Those Who Feel Nothing

by Peter Guttridge

  She took your hand. ‘I’m sorry, Jimmy.’

  You squeezed her hand. ‘I’m not a colonizer. You’re my wife.’ You smiled. ‘There’s always our next one.’

  She looked at you for what seemed a long time. You held her look though you wanted to blink the stinging water from your eyes. You couldn’t read her expression. You’d never been able to but had never dared say it in case it fed into the old stereotypes about Oriental inscrutability.

  You sat on a stone bench, side by side, holding hands but unspeaking, until it was time for you to go. You had a train to catch back to your barracks. The rain had stopped but plump beads of water plopped from the arch masking the garden beyond.

  ‘Leave me here,’ she said when you stood. ‘I want to walk in the gardens after the rain. Smell the air.’

  ‘And see if the rain has brought anything up from beneath the soil?’ you said with a smile. Six months earlier you’d both volunteered for a dig in Tuscany, in the fields around the hill town of Chiusi. There the number of Etruscan finds you made on a daily basis during the wet months had almost become a joke. Things buried years ago would slowly rise to the surface after heavy rain.

  A kiss then you left her there, sitting in the garden of Fulham Palace. You left her reluctantly. You consciously didn’t look back, though you ached to do so. A superstitious dread was rising in you that if you looked back you would somehow trigger some ur-myth: that she would turn into a pillar of salt or be lost to Hades.

  Hades worried you most. You’d gone on from Tuscany to Turkey and during that dig had once stood at the mouth of Hades – or what archaeologists had identified as the cave the ancients believed to be the entrance to Hell. You didn’t know if there was a Cambodian equivalent of such myths or of such a cave. Of course, Pol Pot was turning the entire country into a living hell.

  But that was not to be your fate. Or hers. Instead, she simply disappeared from your life. Vanished. Unreachable. Over the next two years there were times you wondered if you had entirely imagined her. Even when she contacted you to say that she was back in Cambodia with her father you didn’t know that you believed it was her. Not until you saw her nailed like a bat to a barn door in the playground of Security Prison-21.

  Gilchrist didn’t know where she was when her phone woke her. She had dragged herself unwillingly from Merivale’s bed in the middle of the night and come home but it took her a moment to figure out she was actually back in her own bed.

  ‘Bellamy?’ she said, her voice croaky.

  ‘I hesitated to call, ma’am, as I didn’t want to disturb you …’

  ‘Enough with the innuendo, Detective Sergeant. What is it?’

  ‘Don-Don has just phoned to say he’s opened that metal door at the back of the store. It leads into a tunnel. And in the tunnel he’s found a body.’

  ‘I thought that was the point of the exercise: to find all the bodies Rafferty had dug up.’

  ‘This is no bag of bones, ma’am. This is a murder victim.’

  Gilchrist got out of bed and walked towards the bathroom, still holding the phone to her ear. She was aching in odd places but now wasn’t the time to remember why.

  ‘Youk?’

  ‘Hard to say, ma’am – face bashed in, I believe. But it has to be a possibility.’

  ‘No identification on him?’

  ‘None.’

  She reached in and turned the shower on. ‘I’m on my way,’ she said. ‘I’ll meet you at the Pavilion.’

  ‘Shouldn’t I stay out of it as Donaldson made the discovery?’

  ‘OK then, check out Youk’s old address. I’ll phone you in a while.’

  ‘Righty-ho, ma’am. Might we expect to see Agent Merivale today?’

  Did she hear the cheeky sod chuckle?

  ‘Fuck right off, Detective Sergeant.’

  ‘Certainly, ma’am,’ he said, ending the call.

  TEN

  It actually takes you forty-five hours to fly from Siem Reap to Budapest. And that’s the quick way, via Singapore and Frankfurt. A long time for your quarry to remain unaware. A long time for you to think about what you are doing.

  You check into a five-star hotel beside the Danube. You’ve read about the importance of this broad river over the centuries. A conduit and a barrier.

  There is a Chinese restaurant directly opposite that you mean to try later. For now you hit the bar and gaze blankly out at the broad, brightly illuminated Danube. The river traffic is mostly restaurant boats plying between the bridges.

  You were in Budapest because Howe had told you where to find the other two. He’d also told you what Sal Paradise was up to, then and now.

  ‘The older, pre-Khmer Rouge guys – the tunnel rats and Viet Vets – still dominate in Vietnam, hunkered down in Hanoi and Saigon. Excuse me – Ho Chi Minh City. They’re handling the heroin and the antiquities and the people trafficking. A nice little combination – the three get sent together.’

  ‘And here it’s Sal Paradise?’

  ‘Not just him. There’s another guy behind him. We never see him.’

  ‘You do the people trafficking and the heroin?’

  ‘Fuck off – I’m strictly antiquities. Paradise handles all the rest.’

  People traffickers. There are such people. People without feelings. More than you would like to believe. For a while you worried you were such a person until you figured out the difference.

  ‘If there’s a reception party waiting for me in Budapest I’ll come back for you,’ you said to Howe.

  Howe nodded. ‘I know.’

  You killed him even so. You can’t seem to process that.

  You’re supposed to meet somebody in the Liszt Museum. Cloak and dagger but you don’t need to argue unnecessarily with Sal Paradise. The museum is in an apartment where the composer and pianist used to live. You climb a couple of flights of stairs and go into a small foyer. Your shoes squeak on the waxed wooden floor. You are the museum’s only visitor.

  The rooms are deserted. Your contact is not here unless it is the elderly woman who took your entrance money at the makeshift counter in the foyer.

  You read on a notice on the wall that Liszt, like all great pianists, had an unusually large hand span, which made his compositions almost impossible to play by anyone with smaller hands. There is a plaster cast, and a bronze cast, of one of his hands. They are different sizes, which confuses you.

  You are looking at his death mask, covered in warts, when your contact finally arrives. She doesn’t speak, simply places an A4 envelope on the glass cabinet you’re looking into and walks away. You examine Liszt’s warts for five more minutes then leave the museum.

  ‘What have we got, Detective Sergeant?’ Gilchrist said as she joined Donald Donaldson in the store halfway down the Pavilion tunnel.

  The hard hat he was wearing looked like a joke one from the seafront because of his enormous head. Coupled with his white forensics onesie it made him look like a gay polar bear circa Village People.

  He indicated the half-closed metal doorway at the back of the store. Bright lights spilled out from arc lamps. ‘When we forced the door open first thing this morning, we found a body. We’re assuming male.’

  ‘Is it still there?’

  ‘Forensics will take all day, ma’am.’

  Donaldson was avoiding her eyes as they talked, still clearly pissed off with her. She couldn’t blame him but she couldn’t let his moodiness get in the way.

  ‘Any indication of ethnicity?’

  ‘Best talk to Mr Bilson about that, ma’am.’

  ‘I will do. And the tunnel?’

  ‘Doesn’t lead anywhere – it’s blocked up a few yards in.’

  ‘Do you think it’s been blocked for a long time?’

  Donaldson stared at her. ‘I had assumed so.’

  ‘OK. I’d like the blockage clearing – but with the understanding the tunnel is a crime scene. Could you ask Bilson if he has a moment for me?’

  She looked round th
e storeroom, which was now totally empty of boxes and black bags.

  ‘Do I have a moment for the delectable Detective Inspector Sarah Gilchrist?’ a tall man with a sharp face said, bending as he came through the small doorway. ‘My dear Sarah, I have much more than that for you.’

  ‘I’m sure, Mr Bilson – it’s perhaps as well you’re in your onesie so you can’t demonstrate exactly what.’

  ‘True, true – and these are such a pain to get on and off. I don’t want to come any closer because then I’ll have to put another one on.’ He tilted his head and looked at her speculatively. ‘Might be worth it though.’

  ‘It wouldn’t be,’ Gilchrist said. ‘Trust me on that. So what have we got?’

  ‘Give me a chance, Detective Inspector, I’ve only been here five minutes. I usually take at least seven to solve your case for you.’

  She pretended to look at her watch. ‘I can wait.’

  ‘I can tell you the person who left the body here or committed the murder here – I don’t know which yet – either wanted to prevent the smell of decomposition or he read a lot of old crime fiction.’

  ‘Because?’

  ‘He covered it in quicklime.’

  Gilchrist nodded. ‘Which do you think it was? He thought it would speed up decomposition or he wanted to slow it to avoid the smell?’

  One of the few things she remembered of all the many things Bilson had told her over the years was that, contrary to popular misconception from fiction films and books, quicklime did not destroy bone and tissue. It leached the water from a body and that set off a chemical reaction in the quicklime which produced slaked lime. This preserved the body, mummifying it. It also prevented the microorganisms breeding that broke down the body and in doing so produced the foul smells.

  ‘So what can you tell me?’

  ‘His face has been bashed in, so not much there. His teeth have been looked after by a British dentist – the fillings are distinctive. Judging from the hair and what I can make out of skin colour from patches as yet unmummified I’d say he was of South-East Asian ethnicity. Possibly Chinese.’

  ‘Possibly Cambodian?’

  He gave her a sharp look. ‘Perhaps. You have a supposition you want me to confirm, I take it?’

  ‘If I knew what a supposition was I’d say “possibly”. Can you take a DNA sample? I’ll have one for you to try to match later in the day.’

  Bilson gave a little mock salute. ‘Until then, Sarah.’

  She half-bowed. ‘Until then, Mr Bilson.’

  ‘So you’re offering your services,’ Sal Paradise had said to you as you sat beside your pool coughing up vodka. ‘In return for what?’

  ‘I told you – I want to know what happened to this woman Michelle in Cambodia in late 1978.’

  ‘I seem to recall I told you at the time. She was killed in an ambush along with her father.’

  ‘So you do remember her?’ you said.

  ‘Vaguely.’

  ‘Well, you’ll remember that you told me she had been killed along with my former colleagues. But my former colleagues are still alive.’

  ‘Not all of them,’ Paradise said. ‘Only Mr Rogers and Mr Howe survived.’

  ‘They work for you now?’

  ‘In a loose sort of way – although actually they are answerable to someone else.’ Paradise leaned forward. ‘But you’re saying you’re good enough at whatever you do for me to consider using you?’

  You’d got your breath back by then. You put your hands behind your head and grabbed the ankles of the man standing there. At the same time, you rolled back, using your momentum to kick him with both feet in the face.

  As he fell back against one of the other men you did a kind of breakdance spin to the side, taking your weight on your hands and arms to scythe your legs low into the legs of a third man. Neal you dealt with by jumping to your feet, grabbing his wrists and turning them out, breaking both his arms. It was easy but horribly noisy. The crack of bone seemed to reverberate in the yard until his screams took its place.

  You glanced at Paradise, still in his seat.

  He shook his head. ‘Shut him the fuck up, will you,’ he said in a bored voice. ‘He’s giving me a headache.’

  You obliged Paradise with a short jab to Neal’s chin. His head snapped back and you caught him round the waist and lowered him to the floor. When you’ve broken a man’s arms you don’t need him to fall on them as well.

  You turned to Paradise.

  ‘OK,’ he said. ‘There’s this man I need dealing with. Guy called Harry Nesbo.’

  Gilchrist invited Donaldson to join her and Heap upstairs to examine the artefacts. In the Pavilion entrance, Heap and Donaldson studiously avoided each other until a beaming Merivale loped across the gardens, raising his hand in a little wave. Gilchrist was aware of Heap watching her so merely nodded her head at the FBI agent. Plus she was peeved. She was feeling exhausted and was sure she looked it. Merivale looked fresh as a daisy. Bastard.

  She introduced Donaldson and told Merivale about the corpse. Rutherford joined them. She gave Merivale the once-over as they walked towards her. Introductions made, she hung back with Gilchrist for a moment, raised an eyebrow and wafted her hand in front of her face as if cooling herself down. Gilchrist looked down to hide her grin. He was a hunk all right.

  ‘What are you looking for in particular?’ Rutherford asked Merivale as she led them down the long corridor towards the banqueting hall.

  ‘Whatever we can find,’ Merivale said, looking to left and right at the nodding Chinese statuettes on either side of them.

  ‘I’ve been checking with the Museum Association,’ Rutherford said. ‘Apparently the Holy Grail in missing Cambodian artefacts is a bronze figure of Ganesh from the thirteenth century.’

  Merivale gave her an assessing look. ‘That’s true,’ he murmured. ‘You have it here?’

  Rutherford shook her head. ‘I don’t think so – but wouldn’t that be something?’

  ‘You haven’t finished unpacking the boxes?’

  ‘In fact, we stopped when we realized what we had. We need more expert hands. A British Museum expert is joining us.’

  ‘You know I’m going to have to take over these artefacts?’ he said politely.

  ‘I guessed,’ Rutherford said.

  ‘I’m intending to get them moved to a secure place as soon as possible,’ he said, addressing both Gilchrist and Rutherford.

  Gilchrist nodded. ‘Ganesh is who, exactly?’ she said.

  ‘The elephant-headed god in the Hindu pantheon,’ Rutherford said. ‘There’s one of him in the British Museum from Cambodia where he is represented with breasts and four arms.’

  ‘Breasts?’ Heap said.

  Rutherford stopped in the corridor and looked over her glasses at him. ‘What – you accept the idea of him having the head of an elephant but you worry about the fact he has breasts?’

  Gilchrist and Heap laughed. Gilchrist thought about the hermaphrodite they’d encountered a few months earlier who’d had both breasts and penis.

  ‘I wasn’t worrying,’ Heap said, red-faced. ‘I was clarifying.’

  ‘He’s the god of success and a remover of obstacles,’ Rutherford continued. ‘You can see why he was popular with traders and merchants heading out from India in the twelfth century. They took him with them as they spread out over South-East Asia. In Indochina Hinduism and Buddhism were practised side by side, so they influenced each other. Buddhists like Ganesh too.’

  ‘What makes this one so special?’ Gilchrist said.

  Rutherford glanced at Merivale to see if he wanted to answer but he said nothing. ‘It’s size,’ she said. ‘It’s massive.’

  ‘How massive?’ Gilchrist said.

  ‘Some twelve feet high. That’s how I’m pretty sure we haven’t got it – we don’t have a box that big.’

  Gilchrist frowned. ‘Is that so big?’

  Merivale did come in now. ‘Well, he was often depicted in bronze in anci
ent Cambodia but on a small scale,’ he said. ‘The ancient Khmer preferred to work in stone but you can’t carve stone easily in miniature. Particularly a small figure with multiple arms and a trunk.’

  ‘And breasts,’ Heap murmured.

  ‘But this is the only known example of one cast in bronze of such a size.’

  ‘Is bronze valuable?’ Heap said.

  Merivale glanced at Rutherford.

  ‘It partly depends on the value of the metals used to make the bronze,’ Rutherford said. ‘Different metals were used to achieve different colours: gold, silver, copper, pewter, bismuth and so on.’

  ‘It’s the art in the piece that has the value, not the materials,’ Merivale said. ‘Didn’t some London park have a Barbara Hepworth bronze stolen from it for its scrap value? That would have been nothing compared to its worth on the art market.’

  ‘How rare is this piece?’ Gilchrist said.

  ‘It’s unique – until another one turns up, of course.’

  ‘Where was it stolen from?’

  Merivale looked at Rutherford, who shook her head.

  ‘I don’t have that information.’

  Merivale shrugged. ‘Me neither.’

  She led them into the banqueting room. She pointed at the boxes in the centre of the room. ‘There it all is.’

  Bob Watts went back to the Bath Arms for a pint. It was crowded and he ended up sitting near a guy who was talking to himself. Never a good sign but made worse by the fact that actually the guy would clearly much rather be talking to someone other than himself. Watts realized it was the security guard from the museum again.

  Watts focused on his drink and tried not to think about what wild conspiracy theory the man might wish to share. Watts was feeling foolish that he had been so open in his inquiries at the shop. He thought he’d been doing OK with the Frenchwoman until it was time to leave, just after he’d asked whether the owners were around.

  ‘They’re rarely around,’ she said. ‘They spend most of their time away. As you see, we have an office in Siem Reap. We also have connections in Budapest.’