Inspector Sharpe at fifty-four had seen great cruelty in his thirty-four-year-long career. Police agencies all over England, Scotland, and Wales, who were more than relieved to turn the strangest, most inhumane and bizarre cases over to England's elite detective agency, had no idea the extent of horror the average CID man saw. The sight of a crucified woman certainly qualified.
In the muffled stillness of the fog, somewhere off in the distance, another Thames River ferry blew out its mournful anthem. Both Copperwaite and Sharpe looked across the river for the boat, but the distracting noisemaker remained a phantom. “Likely the only send-off she'll receive, wouldn't you say, Stuart?”
“ 'Less we uncover a relative.”
“Pray we do. Perhaps with more information about the victim, we might start to uncover the kind of animal that she ran into. The kind of animal who could nail another human being to a cross.”
“Where do you suppose it happened? In the forest? Where do you find a cross aside from a church these days?” asked Copperwaite. “Perhaps an old tree grown into the shape of a cross?” Telephone pole perhaps... long way to come from the nearest forest to Bow Bells.”
Charring Cross Pier bustled at daybreak. Again Sharpe thought it an unlikely place for a killer to dump a body, what with the two nearby river bus depots looking on. Unless the killer meant to weigh her down and dispose of the body beneath the surface. Still, why so busy a place as this? Even in the fog, a killer wasn't likely to be so brash, unless he blended in with his surroundings to the point that no one took notice?
Likely having similar thoughts to Sharpe's own, one of the uniformed bobbies had come forward to say, “I wager the body was put in upriver somewhere and floated to this spot.”
“Aye, now that makes all the sense in the world. Makes all the sense that the Thames—rough as she is this morning— could lift this body three feet, or four, up the bank and leave not a trace of water in her hair or mouth.” Sharpe pulled forth a pipe and began chewing on the stem.
The officer, taking the sting of his superior's remarks, bit back a reply and found himself relieved when Sharpe added, “What say we hold judgment till we've scanned the ground around here. All you men! Have a search. The body does look ... washed in oils, not in the waters of the Thames.”
Everyone joined in the grounds search while Sharpe again stepped away. At odds with young Copperwaite and perhaps his colleague's entire generation, Sharpe thought of the irony of having been born and raised not too far from where they stood. Copperwaite by comparison hailed from Harrogate, a seaport city in Yorkshire summed up by Copperwaite as a place where “They've nothing but bails of quaint.”
This time Stuart Copperwaite pursued his superior and walked about the embankment beside him, saying, “The victim could be difficult to identify, having no distinguishing marks and nothing whatever to pinpoint her identity.”
“You state the obvious, Stuart. “Hie fact of it weighs heavily,” agreed Sharpe, who had seen his share of faceless, nameless victims, their killings going unresolved here in London. He resignedly muttered, “Stuart, get a sketch artist on hand at the morgue to make a likeness of Mum. Make the bloody Sun's morning edition. See what comes of it. Perhaps someone will recognize her. Have a run at Missing Persons, all that.”
“Yes, of course ... Perhaps someone's looking for Mum as we speak.” Copperwaite took studious notes and added, “Consider it done, Richard.”
Both men felt the cold, nibbling presence of death as it hovered about the body like some primordial creature living just beyond sight, deep in the fog, a creature in search of more souls to take.
“She really isn't your usual age for a streetwalker,” Copperwaite said, breaking the stillness between them.
“Three or four I've known have lived to the ripe old age of fifty, even sixty, Stuart, so we won't completely discount the possibility. It's possible she was plying the trade, being smeared all over with oil, being nude as she is. Hard to say really. We won't know anything for certain until someone steps forward with some information about her.”
“As for now?”
Sharpe returned to the body. He again removed the sheet to stare at the naked body, drained of all color save her purple, puckering wounds. The dead woman's feet remained stiff and overlying one another where they'd been nailed together, rigor mortis having set in, telling Sharpe that she had not been lying here long before her discovery, since rigor released its grip after four or five hours. Yes, indeed, something evil this way had come.
The trinity of nail wounds told the story of how some madman had pinned her to his idea of a cross at some other, remote location—possibly a forest somewhere as Stuart surmised. Now the gashes resembled three dead eyes. The viscosity of the flesh having been thoroughly compromised, the holes puckered in on themselves like oversized, gaping, purple gunshot wounds.
“Doesn't require Karl Schuller or any autopsiest to tell us— nor any man here—that this woman's death began with the slow, agonizing torture of having her hands and feet nailed to somebody's idea of a resurrection cross. Likely some religious fanatic,” Sharpe guessed aloud but did not speculate further. “Is that what you make of it, Sharpie?” asked Copperwaite, a look of intense pain fluttering on and off his countenance where he stood in the glow of a streetlamp. Nearby on the recently completed London to Essex motorway, automobiles whined and zipped and occasionally called out with their horns like mewing, mildly annoyed cattle.
Sharpe said no more, keeping silent counsel for as long as he might possibly do so.
Copperwaite, an exasperated breath of air flowing from him, bit back an urge to again verbally prod his senior partner for words. He felt a powerful need to hear something—anything—from the worldly, former army colonel.
Finally, Sharpe turned and shouted at them all, his voice sounding like a drill sergeant who'd missed a meal. “Anyone locate a scintilla of information, evidence, identifying item about the ground? Anyone? Anything?”
“ 'Fraid not, Inspector,” replied one of the Charring Cross district bobbies.
“Aye and not aught of ye've seen the like of her before today?” Sharpe blurted out in his native Cockney, raising the eyebrows of several of the uniformed men milling about.
“Sorry, sir... She's a stone cold mystery, this one. Not from the district so far as we know,” came the answer.
“Perhaps new to the area then? Have a check with housing authority and what-do-you-call-them? Housewarming people. D'ya know any Warm Welcoming groups in the area?”
Sharpe then snorted into a handkerchief, bent down over the prone dead and once more examined her features with the care of a man preparing to paint in oil. With a gentle, gloved hand, he turned her cheek from side to side, studying the hard-etched, weary, worn features, his pipe still dangling, unlit.
Sharpe finally asked, “What do you really make of her, Coppers?”
Copperwaite pushed closer, kneeling in over the other side of the body, pleased that his senior had used his nickname. He and Sharpe now formed a kind of human arboretum about the deceased, their eyes intent on the dark results of the morning's find. “She's likely in the wrong place at the wrong time.... Like, as I assumed, out here hooking, I suppose, when this madman with spikes and a cross grabbed her up?”
“Then you suppose too much, but tell me why.”
“I don't know....”
“Exactly. You do not know, so you rush in with words to fill empty space, Coppers. CID men can't work that way. Now tell me why you suspect her to be a common whore? Certainly not the way she dresses? Come on, man! Why do you make her out a whore?”
“I can't righdy say“
“Yes, you bloody well can. Go on.” Sharpe's frustration gave way to a flood of anger. “It's because of the district we're in, and perhaps the killer knew full well we'd take her for a whore, dumping her here.”
Copperwaite, some ten years Sharpe's junior, looked more closely at the body and announced, “Look
at her veins. Recently popped. They're not exactly shot, but she's done drugs. Not the most beautiful creature I've ever seen,” he added with a grim shrug. “Most all of your street tramps're real hags, wouldn't you agree?”
“Virtual witches, but this woman, she's hardly a hag, Coppers. Somethin' overweight, surely, but hardly more than what, in Bow Bells, you'd call wholesome and—”
Copperwaite laughed at the use of Bow Bells' “wholesome”—another word for a fat woman.
Sharpe thundered on, adding, “And as for her features, she might be the picture of a British maiden in her youth: comely, rather proper and staid, if you're asking me. Like we earlier agreed, someone's mum or a bloody librarian, perhaps, but I see no whore before me. And one thing I've learned to trust on this job is my first impressions, my first instinct.”
“Aye, I suppose you might say so, something pleasant about her demeanor. Maybe she's more Irish than English. ...”
“Now you be looking for a fight! How would you be tellin' that?” Sharpe put on an Irish accent.
“I'm just supposing.”
“Suppose? Suppose her age for me then.”
“I'd say somewhere 'bout in her early to mid-fifties.”
“Agreed. And that fact is—while not average for your typical girl working the Bow Bells as a hooker—making her easy prey for the bloody bastard who's done her up this way, or so you're supposing?”
“Exactly.”
“Christ, man, you'll never make full inspector if you think like... like one of those bobbies over there,” Sharpe muttered under his breath. “You're a Scotland Yard lieutenant now, Coppers. No ordinary bobby.” Sharpe gave a quick glance to the men and women in uniform, and the few detectives that'd come on scene from nearby district boroughs.
Copperwaite gritted his teeth, his young eyes flashing over the body once again. “She's no prostitute in your estimation, Colonel Sharpe?”
“I'll not be mocked with my own hard-won military rank, Copperwaite,” returned Sharpe, edgy now.
“I meant no disrespect, Richard.”
“Look here ... The moment we place her”—he stopped for emphasis, pointing to the corpse—”in that ill line of business. Indeed, the moment we place her in any category of people, without evidence, we are merely labeling her—”
“But Richard—”
“—and thinking less of her as a human being with a right to life like any other. We start in on the typical and useless procedures that ultimately lead to yet another unsolved case, of which I've had my bloody fill.”
“Still, we only have what our eyes tell us, and we've got to go by what our eyes tell us,” Copperwaite weakly countered.
Sharpe managed not to laugh, suppressing all but the smile. “The eye alone will be your downfall, Stuart. All right, suppose the needle marks you've perceived are there because the woman was, in life, diabetic?”
“I see, of course.... Then we locate her doctor.”
“We can't assume a bloody thing. If we do, we're lost from the start. We can know or not know, but we cannot assume and work from assumptions.”
“Well, I should think we can assume she died of being nailed to a cross.”
“Perhaps ... but it will take an autopsy to be certain even of that, and I suspect there's far more to this singular death than meets the eye, Stuart.” Sharpe fell silent once more while Copperwaite tightened his own jaw, his body stiffening.
Sharpe, having seen enough of the victim's vacant, pained eyes, gently closed the lids, and then he looked into his partner's fervid eyes where a deep and youthful fire burned. “Suppose the killer is himself a priest?”
“Shall we begin our inquiries with priests then?”
“No, of course not.”
“But why not if—”
“It's assuming too bloody much, Stuart.”
“But now you ... just now yourself, you just now said—” the younger man sputtered.
“To bait you, ol' boy, to bait you, and you took it like a mouse on the scent. Shame on you.” Sharpe laughed loudly, sending his voice sluicing through the fog and upsetting the silent crowd of local officials who saw no humor whatsoever in this most grotesque, fantastic, eccentric, and bizarre of killings. “Let's turn the body,” suggested Copperwaite. “Why? What for?”
“But we always turn the body, Richard, always. It's part of the protocol.”
“But it's already been turned by men who found her earlier, some of these men standing about.”
“How can you know that? Now you're assuming, Sharpie!”
“Look at the grass beside her, Stuart. Use your eyes, man, and again, quit assuming that all things are as they appear. They seldom are.
“We know the bridgeman ran her over, yet we see no tire marks. The marks are on her backside then. The first bobbies on scene turned her over to have a look at her front side, her features, but no one wants to own up to that, Stuart.”
Copperwaite looked at the men standing nearby, nodding appreciatively to his wise mentor. Sharpe stared up at the recently completed bridge spanning the Thames.
Copperwaite pointed to the bridge and said, “The motorist who called it in was looking through a camera lens, a zoom camera, when he saw the bridgeman trying to right things after hitting the body. I'm told.”
“Saw it from up there, while crossing over the bridge. Actually, only after he stopped illegally to snap a photograph,” Richard calmly agreed. “He and his family were gaining an early start out toward Sussex, to see a bit o' the countryside, I understand. Anyway, after taking the name, they sent 'em all on their way. Or so I was told, Stuart.”
Sharpe now stared down the high-fashioned, fieldstone wall, which held the Thames in check. For a moment, his eyes fell on nearby Jubilee Gardens and Queen Elizabeth Hall. For some years now, the city had been attempting to run out the vagrants from this area of the embankment. Officialdom threw money at it, hoping to improve it as a tourist walkway, but efforts had gone wanting. Wise city officials had actually thought that it might help if they planted new, exotic trees. Rather, it had added lush locations for the homeless to curl up by night and from which to fend for shillings by day.
Sharpe stood and stepped away, shouting, his order sounding more harsh than he'd wanted. “You men standing about with nothing to do, scour the area for homeless who might have seen something.”
The body had been deposited in a busy area. Someone had taken a dreadful chance at discovery. Had the killer hoped for discovery? Perhaps unconsciously so?
From here it was some distance to the motorway from which the body presumably had been spotted by the American motorist. The roadway overhead, which the killer must turn off from to get down here, led north and south. By now, the killer might be anywhere in the enormous maw of the city or the London suburbs.
Sharpe stepped back from the embankment and returned to where Copperwaite remained kneeling beside the body. Seeing Sharpe, Copperwaite muttered, “Bloody awful hell, this. Can you imagine the depth of suffering this woman endured? Jesus ...”
Both men pictured the torturous image in their minds once again. “Yes, well, that's one item you can assume, Stuart,” said Sharpe.
Stuart replied, a hint of confusion in his voice, “What one item can I assume. Sharpie?”
“That the killer knew she'd die like Christ if he did her up this way....”
“Why the oil? It's still sticky to the touch.”
“I haven't a clue, but I know the bastard knew she'd die an agonizing death.”
Sharpe again kneeled beside his junior partner and pointed to the water's edge, saying, “Wonder why the body wasn't thrown in for 'cleansing of the wounds' before the killer disappeared. Perhaps caught in the act of preparing to dispose of the body in the river.”
“The bridgeman unknowingly startled him, run him off prematurely.”
“It would appear so, Stuart. But they tell us the bridgeman saw no one?” The chief bobby, overhearing this, stepped c
loser to be discreet. “The man had been at his bottle early, sir. Saw no one, sir, not even the dead woman until he ... Well, sir, he run the dead woman over.”
“Yes, ran over the body, so we've heard.”
“His first thought was it was him what killed her, sir.”
“Of course. In his dfunken state, he would.”
“She was facedown when he hit her with the car, sir. We ... some of us took liberty to turn her faceup,” the man confessed, fearful not to do so.
Copperwaite found his voice. “Shall we roll her and have a look, Richard?”
They rolled the body to the sound of Richard Sharpe's curses. “Gore ... Gore blime!” Sharpe muttered the Cockney vulgarism for God blind me, while staring at the unmistakable blistering of tire treads from a lightweight vehicle running the length of Mum's back and buttocks. “Yes, of course,” began Sharpe, “add to the indignity of having been tormented to death and having to lie out here in the elements, the rummy bridgeman must find a way to thump over her body in the dark with his Jetta!” Copperwaite gnashed his teeth over the gruesome image. Sharpe in turn released some of the pent up emotion he felt in a small explosion of exhaled air. “We'll have to examine the car,” he told Copperwaite.
Copperwaite, pointing, replied, “Parked over there, at the base of the bridge.”
Sharpe had seen the vehicle below a stone ladder that wound its way to the man's stone turret high overhead, from which perch he currently looked down on the scene, no doubt trembling still.
While staring at the damage done, two clear tire tread marks well tattooed onto the woman's back and backside for her to take to eternity along with the wounds inflicted by the killer, Sharpe groused, “Likely the only useful forensic evidence and it's from the wrong source.”
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