The Artisans

by J G Alva

  Brund inclined his head to Ben, a sort of nod of greeting. He was wearing a suit, unbuttoned, a spotted red tie loosened around his neck.

  “Dressing up for TV?” Ben asked, smiling.

  “Fuck off,” Brund snapped. He was chewing gum, and the words came out of the side of his mouth.

  “Come on. Don’t tell me you still miss the old cancer sticks. How long have you been on the nicotine gum now?”

  “Too long,” Brund grunted.

  “A decade?”

  Brund almost cracked a smile.

  “Always the joker. Who’s this?” He indicated Sarah. “Your babysitter?”

  “Detective Brund, this is my new partner, DC Goodchild.”

  Now Brund did smile.

  “I heard they moved you. I thought it was ‘cause you fucked up.”

  “It almost sounds like you missed me.”

  Brund gave a non-committal grunt.

  “Come on,” he said. “I’ll walk you through it.”

  They followed him in through the front door.

  They were in a short hall with brown carpet and terracotta coloured walls. Some conflagration of people was blocking the entrance to the kitchen, so Brund led them through a side door into the front room. There was a large bay window, a fireplace, and against most walls bookshelves.

  “No TV,” Ben said to Sarah.

  She nodded, her face serious. She was checking the spines of the books.

  There was another door, to the Dining Room, and Brund led them through that also. The kitchen was at the far end, separated from the Dining Room by a breakfast bar. On the floor, at the base of the fridge, was a large pool of dried blood. Numbered yellow marker points had been placed around the edges of the pool to indicate spatter. To the left of this was a carton of milk, its contents dried to a thick paste.

  “The daughter was found here,” Brund said.

  “She’s at the Flax Bourton mortuary already?” Ben asked.

  Brund nodded. His face was grim.

  “Her face was smashed up like a fucking pumpkin,” Brund said.

  “Jesus, Ollie,” Ben said.

  “Come on. You’ve got kids. It makes my blood boil. What was she? Seven?”

  “Six,” Ben said. “Was the carton on the floor like that when you got here?”

  Brund nodded.

  “He came in through the conservatory,” Brund said, indicating the open back door. “He chipped away at the putty and took a pane out, came in through the back door here. No burglar alarm. It must have been easy.”

  Ben frowned.

  “They couldn’t afford one?” He asked.

  Brund shrugged.

  “Aldershot owned this place outright. He was some kind of respected lecturer at the university. I don’t think money was a problem.”

  “Huh.”

  “What’s this?” Sarah asked, indicating a lighter patch of flooring next to the dark pool of dried blood. “It smells like…bleach.”

  Brund smiled.

  “She is your babysitter,” he said to Ben.

  Ben gave him the finger.

  “That’s exactly what it is,” Brund told Sarah. “The bottle was on the counter. We’re checking it for fingerprints now. He pretty much emptied it all out on to the floor right there. And look at this.”

  Brund moved closer to the kitchen door to the hall, and impatiently shooed some of the Forensic people in the doorway out of his way. What they had been obscuring was the wife’s body, crumpled in an unholy heap, half in the kitchen, half in the hall, one ankle turned at an impossible angle.

  Ben moved closer. Her face was turned up toward him, but some terrible violence had been done to it: a scattering of messy puncture wounds covered all the exposed skin, in no discernable pattern. Not gunshot wounds, but something else. Ben wasn’t sure what.

  Brund stepped gingerly over the corpse and indicated the wife’s left arm, which stretched outward; it was as if she were pointing to the back door. Giving them clues from beyond the grave, Ben thought with grim humour.

  Her hand rested in a cereal bowl.

  “He filled a bowl with bleach, then placed her hand in it and left it there,” Brund said, in a tone of voice that suggested that the world might be just as mad as he feared it was.

  “You found her like this?” Ben asked.

  “Yep. We were thinking DNA.”

  “She scratched him,” Ben said.

  “Yeah. Probably. Put up a fight. I hope she got an eyeball. But you only have to watch CSI to know we can get DNA from tissue under the fingernails. He obviously thought he couldn’t take the chance.”

  “So he’s a little bit more than just an idiot,” Ben said thoughtfully, looking around the room.

  “Or he’s already in the system,” Brund added hopefully.

  At that moment, Brund’s mobile went off, and he held up his finger as he answered it.

  “Hello?”

  A small tinny voice could be heard shouting at the other end.

  “Honey, baby,” Brund said, in a placating tone of voice, “I’m not buying a fucking Jacuzzi just because every now and then you get a twinge in your back…”

  Brund made an apologetic face and Ben nodded, and then Brund went outside, to deal with his domestic situation.

  “New wife,” Ben told Sarah. “Shall we try and put this together?”

  “Why do you call Francis, Kip?” She asked.

  “What?”

  She shook her head.

  “It’s been…I’ve been wondering.”

  “He told me sometimes he dreams in computer code.”

  “Oh. Right.” She frowned. “And what’s Krav Maga?”

  “What?”

  “Krav Maga. You asked Francis about it.”

  “Krav Maga is an Israeli self-defence technique. Pretty brutal, no bullshit stuff.”

  Sarah nodded, her expression thoughtful.

  “So he comes in through the conservatory,” Ben said, moving to simulate their mystery intruder’s entrance, “and…what? The daughter surprises him?”

  “She came down for a drink of milk,” Sarah said, indicating the carton. She frowned. “But remember what Brown said: no previous victims under the age of nineteen.”

  “So he hadn’t planned for it. And then the wife hears the commotion, and comes down to investigate, and then he attacks her.”

  Sarah looked at the wife’s body.

  “And that’s when she scratched him,” she said.

  “She fought back.”

  “But why dump all this bleach here?”

  “Maybe he was bleeding.”

  “But there’s no other blood,” Sarah said.

  Ben scratched his head thoughtfully.

  “Perhaps some of these peripheral spots will turn out to be his.” He indicated the yellow marker points.

  “But wouldn’t there be a trail leading out the door as he left?”

  Sarah began opening the floor cupboards and checking inside.

  Ben asked, “what are you doing?”

  Sarah stopped at the cupboard under the sink. She turned, at the same time pulling out a small metal bin.

  “What?” Ben said.

  “The bag’s gone.”

  Ben frowned.

  Sarah looked around the kitchen, stopped, moving to the countertop under a window. She pointed to a towel dispenser.

  “He was bleeding. He thought it would lead us to him. So he cleaned it up with towels, put the towels in the rubbish bag, took the rubbish bag with him.”

  “And dumped bleach over the spot for good measure. Okay.”

  He paused, thinking about it. It was…unusual.

  “Come on,” he said eventually. “The husband’s upstairs. So’s the message.”

  ◆◆◆

  Jeffrey Aldershot’s body was still on the double bed, a facedown parody of Christ. Somebody had pulled the white duvet down to reveal navy blue boxer shorts. Ben felt a little sorry for Aldershot, to be robbed of this little dig
nity, even after his death.

  Two Forensic scientists were packing up their gear as both he and Sarah stepped in. He moved around the bed so that he could see Aldershot’s face, turned as it was to the window. It had suffered the same violence as his wife’s: a flurry of deep messy wounds dotted the entirety of his features, from forehead to chin.

  “Do we know what caused these wounds?” Ben asked the Forensic guys.

  The shorter one turned to him and shrugged. He was wearing a hood and mask, so Ben couldn’t properly see his face.

  “Something small and blunt,” he said, his voice muffled by the mask. “Probably a screwdriver. We haven’t found it.”

  The two Forensic scientists gathered up their things and left. Ben felt disturbed on some deep level. Jeffrey Aldershot was near enough his own age, and was a father too. Was this a random attack? Or had he somehow earned this violent end, either through accident or intent?

  And why had he not been able to protect his family? Hadn’t he heard what was going on downstairs?

  Sarah stared at the wall above the bed where in red paint the killer had left them his message. Sarah read it aloud.

  “”The father you spring from is the devil and you will carry out the evil wishes of your father, who has been a murderer from the beginning”.”

  “CID are checking to see if it’s a quote from anywhere,” Ben said.

  “It’s from the Bible,” Sarah said.

  That stopped him.

  “What?”

  “It’s from John, chapter eight, verse forty four. The full verse goes: the father you spring from is the devil and you will carry out the evil wishes of your father, who has been a murderer from the beginning; he didn’t uphold the truth for, in him, there is no truth; and now, when he speaks for himself, he lies; he is a liar and the father of lies.”

  Ben stared at Sarah, and then at the scripture on the wall. Oh fuck. A religious fanatic. Great.

  “Cosy. Think it means anything?”

  “I’m…not sure.” She turned to him. “Does Jeffrey Aldershot have any kids, other than the daughter that was found downstairs?”

  “Not that we know of. You think it might be some kind of bastard child, getting his revenge on the father who abandoned him?”

  Sarah shrugged. She went back to staring at the writing on the wall, as did he. Ugly writing. Ugly words.

  “Is that what your Psychology degree is telling you?” He asked lightly.

  He could feel Sarah’s eyes on him then.

  “I would have told you,” Sarah said haughtily, “but I thought it would be more prudent to keep the fact that I am an inexperienced university graduate to myself.”

  He nodded. Fair enough. He felt he’d probably deserved that bit of whiplash from her tongue.

  Ben stared at Aldershot’s body. There was a dark patch on the back of his neck, trauma from the bludgeoning that had paralysed him, and made him easy to kill. The fact that there was bruising meant that he had not been killed outright though. It was the stabbing to the face that had killed Jeffrey Aldershot, as it had his wife: both had suffered a cerebral haemorrhage from having their brains poked with what it would now appear was a screwdriver. Everyone else was betting on a hammer for the initial attack weapon. This guy was a regular B & Q.

  From the hall, someone called his name.

  Ben turned around.

  Sarah was no longer in the bedroom with him. Damn it.

  He went out into the hall.

  “Sarah?”

  “In here.”

  The study was more of a cubbyhole than a room of any real dimensions. The bookcases on either side only helped to decrease the already limited space. The writing desk under the window further impaired any movement.

  Sarah was pulling file folders from the bookshelves and flicking through them.

  “What was he? A writer?” Ben asked.

  “Of sorts,” Sarah said.

  On the table was an old fashioned Underwood, battered, tired, covered in a thin layer of dust.

  “Listen to this,” Sarah said, reading from one of the files, “”through our dependence on technology, we have come to trust objects to define us. Nature, in all its wild tumultuousness, has come to be bought, boxed, brutalised and broken in a world no longer allowed to flourish beyond the confines of a grid, or a straight line. We impose order on a fundamental chaos, not from a sense of progress or harmony, but because we cannot understand it. Delighted by our own inventiveness, we marvel at our ability to produce light from nothing, to wave flickering images in front of our eyes to simulate motion. How long before we begin to simulate life? How long before all that remains of a once wild and incredibly variegated natural world is only seen as a series of flickering images from a box that produces nothing but the simulation of what existed? We stand on a threshold. We separate ourselves from our natural heritage by a series of screens, each more opaque than the last. And in this we seek to end our own humanity, because to separate us from nature is to separate all of us from each other. How long before communication is held not through the connection of living things, but through an interface? How long before we all live alone, in boxes, staring out at a world we have made barren from indifference?”” She turned to him, an eyebrow raised. “Not exactly Tolstoy,” she said.

  “What was he, a fanatic?” Ben asked, pulling a face. He reached for the other bookshelf. Here too were more manuscripts, all bound with string, some dusty with age and disuse.

  “They’re all the same,” Sarah said. “They’re all essays on humanity’s dislocation from nature. And our reliance on technology.”

  “I bet he was fun at Christmas,” Ben muttered.

  “Ben,” Sarah said, and her tone made him turn. There was a strange look on her face. “I know who he is.”

  Ben frowned.

  “What-“

  “I recognise the style.” She held up one of the bound essay books. “And this one here, I recognise it. It was one of the cold case files we reviewed in the Crime Investigations Development Program. I think…I think Jeffrey Aldershot is the Sunday Times Bomber.”

  Ben looked around at the study, at the typewriter, at the litany of madness on the shelves.

  “Oh shit,” he said.

  ◆◆◆

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