stood down from active research a few years back,” Melissa explained. “When our daughter was terribly unwell.” She smiled at him with real affection. “The former Mrs Cunningham Bowls passed suddenly. It wasn’t a year after that before the two of us met, Melodie was in a bad way, only five years old. We needed him here at home.”
“Of course she’s much better now,” he nodded firmly. “Much improved.”
“With so many hobbies and sports, that much is evident,” Dee noted. “I’m glad to hear you got through a dark time, all three of you.”
“What can you tell us about this so-called ‘devil’ that some of the guests say they saw?” I asked. I was directing my question towards Mrs Cunningham Bowls, who seems the least spiky of the two.
“It may mean nothing,” she said, apologetically. “I admit, none of the adult guests saw it. But I firmly believe something dark entered our home that day.”
“None of the adults?” Dee raised his eyebrows. “So you’re saying the children saw it?”
She nodded, her hands fiddling with the string of pearls she wore. “It was in the bushes by the house, two or three of the children had wandered off, girls from dance class, looking for Melodie, I suppose. They say they saw it heading towards the house, but were so afraid of it, they ran back without finding her.” She paused, clearly uncomfortable. “They were distraught, poor little angels. They said… they said it smelled like a dead thing, and that it… it grinned at them, but that its mouth was far too wide.” She swept a finger briskly from one cheekbone to the next. “From here to here.”
“I’ve never heard of any such GO,” Denison said thoughtfully.
Child-snatching, grinning demons? I thought, yeah, me neither. But then I’d never heard of eerie faceless doll-girls until a few months ago either, and I’d ended up almost being strangled to death by one in a creepy-ass old power-station. I tried at least to keep an open mind these days. Within reason.
“I should put this on the table right now, doctors, or whatever you are,” William said, with brusque finality. “If you are unable to locate our daughter, you will leave me with no choice. So far I have done my damnedest to keep this from public knowledge. Only close friends of the Mankind Movement who share our views, a select and discreet number of well-connected and upright people, those you met at the vigil last night.” He sighed. “But if I were to announce this at the October Gala, the entirety of the Mankind Movement will be made aware. The city will be forced to act, en masse.”
“You’ll start a witch-hunt if you go to the press with unsubstantiated claims of GO involvement,” Denison said.
“I don’t want this publicity,” William said. “If this can be settled quietly, and my daughter returned unharmed, all the better, for us as well as you, and Cabal.”
I looked around the room, thinking. “She was last seen in the music room you say, with her governess?”
“Headed there, yes,” Marissa clarified. “We searched there first, of course. There’s very little to see. Curtains to hide behind, where of course she wasn’t. Other than that, the room is sparse. The harp, the piano and pianoforte, some chairs, and the presents of course. The birthday presents are still there, unwrapped…” Her hand suddenly went to her mouth and the blinked rapidly. It was the first real show of emotion I’d seen.
“No one’s been in there since,” her husband nodded. “Or anywhere in that wing of the house. It has a bad feeling to it now. Another vile product of having a Genetic Other monster trespassing in our home, it’s tainted. We’ve searched every other room of the house. Every nook and cranny.”
“Even so,” I said. “I’d like to see it.”
Chapter 7
The Cunningham Bowls had claimed there was a ‘taint’ in this part of the house. Superstitious nonsense of course, but they were two parents who had lost their daughter. You could forgive them for not being quite in their right minds. But as I walked along the large corridors, feeling slightly as though I was Belle about to enter the forbidden west wing of the castle, I had to disagree. When they said ‘taint’, unless caused by a bad aura, they meant an underlying rottenness, like a dead cat tied in a garbage bag and left out in the hot sun with some over-ripe bananas. This wing of the house, the further we walked into it, had a very distinctive smell. This wasn’t a bad juju. This was simply death.
I glanced at Denison as we walked. He returned the look. We’ve both been around enough corpses to know the smell of dead bodies, and this creeping aroma was not flowing through a chilled and refrigerated morgue, but a regular house with the heating turned up high against the October chill outside. It was overpowering.
“This… wasn’t like this… the other day,” Mrs Cunningham Bowls said, covering her mouth with her sleeve and looking alarmed as she turned the key in the white-panelled door into the music room.
Well, of course it wasn’t, I reasoned. They’d already told us that no one had been near this room, or even this part of the house, since the party. Fresh death doesn’t smell. Give it three days though, even in a cold autumn, and it’s a different tune.
I was braced for horror, but the ground-floor room beyond the door was empty. Mr Cunningham Bowls rushed to the windows, large ornate French doors, unlocked and threw them open, trying to get some kind of air circulating in the stale miasma and gagging slightly. His wife refused to enter the room at all. She simply stood in the doorway, hugging her elbows and looking lost and afraid.
“It’s like brimstone,” she whispered, crossing herself. “Corruption. The stench of hell. I told you.”
I took in the room at a glance. Larger than my entire flat, the music room was light and airy. Dark wood floors, pale pastel walls with arched recessed bookcases under elegant domed seashell-carved pediments. The ceiling was a sky fresco, light blue with painted clouds, and white gauze curtains billowing slightly in the breeze from outside.
It should have been a fresh, sunlit place, but the smell of death coated everything in a thick, invisible varnish. It made the air itself feel sticky.
As we’d been told, there was little furniture. A large black grand piano, polished to perfection, stood on a busily-patterned maroon rug, a pianoforte stood away to one side against the wall, a large harp in the bay window on the far side of the room, and a towering mountain of boxes, a well-wrapped pile of unopened birthday presents, stacked neatly against the shelves. The sight of the unopened gifts made my heart plunge unexpectedly. I’m not an overly emotional person, but I’m not made of stone either. There should have been a young girl opening those boxes three days ago, and now there wasn’t. The sight of them gathering dust was incredibly grim.
“It’s a demon,” Marissa whispered, horrified behind her sleeve. “The children saw it… I told you. You can feel its presence lingering still.”
“It’s unlikely, ma’am,” my colleague told her grimly but diplomatically, as we walked around the room. Even with the windows wide open, the stench was unbearable. It stung the eyes and crawled down the throat. Denison glanced between our two hosts. “Please, if you could both give us a moment.”
“What is there to see?” William asked, exasperated. “I’ve told you already, the room was empty, the windows open. She was already gone.”
“Indulge us, please.” I gestured to the door as politely as I could. “Perhaps take your wife to get a glass of water?”
Begrudgingly, the Cunningham Bo
wls left us alone, closing the door behind them. As soon as I could no longer hear their footfalls in the corridor outside and judged they were out of earshot I frowned at Denison.
“Dead body.”
He nodded, looking around. “Dead body,” he agreed. I could see the silent prayer in his eyes. He was thinking the exact same thing I was. He could smell a corpse, same as me. Jesus H Christ, I really didn’t want to find a young dead girl anywhere in this room.
“Three days,” he muttered thoughtfully to himself, crossing to the bookcases and sliding his hands behind them, between the wood and the wall, checking if any of them swung out. “I can tell the PMI just from the smell. Definitely three days, no more, no less. That puts this death we’re getting a lungful of precisely at birthday party time.”
“I didn’t think it was possible, but you just made this even creepier, Dee,” I said, approaching the large pile of presents. Denison was a forensic scientist, and to say he knew his shit would be a tremendous understatement. There are complex chemical processes that begin when we die. From the second when we go from being a living thing, to essentially being a large piece of cooling meat.
PMI, or post-mortem interval, as Dee had indicated, was the determination of how long a body had been dead. Depending on the chemical processes involved, and the environment of course, a corpse smells very different at different stages.
“Normal science uses all manner of things to determine PMI,” I muttered, warily lifting aside wrapped present boxes and dreading finding a child corpse buried in the pile. The image, once lodged in my treacherous mind, wouldn’t budge. “Two-dimensional gas chromatography, time-of-flight mass spectrometry, you know?” I glanced up at him. “You do realise how absolutely awful it is that you can tell just with your own nose. What are you, a sniffer dog?”
“A good wine expert can tell a lot about the wine by scent alone,” he shrugged unapologetically, finding nothing at the bookshelves and crossing instead to check the space behind the harp.
“This isn’t a wine-tasting. You’re a corpse-connoisseur?”
“I know what I know,” he replied. “When it comes to dead things, there’s quite the cocktail of several different families of molecules, you know. Volatile organic compounds. They might look still, but a corpse, however stationary it may appear, is a carnival fiesta.”
“Cheerful thought.” I have a strong stomach, but even I was trying not to gag on the smell as I dug through the present pile. Please don’t be a dead kid at the bottom, please don’t be a dead kid at the bottom.
“Carboxylic acids, aromatics, sulfurs, alcohols, nitro-compounds, as well as aldehydes and ketones…” Denison rattled them off like a nursery rhyme, gingerly opening a cupboard built into a bookcase. “The combination and quantities of these volatiles change as a cadaver goes through different stages of decomposition. It gives us what we call an odour fingerprint for each stage of decomposition.”
“So what we’re assuming then is that this body that’s here…” I looked around the room, with its distinct lack of corpse. “…but clearly not here… was here the day of the party, right under everyone’s noses, only it hadn’t… gone off… yet, so no one found it then.”
There was no child buried in the stack of presents. I closed my eyes, silently thanking a god I didn’t think I really believed in for that small mercy.
“Two chemicals are found in decomposing tissue, Doc, putrescine and cadaverine,” he murmured, sniffing the air.
“I know, both diamines, they pop up when amino acids break down. Believe it or not I do deal with the dead from time to time myself you know, Dee.” I sounded testy, but to be fair, I was more than a little tense.
“Most notably, lysine breaking down,” he continued, walked to the piano, still looking around the corners of the room curiously. You hear urban legends of kids playing hide and seek, getting stuck or wedged in some wallspace or attic cubby hole, and not being found until days later. We were both clearly thinking this. Was that what had happened to Melodie Cunningham Bowls? Not kidnapped at all, but simply stuck somewhere. She could have fallen down and hit her head, broke her neck, and lay undiscovered until the smell of her body called out as it was doing now.
It was a grim theory, but there didn’t seem to be else to look. “Putrescine and cadaverine each on their own give off a characteristic odour, both bad enough to make your eyes water, but put them together like you get with dead bodies and the stench is indescribable. And unmistakable. It’s here, somewhere.” He tapped his heel on the floorboards, glancing down in speculation. “Tell-tale heart, maybe?”
“No random intruder had time to rip up the floorboards, bury a small child, and then replace them and revarnish, Dee,” I said.
He raised his eyebrows. “Not even if they had unholy powers?”
I put my hand on my hip, reaching out with my other hand to lean on the piano. “Don’t be facetious.”
We both stared down at my hand. It was resting on the spotless black and white keys, several of them depressed beneath my fingertips. But there had been no music. Not a single note had played.
Something was supressing the hammers inside.
“Play it again, Sam?” Denison muttered quietly, as I slowly took my hand away. I swallowed hard, looking down at the glossy black instrument. Dee dropped into a crouch and peered under the piano. “The wood, it’s…seeping,” he said, thickly. “Open it up, Doc.”
With grim realisation, I lifted the sleek black lid of the grand piano as Denison straightened up and crossed to stand by me. The reek that escaped from it in an invisible cloud was like a punch in the face, I reeled back, coughing, feeling bile rise in my throat. My eyes began to water.
Denison reached out with a shaky hand and propped the lid open.
“Well…” he said, the barest hint of a tremble in his voice. “I suppose that solves the mystery of the missing governess.”
Dana Fraedrich, elderly au-pair and accused kidnapper, or at least what remained of the slight old lady, was crammed into the piano innards.
I had to agree with Denison. From the size and level of insect activity, the gassy bloating of the body, making her look as though she’d been dredged from the bottom of a slimy lagoon, this corpse was three days old. Neither of us spoke. Whoever, or whatever, had done this to the old woman had broken a lot of body parts in order to stuff her into this tight space. Twisted and tangled in the piano wire, her corpse looked like a tortured soul in hell. From the state of the old woman’s hands, even at a glance it was clear that elderly or not, she had put up a fight. She had tried to protect herself from her assailant… and to protect her young ward too.
“There’s no child here,” I said, my voice sounding dull and tin-like in my own ears. The sight in front of me was horrific, but thank everything, the body was not a young girl. Still, I had to look away from the corpse. Three days in, the soft tissue of the eyes were already gone.
“Whoever… whatever did this to her, it took the girl. She’s out there in the city with it now, somewhere,” Dee replied, sounding haunted.
Something strong and capable of a high level of violence had entered this estate three days ago, and it had been something intelligent enough to take the time to hide the old woman’s body. Clearly not an animal, but the way it had bothered to stuff her into the piano… Such force and cruelty. It spoke of a malevolence and, in a twisted way, almost playfulness. It must have known this body would be found eventually. It had been left like a gory jack-in-the-box. A darker present than the others in this room, waiting to be unwrapped. Whoever or whatever took the time to do such a thing, for the sheer dark fun of it, had an innocent and defenceless young girl in its possession.
And in my mind’s eye, I saw a wide-eyed face grinning with a mouth horribly, unnaturally wide, grinning from ear-to-ear.
Chapter 8
“Wait, so it kind of was Cluedo then,” Lucy mused.
I glanced up from my workstation. Across the bright space of Blue Lab, m
y assistant stood lost in thought, an armful of folders clutched to her chest.
“What?”
“Well, it wasn’t Colonel Mustard in the library with the candlestick,” she shrugged, bringing the files across to me and dropping them on my already chaotic desk. “But you did find a dead body in the mansion.”
“Demon in the music room with a piano?” I replied absently. “Pretty sure that’s never been a guess that has won a game of Cluedo yet, Lucy.”
It had been a long day already. There’s a tremendous amount of red tape involved when dead bodies show up, and the Cunningham Bowls residence had been swarming with Cabal Ghosts within twenty minutes of us phoning it in.
Cabal Ghosts are the private uber-police of our world – think men-in-black only with even less personality and individuality. They also brought photo-drones, Denison’s entire former forensic team, and a partridge in a pear tree. The place had become a circus in no time at all, with Mrs Cunningham Bowls on the verge of hysteria at the discovery of the old woman’s mangled body, and her husband apoplectic with indignation at the sheer volume of Cabal representatives suddenly invading his private fortress and thoughtlessly scuffing the parquet.
I’m only slightly ashamed to say I made a delegation management decision and left it all in Dee’s hands. I had to report this to Cloves, and knowing how she operated, she would want a full and comprehensive fifty-page review within the hour. So leaving Dee on site to deal with the fallout and coordinate the ‘extraction’ of the body, I’d headed back to the lab, leaving Melodie Cunningham Bowls’ parents with a slaughtered governess and empty-sounding but earnest promises that their little girl would be found.
Blue Lab, my place of work, haven and sanctuary, is located several levels beneath the ground. It burrows under one of Oxford’s many universities like a high-spec warren. From the outside, it’s just an ancient door in some ancient stone wall. They’re ten-a penny here in my city. But within, there’s no pretence of the old world. It’s as bright, chrome and sterile as it gets. State of the art equipment, tremendous resources, incredible security. Cabal is happy to fund my lab, as well as the many other divisions which labour here in our underground hive, in the name of curing the zombie-like virus which rages outside our walls. No expense was spared at BL1. My lab looks like the bridge of the Enterprise, only with less lens flare.