Those Who Feel Nothing

by Peter Guttridge

  You nod. ‘I’ve heard. You think that’s a good thing, do you?’

  ‘I think it’s a damned shame, but that is the world I live in so I have to acknowledge it.’

  ‘Embrace it?’

  ‘Deal with it.’

  You look at the water in your pool for a moment. ‘Don’t you want to know how they ripped you off?”

  Paradise shakes his head again and smiles. You think he’s aiming for genial but he’s forgotten how to be anything but ruthless. The smile is a grimace.

  ‘That long ago? Couldn’t give a fuck. I’ve done my share of shafting and been shafted since.’

  ‘Do you still do business with them?’

  Paradise stands. ‘Leave them alone, pilgrim.’

  ‘I know one of them is attached to an office in Siem Reap.’

  ‘There you go then – you don’t need me.’

  ‘I’m paying that office a visit next.’

  Paradise wags a finger at you. ‘If you try that there may not be any next for you.’

  Gilchrist told a constable to keep Rafferty and his house guest, now in a shirt and jeans, in the kitchen. She and Heap went into the hallway.

  ‘We’ll have the first look then let Don-Don and the rest do the thorough stuff when they get here,’ Gilchrist said.

  Don-Don was Detective Sergeant Donald Donaldson, who was a loose part of her team. Or perhaps a loose cannon part of her team was a better description.

  ‘Ma’am,’ Heap said.

  ‘Obsessive-compulsive?’ Gilchrist said to Heap, gesturing around the long ground-floor room.

  ‘Extremely,’ Heap agreed. ‘Remarkable when it’s so overstuffed with knick-knacks and all this fussy stuff.’

  ‘No wonder he lives alone,’ Gilchrist said. ‘Who else could find shelf space? You live in Brighton, Heap?’

  ‘Lewes, ma’am,’ he said, leading the way up the steep staircase to the first floor. ‘Brighton is too exciting for me.’

  The front room on that floor was a library, lined with books from floor to ceiling. All hardbacks. The master bedroom was at the rear with long French windows looking out over the well-kept garden.

  Neither these rooms nor the floor above held anything of immediate interest. The house was formidably tidy except for the guest room on the top floor scattered with Roger’s clothes.

  Gilchrist pulled the bedcover back. ‘And?’

  ‘He’s been sleeping here,’ Heap said. ‘Whether he was last night I wouldn’t know.’

  They descended to the basement, which had been fitted out as a self-contained flat.

  A room at the front was locked and bolted on the outside. The key was in the door. Heap and Gilchrist exchanged looks. Somebody locked in here?

  There was and there wasn’t. When they walked in both stopped dead. It was a big sitting room with sofas and armchairs and, over against one wall, a dining table and chairs. And on every available seat were placed oversized dolls, in skirts and stockings, aprons and Bo-Peep hats.

  ‘Has he been nicking the museum stock …?’ Gilchrist started to say when she realized something.

  Heap must have realized it at the same time because he suddenly clutched at her. ‘Christ,’ he said.

  ‘My sentiments exactly,’ Gilchrist whispered, gently disengaging Heap’s hand from her arm.

  He looked down at what she was doing and the second realization dawned. He jerked his hand away from her and flushed bright red. ‘Sorry, ma’am,’ he said.

  ‘It’s all right, Bellamy,’ she whispered, unsure why she wasn’t speaking in her normal voice. ‘We all get taken by surprise.’ She surveyed the room. ‘I’d say Keymer isn’t the first graveyard Mr Rafferty has robbed.’

  Bob Watts looked down on the promenade from his balcony. The seafront was busy in the sunshine but hardly anyone was actually promenading. Scarcely a walker to be seen. Jostling together were cyclists, joggers, then grown men and women on scooters or roller-blades or skateboards. There was also a new breed: people on skis with little wheels attached, propelling themselves along with ski sticks.

  One of the few people walking was a man with a huge cluster of balloons battling with the wind. Dirigibles really, shaped as Dalmatians, dolphins, whales and tigers. A big gust of wind almost lifted him off his feet as it caught the balloons. Watts smiled but the man didn’t. There seemed something wrong about a man selling such happy, silly things being so churlish.

  Damn if the middle-aged Asian woman from the pub wasn’t standing against the railings, holding a carrier bag. She scowled at the balloons as they bobbed towards her. Watts watched her for a moment then went to his telescope.

  He had bought it when he moved in. He’d decided that of a sleepless night, of which he’d been having many, he would stargaze, light pollution permitting. He’d always been vaguely interested in astronomy and he’d read there would be two comets to watch this year.

  Since he’d started living in the flat, however, he’d slept like a log and the nightly sea frets had obscured even the moon.

  He trained the telescope now on a boat on the horizon that looked familiar. It was the elegant rum-runner from the Great Escape heading back to Brighton. Smoke puffed out of the central funnel. He scanned the length of the boat but could see no one on deck.

  FOUR

  Gilchrist left Heap at Rafferty’s house questioning Roger the house guest whilst she escorted Rafferty to the station. She handed him over to the desk sergeant to process and went to her office to call Legal for advice about what he might actually be charged with. Whilst she was waiting for a call back she googled ‘contemporary grave robbing’ and found a case of a man in Russia, an academic, who had done a horribly similar thing, even down to the tea party.

  She was mulling over the fact that two minds thousands of miles apart had been having the same sick thoughts when her phone rang. Tracey, the chief constable’s secretary.

  Within the limits of her Botox, Hewitt was looking fraught.

  ‘Sit down, Gilchrist. Bernard Rafferty is no friend of mine but he’s a big cheese in our town. What is he doing in our cells without a lawyer in attendance?’

  ‘Bernard Rafferty was interrupted digging up a body in Keymer graveyard,’ Gilchrist said.

  ‘Which is not a sentence I thought I’d ever hear,’ Hewitt said.

  ‘Indeed, ma’am,’ Gilchrist said. ‘His lawyer is on his way.’

  Hewitt looked up at the ceiling. ‘Maybe he was doing research for a new book.’

  ‘With respect, ma’am: at four in the morning, by torchlight?’

  ‘Don’t ask me – academics are a law unto themselves.’ Hewitt sighed. ‘An actual body? Recently buried?’

  ‘Not a body,’ Gilchrist said. ‘Bones – a skeleton, as far as we can tell.’

  ‘Isn’t that more grave robbing than bodysnatching?’

  ‘I don’t know, ma’am – I’m afraid I’m not up on this aspect of the law. Burke and Hare were a bit before both our times.’

  Hewitt sniffed. ‘I’m glad you included me in that comment. Had he actually dug up the skeleton or bones or whatever it was?’

  ‘No, ma’am. Our officers stopped him before he had got that far.’

  Hewitt clasped her hands. ‘So in fact he’s only guilty of something like disturbing or maybe desecrating a grave.’

  Gilchrist tried not to stare at Hewitt’s smooth forehead. ‘Probably.’

  ‘How old was this grave?’

  ‘One hundred and fifty years or so.’

  Hewitt slapped the palm of her hand lightly on the desk.

  Gilchrist looked at the desk. She was bemused by the fact there was never anything on Hewitt’s desk. Anything. The chief constable’s computer was at a station behind Hewitt’s chair and Hewitt would take her tablet out of her drawer at the start of any meeting.

  Gilchrist assumed that at some stage Hewitt had been on the same in-house course that she had done a few weeks ago about an uncluttered desk equalling an uncluttered mind. She wond
ered impishly if Hewitt’s implementation of the course’s recommendations was the same as hers. Gilchrist’s desk was also bare. But that was because she’d crammed everything into her drawers and now couldn’t find anything.

  ‘Oh Christ,’ Hewitt said. ‘Then he was doing a bit of amateur archaeology.’

  ‘In the middle of the night?’

  ‘But cemeteries are his thing, aren’t they? He could argue he didn’t want to upset the locals.’

  ‘There’s more, ma’am. I’ve just come from his house.’

  ‘And you found?’

  ‘He was living with the mummified bodies or skeletons of possibly twenty-five other women. He dressed them like dolls and kept them round his house.’

  Hewitt looked intently at her bare desk. ‘Run that by me again?’

  ‘The women’s skeletal or mummified remains have been dressed in knee and ankle socks, dresses, aprons, ribbons. Some have Little Bo-Peep hats on. In the basement one group of dolls were sitting at a dinner table set for afternoon tea. One chair was empty at the end. Presumably his. On closer examination of the house we found other remains stuffed under beds and in cupboards. There were two up a chimney.’

  ‘Jesus.’

  ‘I don’t think Jesus had anything to do with it.’

  ‘But none recently dead?’

  Gilchrist shook her head. ‘All look like they’ve been in the ground decades before he got at them.’

  Hewitt made a quick sign of the cross. Gilchrist was surprised. She’d never thought of her boss as religious. She’d given no indication a few months earlier when fundamentalist Christianity and the occult collided in Brighton.

  ‘What are people like?’ Hewitt said. She looked as sour as her new face would allow. ‘You never really know, do you? Rafferty? The man is insufferable but he is also very bright. He’s on TV. He writes newspaper columns from time to time. He’s a historian and a journalist. He speaks four languages.’

  Gilchrist was surprised at Hewitt’s naïvety. ‘All except human, ma’am?’

  Hewitt looked at the ceiling. ‘So what are we going to charge him with?’

  ‘I have no idea. Grave robbing?’

  Hewitt leaned towards Gilchrist. ‘Is this more of that black magic nonsense you dealt with a few months ago? Is he a black magician?’

  Gilchrist grimaced. ‘There are no black magicians, ma’am. Just people who think they are. But, no, on the surface this doesn’t seem to have anything to do with black magic.’

  Hewitt stood and leaned forward, pressing her palms into her desk. ‘OK then, Sarah. I want to be sure this doesn’t get into the papers. So long as it doesn’t we can handle it discreetly. If it does it will be massive.’

  ‘Yes, ma’am,’ Gilchrist said, remembering Constable Stanford’s parting expression. Thinking: that bird has probably already flown.

  You take the coach from Phnom Penh north-east to Siem Reap. The journey takes all day but is not unpleasant. You have a bench seat to yourself. You sleep in the morning and at a stop in a village around lunchtime try a plate of fried locusts from a street vendor. You’ve had them before as a delicacy. They taste of nothing much but the salt on the crunchy carapace and evoke for you not Cambodia but the first occasion you had them on the other side of the world.

  It was in Oaxaca, Mexico, in a restaurant on a balcony overlooking a square that was occupied by government tanks recently involved in putting down an insurrection. A teacher’s strike that had got out of hand. Judging from reports a few months ago it happened all the time in Mexico. Who knew teachers could be so vicious? Actually, you did. Catholic upbringing.

  Calm had now been restored but people were staying off the streets. The fish and meat market housed in an old Spanish colonial building behind the square was bare of food, the mongers slouched behind their counters, listening to dance music on tinny radios, waiting for the latest official statement.

  You came up from Colombia where you were employed as a mercenary on a special op in Bogota – another city with tanks on the street. Not against the drug cartels, unusually, but against a communist cell operating covertly there, giving tactical support and advice to FARC and other communist guerrillas.

  ‘First thing you’ve got to recognize is that these fucking FARC bastards aren’t propelled by ideology,’ your friend ‘Will’ Rogers was saying. Big man, good looking, bit of a swagger. ‘They’re criminals, plain and simple. Kidnappers, human traffickers, dabblers in the drug business. They cloak their criminal activities in rhetoric but they are no better than some street-corner hustler with a switchblade or a flashy handgun.’

  He drew the long antenna of a locust from his mouth and laid it on the side of his plate. ‘That’s why I fucking despise them. They’re hypocrites. At least your everyday scumbag doesn’t pretend to be anything else.’ He reached for a toothpick. ‘Still, who are we to judge, eh? We’re not exactly untarnished.’

  He pointed at you with the toothpick.

  ‘Well, except for Captain America here. Cryogenically frozen in a time when you could tell good from bad, black from white. Brought back to life in the here and now, shield unblemished, outmoded morality intact.’

  Cartwright, Howe and Bartram laughed wolfishly at your discomfort. All moustached, all brawnier than you. These four had known each other a long time and sometimes you felt excluded. They seemed to have something else going on outside of each operation but you turned a blind eye to that. In consequence, you five were a team, knitting well. This was your third operation with them.

  ‘I don’t have a shield,’ was all you could think of to say. Quietly.

  Rogers prodded at the carapace of one of the locusts. ‘You’ve got a shell, though, laddie. That’s for sure.’

  Now you buy a big bottle of cola as you can’t find a bottle of water with an unbroken seal. You hate cola but it does seem to work as a stomach-settler and you need that. You have a flask of vodka in your hip pocket and the rest of the bottle in your duffel. You leave that alone: you’re trying to stay focused.

  Your bruised ribs are constricting your breathing so you’ve been trying to stay still in the coach. You adjust the strap on the satchel on your lap. Paradise’s men looted your safe but the stuff in there was all decoy. You know how easy it is to break into a battery-operated safe simply by removing the batteries so you’d factored that in. Most of your money and your real passport were in a waterproof bag buried in the little bamboo plantation in the corner of your yard.

  You look out of the window at the passing landscape and think back to the first time you were here.

  When Heap returned to the station Gilchrist took him down to the cells. Gilchrist looked through the window. Bernard Rafferty was sitting upright and perfectly composed on the edge of the concrete bunk. He saw her and mouthed the word ‘lawyer’ then mimed a zip closing over his mouth.

  ‘He’s here,’ she mouthed back. Not mouthing what she was thinking: asshole.

  Gilchrist and Heap went to the interview room.

  ‘Time for me to fess up, I suppose,’ Rafferty said cheerfully, when he entered the room.

  ‘It’s usually best,’ Gilchrist said, struggling to keep the distaste off her face.

  The Royal Pavilion director pointed at Gilchrist. ‘Don’t patronize me, young lady – I know exactly who you are and what you get up to with your chief constables.’

  ‘Bernard,’ his lawyer said quickly.

  Rafferty sat beside his lawyer and shook his hand heartily. Rafferty’s lawyer tried for expressionless but Gilchrist could see he was having trouble concealing his discomfort. Gilchrist gave the lawyer a look. He held it for a moment then looked down.

  ‘Tell me about you and graveyards,’ Gilchrist said to Rafferty.

  ‘Graveyards fascinate me,’ Rafferty said. ‘I know more about them than almost any living person. I should – I’ve been studying them for around twenty-five years.’

  ‘Studying them?’ Gilchrist said.

  ‘For years now I’v
e been visiting cemeteries around Brighton and churchyards on the Downs to dig up women. I like them to be aged between fifteen and twenty-five.’

  Gilchrist looked at Heap.

  ‘How did you get the remains home?’ Heap said.

  ‘Bin bags. Those thick ones for the garden? Sometimes I’d dig up two in a night.’

  ‘And put them in separate bags?’

  ‘Not necessarily. It didn’t matter anyway. Part of the fun was taking the skeletons apart and putting all the different bones of the women back together in new combinations.’

  ‘So the skeletons we found in your basement—’

  ‘That’s right. Not all the bones in one skeleton are from one person.’

  Gilchrist found herself gripping the edges of the table. ‘Did you keep track of whose bones went where?’

  He laughed. ‘Heavens, no! Why would I do that? What mattered was the end result.’

  ‘Why did you dress them up?’

  ‘So they’d look nice at teatime.’

  Gilchrist looked down at her hands. She was a big-boned woman but her hands, whilst long-fingered, were relatively neat and tapered. She lifted them off the table. Her knuckles were white. She wondered idly if they were too narrow to knock Rafferty out with one punch. She wouldn’t mind trying one day. She had long despised Rafferty for the oleaginous creep he was but add this sick activity …

  ‘You say you’ve been doing this for years,’ she said, keeping her voice level. ‘How many women have you dug up?’

  Rafferty raised his scrawny shoulders. ‘I didn’t bother counting. And they are hardly women, are they, Detective Inspector? They’re bags of bones. Corporeal life has left them – as has their spirit, if you think in those superstitious terms. Do you need to think in those superstitious terms?’

  ‘How many?’ Heap repeated.

  The lawyer put his hand lightly on Rafferty’s arm.

  ‘Let me think,’ Rafferty said. ‘I’ve probably spent around seven hundred and fifty nights in cemeteries.’

  ‘Seven hundred and fifty?’ Gilchrist tried to make her voice expressionless.

  ‘Over many years, that’s probably about right.’ Rafferty tried for a confiding expression. It came off as a leer. ‘I like to sleep in them sometimes. Often in a coffin.’