Blind Instinct jc-7

by Robert W. Walker

  She shook her head. 'Take me somewhere where I can change.” Her tone hammered him over the head, firm and focused and nail-driving.

  He silendy did as told, and soon she had changed in the ladies' room of a restaurant calling itself the Chicago Pizza Factory only a few blocks away from where they'd met on the street. From there, they raced to Regent's Park, north of St. Albans, the opposite direction of the Thames and where all the other bodies had been found discarded.

  Regent's Park, already alight with police activity and equipment-dead stock, the Scotland Yard fellows called such things as generators and night-lights-buzzed with both the number of police and the crowd that had gathered. A small pond in the park marked the place where the body had been located. Jessica and Sharpe were waved over by Stuart Copperwaite who stood alongside the nude body of a man, a much younger man than any the Crucifier had discarded before now.

  “They're getting younger in age,” Copperwaite announced. “Perhaps a pattern developing?”

  “Christ was only twelve, maybe thirteen when he began preaching in the temple,” suggested Jessica. “Maybe you're on to something, Stuart.”

  Copperwaite nodded but let it go at that. He said a firm, if strained hello to Richard, who acted as though there existed no problem between them, Sharpe's entire focus already on the corpse, his professional acumen taking over.

  After searching for clues and closely examining the body, Jessica looked up and into Richard's eyes. For a moment she flashed on the wonderful time they had had when pub-crawling London, and she wished they were at it again. After she and Richard had made love, she had slept the sleep of the contented. It had been a long time since she'd actually rested fully, and he had given her that gift. The sure knowledge that Richard could not be the killer, that he harbored no secrets from her that might kill her, that she could fully and unreservedly trust him felt like the greatest gift of all. “What're you thinking, Jessica?” he asked.“I'll have to tell you that later, when we're alone,” she whispered. He smiled a moment, relieved, she guessed, that she had not allowed her anger with him to linger. Finally, he said, “I mean about the body.”

  “Something wrong here,” she announced, sensing it, feeling a resignation to wholly trust herself. “I think we may well this time have that copycat killing we've all been expecting along the spectrum; someone masquerading as the Crucifier merely to rid the world of this poor slob.”

  “Could be I agree with you. Nail marks haven't the usual pattern.”

  “First thing I noticed,” she agreed. “Likely he was dead before the nails were driven in.” She shone a flashlight on the palm wounds. “Notice the lack of coloration about the wound itself? Not the sort of reaction expected from the living. No bruising.”

  “How do you think he died?”

  She closely examined the eyes, taking her time. “He isn't likely to have died of asphyxia but something else, likely a poisoning.”

  “Then the staking of the hands-”

  “A hasty cover-up, an afterthought to what may have been a well-planned meal of rat poison, but only an autopsy can say for sure what he ingested.”

  He nodded agreement but said, “Still, why don't you have at the tongue, to be sure there's no connection.”

  She pulled out a pair of tweezers from her valise, yanked open the dead mouth, and pulled the tongue out while Sharpe flashed his light on it. No marks whatsoever.

  Sharpe instantly said, “Put Raehael on this one. We need you focused on the real thing. This most likely involves the fellow's closest friend or relative, roommate or lover, someone who knew him well enough to hate him.”

  She thought of Tattoo Man in the States. Same situation, she believed.

  After closing down the crime scene, Sharpe offered her company for the night, saying, “We have some things to talk about and some things to nurture.”

  She realized that she didn't want to be alone tonight. Looking into Sharpie's strong, steady eyes, the glistening moisture of them sparkling in the blinding police lights, she nodded her assent, casdng all her little doubts and fears aside like so much collected flotsam. She simply could not believe ill of the man.

  Jessica dreamed dreams of creamed cream, floating furniture, floating lovers, rising to the ceiling while in embrace as in a Marc Chagall painting. She dreamed of warm places, soft touches, caressing fingertips; she dreamed of wonder and other worlds gone undiscovered in faraway galaxies with strange-sounding names, and at once she wondered how her faraway dream places could possibly have names if they were as yet to be discovered. She dreamed on for the first time in as long as she could remember, dreams of childhood and love, tenderness and morning, of fuzzy animals and milk shakes topped with cherries. She dreamed dreams she wanted to take firm hold of and never let go, dreams she could live as a lifetime, but the images, odors, feelings, sounds, smells, and tastes in this playground of the subconscious all dissipated as candle smoke when suddenly she awoke.

  The morning light” woke Jessica where she lay at the foot of Richard's bed, having fallen asleep there after the love-making had exhausted them both. She lay nude, recalling the night of passion they'd shared. The light filtering in bathed the bed they lay upon, but when she reached for him, where his leg ought to be, she found Richard gone. She looked about and called out his name. Nothing. The small place returned a deafening silence. No sign of the man, when suddenly the door clicked, the key turning in the lock to announce his return. He poked a head into the small bungalow and shouted back to her, “Are you up in there? I've brought us some pastries and coffee.”

  “Attention to detail,” she said, standing in the hallway now, his white terry-cloth robe wrapped about her. “That's what I like in a man.” If she couldn't have the dream, she'd setde for the Englishman, she thought.

  “I suspect you received all the attention you could handle last evening,” he replied, a broad smile coloring his features.

  “I'm starved.”

  “Good. Soon as we eat and get out of here, we're visiting the RIBA. Should have found time to do so before now.”

  “And exactly when would that have been?”

  “Eat!” he ordered.

  SEVENTEEN

  Genuine demonic possession in the annals of church history is rare. Everyday human evil, by comparison, all too common.

  — Father Jerrard Luc Sante, Twisted Faiths

  At the Royal Institute of British Architecture, Jessica and Richard did indeed locate a large array of information on coal mines and coal mining in England and London in particular. A curator of the museum housed in the bowels of the place, both amused and confused over their interest in the area, became befuddled further when they told him who they were. At that point, he made a phone call and asked that Donald Wentworth Tatham come up from the subbasement to speak to the authorities.

  Tatham, a bald, round little man with glasses, lit his face up for them when he learned of their interest in coal-mining history. He could hardly contain his energies, ushering them from his boss's office, a ranting and endless diatribe on coal mines spewing forth now as they made their way through a door marked employees only. Down a flight of stairs and through a set of double-doors and out into a room filled with stacks of metal shelving completely full with boxes of dusty collections of decades and centuries-old junk, far more than the museum had display space for. The stacked metal shelving went to the top of a ten-foot ceiling, and this back basement room appeared as large as any assembly room in any factory.

  Jessica marveled at the sheer amount of treasures and his story going unattended and unseen here in the dimly lit, musty backside of the museum.

  Through the maze of stacks, they emerged on the other side at another door, and through this portal they stepped and suddenly found themselves in the public exhibit on coal mines, located in a dark, sepulchral comer of the little museum, the terminus of an unlit, musty corridor for those ghosdy few visitors who dared enter here. The place and the exhibit seemed a great anachronism, rem
inding Jessica of a little whaling museum in the midst of Maui's towering beachfront condos and hotels, a quaint little museum on Maui that saw far more visitors than did this place. Jessica flashed on her trip to Maui, meant as a rendezvous getaway that had never happened, and even her vain effort to get in some diving had failed when a call from a field chief in Honolulu by the name of James Parry had come through. Parry wanted forensic help on a bizarre case that plagued the city of Honolulu on the island of Oahu. It all seemed like a hundred years ago now that she and Parry had put away Lopaka Robert Kowona for butchering native Hawaiian women.

  And here she stood amid the beauty of London, again in pursuit of evil. But this evil, an evil that used the raiments of the church and Christ's death as a starting point for itself, for its existence and reason for being, this evil rooted in Christian values seemed a far greater and more twisted beast than any evil she had faced before. Whereas Kowona's evil rested on a pagan religion that sacrificed women to a god, the Crucifier's evil rested firmly on the rock of the crucifixion and resurrection of Christ. Did the killer or killers believe they could and had resurrected the souls of their vicdms?

  They now stood before small-scale models and replicas of mining operations in and around London. They stared at hundreds of sketches and photos of early mining operations, framed and under glass. The detail abounded, as did diagrams of whole mining concerns. Here the walls and glass cases were littered with the paraphernalia of the coal-mining industry in its heyday.

  “Mind you, coal mining still goes on, but it's run by computers nowadays, all the romance, so to speak, completely taken from it,” said their guide, Tatham. His eyes shone like shiny large seeds, bright with the anticipation of speaking on his favorite obsession.

  Already, Jessica had learned that there once had been 160 coal mines in operation all across England, “But this number has dwindled to only a handful about the city, only fifty all told across the nation in operation nowadays,” Tatham added, his small grin growing with the intensity of his excitement about his arcane field.

  “We're not interested in any mines outside the city,” said Sharpe. “Have you citywide plans? Original specs of the underground caverns within the city?”

  “We're also interested in mines that date back to Roman occupation within the city limits,” added Jessica.

  “My, that does narrow the field. London began as a Roman garrison, so we're speaking of quite some time ago,” the museum man replied. “That must be the Marylebone Mine.”

  Sharpe instantly replied, “Marylebone?”

  Tatham, in a world of his own, simply said, “Come, follow.”

  Sharpe gave chase, asking Tatham, “Do you mean Marylebone? Near the cemetery of the same name?”

  “It's within walking distance, but sealed underground, you see. Is that important to you?”

  “Could be… could be,” muttered Sharpe. He drew Jessica aside, and after a studious look into her eyes, he near whispered, “Marylebone Cemetery also stands well within walking distance to St. Albans.”

  “Coincidence?”

  “How much coincidence do you believe in one city?” he asked, his eyes never leaving Jessica's.

  “I'll have to search the archives for any maps that might be of help, but don't hold your breath,” Tatham told them as he began to desert them here.

  Jessica, trying to catch Tatham, who seemed to be fleeing the museum, shouted, “Also, please search for any maps of the time when the mine was last in operation.”

  “Showing proximities, you mean?”

  “That and anything underground.”

  “Underground? Like the tube lines, you mean? There is one such map on display, but you can't possibly have it.”

  “You must have copies, something,” suggested Sharpe.

  “We may, may not. I will have to search the archives and the shelves.”

  “Do that.”

  “While you wait, you may wish to study this display,” Tatham trumpeted, his hands flourishing like a magician's. “My triumph,” he finished, pointing at a huge display of the original mine shaft at Marylebone just northwest of Hampstead Heath.

  They did indeed study the layout of the mine in its small-scale version. A series of shafts had been cut in several directions, one leading as far as the cemetery it appeared. Another led out to a canal, long since shut down and no longer in use, Sharpe told Jessica. A third one led off in a dead end in the opposite direction, but it opened on a huge, cathedral-sized room where, according to Donald Wentworth Tatham's reconstruction, huge oaken beams, thick as railroad ties, were stored along with any heavy machinery.

  “Read the placard. I wrote it myself,” he told them, caressing the glass covering the scale model. According to the placard, the Marylebone Mine had closed down in 1911, played out, no longer economically profitable or feasible, as there had been cave-ins. Few appeared to know of its existence below the streets of London, and even men like Tatham, who appeared to be obsessed by such arcane information, confessed that he had not ever set foot in the mine itself.

  They were kept waiting a half hour before Tatham again returned, and further frustrating them, he'd come up empty-handed and apologetic. “It's as though some gremlin simply will not allow them out of hiding. I know we had books and blueprints drawn up by some of the early engineers when they reopened the thing in the late 1800s. It's as if they've been… I fear saying it… stolen. I can't seem to put my finger on the material this moment, but I will assiduously continue to search. You have my word on it.”

  “But wouldn't you have had need of the same information when you designed this display?” asked Jessica. “That's right.”

  She reached into her purse and pulled forth her petite Nikon, set the automatic flash and was about to snap off a shot, saying, “We can remedy the situation with a single-”

  “No… against museum rules to take photos of the exhibits.” Tatham almost shouted. “You know, gift shop and all upstairs. Besides the flash, you know, causes deterioration.”

  'Take the photo!” ordered Richard. To Tatham he menacingly said, “Bugger the bloody rules, Mr. Tatham. We 'ave people being murdered by crucifixion. Are you at all interested in the killer's g'd-awful rules?”

  “Yes… well, putting it that way,” muttered Tatham as Jessica snapped three shots of the exhibit in order to get the entire thing.

  “We'll have these immediately developed and blown up,” she said. Turning to Tatham, she took his hand, shook it, and said, “You may well have helped us put an end to the Crucifier's career, Mr. Tatham. You must find reward in that.”

  “Well, yes, of course, but it's actually Dr. Tatham. I received my doctorate in museum affairs and history last month.”

  She smiled in return, again thanked him and asked if he could show them out.

  “Hold on a moment,” said Sharpe. “Have you a similar exhibit of the canals?”

  “The canals?” asked Tatham.

  Jessica asked in tandem, “The canals?”

  “London is littered with canals. The maps're dotted with them, and many-most, actually-are no longer serviceable. Others are put in use only in times of storm, as runoff. I'm curious to know where this one, on your display, originates.”

  “Perhaps if I had the original notes on the project. They will surface, of course. If you took one peek into my office, you'd understand the… the disarray. I know the research is somewhere at hand, but this particular canal stuck out for me. I recall it from my research and the building of the replica.”

  “And why is that?”

  “Associated with it, the canal, that is, is an ancient bridge, a clapper bridge.”

  “Really? And why hasn't it become an archaeological dig then?” asked Sharpe. 'Too far from downtown to bother tearing up the streets to get at?”

  Tatham gave a nervous laugh at Sharpe's joke. “Funding dictates everything in the archaeological and historical spheres, Inspector.”

  “All right, then, about your notes.” />
  “Yes, well, when I can-”

  “Locate them and fax a copy to Scotland Yard to my attention. The number is here on my card.” Sharpe pushed the card at Tatham. “No unnecessary delays, man. This is of vital importance to the Crown, you realize. You could be saving a life, and in doing so, perhaps currying a bit of favor with the Royal Family could save your dark little concern here.” Richard's eyes roved the room as he threw Tatham this suggestive bone.

  Jessica only half listened, still wondering precisely what a clapper bridge might be.

  “If you're actually onto his game, the Crucifier's that is,” replied Tatham, his wheels within wheels behind his eyes now turning. “I suppose my helping you out couldn't hurt my career.”

  Sharpe breathed inward, taking a deep sigh with his inhaling.

  “Can you get us back up to street level and out. Dr. Tatham?” asked Jessica.

  “Of course, back this way.”

  Jessica, following in single file behind Tatham, Richard at her back, felt as if they were stumbling about in a confusing, crisscrossing, tuming-in-on-itself maze, not only here in the pit of the ancient museum with its ancient artifacts and displays, but outside, in the real world above, on this bizarre case that she had signed onto; she feared that somehow Luc Sante, his church, the strange-sounding Marylebone Cemetery, the Roman mine, the canal, something called a clapper bridge, Father Strand, Richard Sharpe, and Jessica Coran had all come to this place and time in a preordained fashion, that somehow they must do batde against evil, to force it into the light of the millennium in order to see the true face of evil in all its ugliest manifestation.

  They finally found ground level and sunlight from the waning day. Outside, they both breathed deeply of the sweeter air. They stood talking on the steps of the RIBA, feeling small below giant columns on either side.

  “You keep coming back to this Marylebone Cemetery and St. Albans, Richard. That whole area.”