by Alex Grecian
Tiffany sniffed. “By the smell of you, what happened is no great mystery. Why don’t you get down to the kitchen and clean yourself up? Have your jacket brushed out.”
Day nodded. He stooped to pick up his cane and limped past Tiffany to the stairs. He stopped halfway down, his hand on the wall. He took a deep breath and held it in his lungs. His throat hurt and he felt sloppy, panicky, like he was underwater. He let the air out and passed a hand over his mouth and leaned heavily on the banister the rest of the way down the stairs. In the kitchen, a girl jumped up from the long low table and took his jacket from him without a word. She folded it over her arm and bustled out of the room. Day went to the pitcher on the sideboard and dipped a cloth into it. He unfastened his cuffs and wiped his sleeve until it was drenched, then pushed it up past his elbow and rinsed his hands and arms in the basin. He splashed water on his face and tipped the pitcher up, drinking until it was empty, letting the water run off his chin and down the front of his shirt. He heard someone in the hallway approaching the kitchen.
“I don’t know if I’ve seen anything worse than this.” Kingsley’s voice was grim.
Day turned and grimaced at the doctor. “It’s bad up there.”
“I meant you,” Kingsley said. “I’ve disinterred better-looking corpses.”
“Sorry.”
“Desk work clearly doesn’t suit you.”
“I’ve not much choice in the matter.”
“Well, I’d appreciate your opinion on this one. If Inspector Tiffany’s agreeable, that is. A day or two away from the desk. Maybe more, if we don’t catch this madman before he kills another family.”
“Jimmy Tiffany’s a good man. You don’t need me.”
“I think I do.” Kingsley pulled out a chair and sat.
Day set the pitcher down and pulled his wet sleeve back into place, fastened the cuff. He leaned his cane against the table and sat opposite Kingsley. “What makes you think I can do you any good?”
“It’s not just the bodies,” Kingsley said.
“Did he do something different this time? Wait. I’m getting ahead of myself. Am I wrong in assuming this is the work of the Harvest Man?”
“You are not wrong. This is unquestionably his work. There’s a broken window at the back of the house and scuff marks in the dust up in the attic where he waited for the family to come home and go to sleep. We may take it for granted that he acted much as he did in the other three houses . . .”
Kingsley continued to talk and Day sat silent, drying, absorbing what information he could, trying to remember the basic facts he already knew. A killer had escaped from prison with three other men and had used the ensuing confusion to evade police. He was still at large. He had no known name, and his records had been lost, but he had been called the Harvest Man by other inmates. The Harvest Man broke into people’s homes while they were out during the day and hid in their attics, waiting until the household was asleep before emerging. He somehow made them groggy and unable to react while he methodically cut away their faces, a piece at a time.
“How do you think he keeps them still before he ties them down?”
“This one is fresher than the others. There’s still a lingering odor of ether. He’s sedating these people.”
“So they go to sleep and then he keeps them asleep.”
“Which gives him all the time in the world with them.”
“To harvest them.”
“I don’t think that’s where he got his name.”
“Why do they call him the Harvest Man, then?”
“It’s a spider,” Kingsley said. “Opiliones. A breed of arachnid-like creatures that live in people’s attics, out of the way, unseen, prey on common household pests, I think.”
“Of course,” Day said. “Every one of the victims has had an attic.”
“That fact is not lost on me,” Kingsley said.
“Nor on me.” Tiffany entered the kitchen and picked up the water pitcher, saw it was empty, and shot a damning look in Day’s direction. “And there are signs he spent time in this attic. Broken cobwebs, scuffs in the dust, like that. But there are hundreds of attics in London. Thousands of them. An attic is a natural place to hide, if there’s one near to hand.”
“So, what, you think he’s just been lucky all his victims had attics? You believe in coincidence?”
“Don’t you, Dr Kingsley? I’ve certainly seen enough of them.”
“I reserve judgment,” Kingsley said. “What do you think, Inspector Day?”
“I don’t think it’s coincidence. He specifically chooses houses with attics,” Day said. He could feel himself engaging with the puzzle, his nausea ebbing as he tried to imagine himself in the killer’s shoes. “That must be his first priority. Or, at least, an early priority as he goes about looking for victims.”
“So he’s always interested in the houses?” Tiffany pulled out a chair next to Kingsley and sat, staring at Day all the while. Day put his hands in his lap, hiding his sopping right sleeve from view.
“More than that, don’t you think?”
“I’d like to know what you think,” Tiffany said.
“I don’t know why the attic’s so important to him, but I do think the houses play a part in whatever his reasoning is.”
“Sure,” Tiffany said. “He seems like a reasonable bloke.”
“He chooses the house and he chooses the family. The two go hand in hand for him. He needs both circumstances to be right before he acts. And I imagine there are details about the members of each family that have to fit his criteria.”
“That’s a lot of things for a murderer to concern himself with,” Tiffany said. “I mean, most of them I’ve met barely have a single thing that sets them off. All you have to do to be killed is jingle a pocket full of coins.”
“Yes,” Day said. “That’s what sets this man apart from other killers, makes him that much harder to catch and more dangerous. But it’s also why we haven’t seen even more murders like this one since he escaped prison. The conditions have to be just so for him. It must take time for him to deliberate and then make his move.”
“Supposing you’re right,” Tiffany said. “Why? Why these particular conditions? What is it about the house and the family? I heard what the doctor said about spiders feeding on common pests. Does he think he’s a spider? Does he think those people upstairs, that man and woman he chopped to little bits, does he think they’re pests? Insects? What?”
“No, I wouldn’t guess he’s delusional in quite that way. I don’t know whether he starts with the house or the family inside it. I don’t know what it is about the house. Aside from the obvious fact that he wants it to have an attic.”
“But beyond that? You make it sound more complicated.”
“It is,” Day said. “He’s searching for something.”
“How would you know that? What’s he looking for?”
“Right now he may be looking for those children,” Kingsley said. “That should be our priority.”
“What children?”
“I’m sorry, Inspector Day,” Kingsley said. “There are two missing children. I should say, we think there are two. We don’t know much of anything yet, but Tiffany’s men are making inquiries. It’s a large part of why we asked for you.”
“To be clear, two children have gone missing from this house?”
“Yes. We think so.”
Day leaned forward. “What do you know about them?”
Tiffany broke in, swiping his hand through the air. “I have constables looking.”
“Nobody’s implying that you and your men aren’t doing the job,” Kingsley said. “But does it hurt to have another pair of eyes?”
Tiffany sat back and frowned, not objecting, but not agreeing.
Day looked at each of the men in turn. “You said the children were a part of why you asked
me here. What’s the whole reason?”
Kingsley stared at Day without speaking.
Day nodded. There were politics involved here, and though Kingsley was the bluntest of men, it wouldn’t do to antagonize Inspector Tiffany too much. “I apologize,” Day said. “Long day. Long month, actually. It doesn’t matter. Tell me about the children. You’re right, that’s most important.”
“As I say, we know nothing about the children,” Kingsley said. “Not really.”
“There are two beds upstairs,” Tiffany said. “And there are two bodies, but they’re both adults and both in the same bed. The other bed’s smaller, child-sized.”
“You’ve looked . . .”
“We’ve searched the entire house, knocked on every door up and down this street and the next.”
“Speaking of those two bodies upstairs,” Kingsley said, “I must get back to them. And I probably ought to send poor Henry home. He’s not of much use to me here. Please excuse me, gentlemen. Godspeed.”
The two inspectors watched Kingsley rise and leave the room, listened for his tread on the stairs. Tiffany leaned forward and put his elbows on the table, tented his fingers under his chin. “What’s happened to you, man?”
“What do you mean?”
“Look at you,” Tiffany said. “You’re a disgrace.”
“The bodies caught me off guard, is all. The smell of it.”
“You’ve seen bodies before. We all have, and worse than this.”
“Never worse than this,” Day said.
“All right. Perhaps not worse than this, but certainly not much better.”
“It’s not a thing I really care to become used to.”
“You’ll never get off the desk with that attitude.”
“Maybe I don’t want to leave desk duty.”
“Please,” Tiffany said. He laid his hands palm down on the table. “We both know you’ve been hobbled.”
Day sniffed and changed the subject. “Do you think he took them? The Harvest Man, I mean. Do you think he has the children with him?”
“He’s never taken anyone out of a house before.”
“Not that we’d know if he did.”
“True,” Tiffany said. “We don’t know much. There was a bloody footprint, a small one, child-sized, near the bedroom door.”
“An injured child?”
“Or it just stepped in its parents’ blood.”
“Please don’t call the child it.”
“I don’t know whether they’re boys or girls. What should I call them?”
“Let’s just find them.”
“I have two constables looking for more footprints outside. Unless the killer carried them out the children may have left signs, but so far no luck.”
“They ran away. They saw what was happening, saw it was too late to act on their parents’ behalf, and they got themselves out of the house.”
“I hope so,” Tiffany said.
“They’re hiding somewhere nearby.”
“Why nearby?”
“So they can watch and come home when the Harvest Man leaves. I’d bet anything on it.”
“But he’s left already and they haven’t come back.”
“Because we’re here now.”
“They’re scared of us?”
“Of course they are.”
“My constables are at your disposal. The two in the garden are. Take them and find those children. I’ve got to get back to the investigation.”
They both rose as the girl came wordlessly back into the kitchen, holding Day’s jacket up to the light from the window. It looked passably clean. She helped him on with it and he thanked her. Tiffany nodded at him and turned to leave.
“You know,” Day said, “those children . . .”
Tiffany didn’t turn back to look at Day, but he stopped at the kitchen door. “What?”
“They saw him. They must have seen him. We could finally get a description of this madman.”
Tiffany passed through the door and into the hall beyond. His voice wafted back through the air. “That fact is not lost on me, Mr Day. Please find those children as quickly as you can.”
7
Why did he do it that way, do you think?”
Dr Kingsley straightened his back and swiveled his head a few degrees in the direction of the bedroom door. “Who did what?”
“The murderer. He did it messy.”
Kingsley sighed and turned his head the rest of the way so he could see the doorway. Constable Bentley leaned there against the jamb, his hands in his pockets.
“He did indeed do messy work here,” Kingsley said.
“Is there clues about who he is, him what done it?”
“Look right there.” Kingsley pointed to a long smudge of gore near the corner of the bed. “Do you see these ridges in the blood?”
“It’s a boot print, is what that is, Doctor.”
“Yes. A boot print.”
“And you can tell from that print whose boots they is?”
“I can indeed. You’ll note the distinctive pattern here of wear along the outer edge. This narrows down the suspects to one pair of boots among a thousand.”
“You’re some kinda genius, you are. To be able to see all that. So who done it, then?”
“You, Constable. This is a print from your own boot. You’ve walked through the blood over there, you see?” He pointed. “Then you picked up a bit of the man’s face on the tip of your right boot and deposited it over here, which caused you to slip just a bit and smear through this small pool of blood right here.”
Bentley backed away, his palms up. “No, sir. Wasn’t me did all this. No, sir!”
“Of course not. I’m not implying that you killed these people, you fool. But you might just as well have been the murderer’s accomplice, since any evidence I might have found here you’ve completely obliterated by tramping through the room like a bloody elephant.”
“Weren’t only me in here.”
“No. The lot of you have ruined this crime scene. As you’ve ruined half the crime scenes I’ve been to.”
“You got your work to do and we got ours.”
“Yes, but could you possibly see fit to stop obstructing my work as you carry out your own?”
“You mean, there’s no clues left here at all?”
“Oh, I don’t know, Constable. Please go away and let me concentrate. I might still find a clue intact.”
“I can tell you right off the murderer’s a madman. Full of hate.”
“We can’t know that.”
“Sure we can. It looks to me like he cut bits off ’em and then laid the bits on the floor and kept on cuttin’ and cuttin’ the bits, even though they was off already. Just choppin’ and choppin’. He musta hated these people to go on killin’ ’em even after they was dead.”
“You’re substituting assumptions for facts and then treating them as history. That won’t do.”
“How so? If I was Inspector Day, you’d be hangin’ on me words.”
“You’re not Inspector Day.”
“Looka all these pieces of people underfoot. There’s a nose. But over there’s another bit of nose, might be the same damn nose.”
“It is the same nose,” Kingsley said.
“That’s hate,” Bentley said. “You’re a doctor. So I respect that. You see sickness. You see it in the body and you must see it in the mind. People come to you, think they got somethin’ wrong in their bodies, but it’s in their minds. But me, I’m police. And I see hate. I see it every day. Hardly nobody I see but they’re fulla hate, and I see what they do to their neighbor with that hate. They use it like a weapon, see? That’s what this is. A bit of that man’s nose here and a bit of that same nose there. Hate.”
“This is, in fact, the woman’s nos
e that you’re pointing to now. Or parts of it.” Kingsley rocked back on his heels and contemplated his bloody fingertips. “And I don’t know that it is hatred on display here.”
“What else could it be?”
“It could be that the doctor’s busy and you’re in his way.” Inspector Tiffany crossed the landing and tapped Bentley on the shoulder. “Get back to work, you. You’re wasting Dr Kingsley’s time and your own.”
“Wasn’t trying to waste time. Trying to understand why we’re here, is all.” But Bentley tipped his hat to Kingsley and elbowed his way past Tiffany and down the stairs.
“Sorry,” Tiffany said. “He doesn’t know any better.”
“Actually, I suppose I can appreciate his point of view. I tend to come to a thing like this with the idea that I’m looking at a manifestation of some brain injury or an imbalance of spirits. It’s easy to forget that people are capable of the worst acts when they think they’re justified.”
“You think young Bentley’s right, then?”
“No. Not this time. This is a seriously deranged individual. Your man’s hypothesis leaves off the most telling point, which is that whoever did this did it while the people were alive and he did it in stages.”
“Stages? You mean like he was putting on a show?”
“No, I mean he did it bit by bit. He cut off this part of the woman’s nose”—Kingsley turned his lens and used the handle to point at a piece of flesh on the floor near the corner of the bed—“then went back and cut off this part.” He pointed at another chunk of meat. “Then this and this and this.”
“You’re saying . . .”
“I’m saying he took these poor people apart a little at a time, while they lay there helplessly and they may have even watched him do it. I only hope the ether kept them asleep the entire time.”
“But I thought—”
“You thought what Bentley thought. That he cut them and then cut the pieces of them. But no, he cut them and then cut them deeper and deeper until there was nothing left to cut.”
“He’s mad.”
“He is assuredly mad. And when he ran out of things to cut, he became angry. That’s when he killed them.”