“What does that mean?”
“It means I know what you’re thinking. I know all about you. I know where you live. I know what friends you have. I’m going to give you another test, Sylvia. Remember what happened last time. I know one of your friends: her name is Helen Chambers.”
“What about Helen?”
“I want you to tell me where she is.”
“I don’t know. I haven’t seen her in years.”
“Liar!”
“No, it’s true. She sent me an e-mail a few weeks ago.”
“What did it say?”
“She-she-she said she was coming home. She wanted to meet up.”
“Syl-vee-a, don’t lie to me.”
“I’m not.”
“YOU’RE A FUCKING LIAR!”
“No.”
“Are you naked yet?”
Tearfully, “Yes.”
“You haven’t opened the curtains.”
“Yes I have.”
“That’s good. Now go to your wardrobe. I want you to find your black boots. The ones with the pointy toes and fuck-me heels. You know the pair. I want you to put them on.”
I hear her looking for them. I imagine her on her knees, scrabbling on the floor.
“I can’t find them.”
“You can.”
“I have to put the phone down.”
“No. If you put the phone down, Alice dies. It’s very simple.”
“I’m trying.”
“You’re taking too long. I am going to take the blindfold off Alice. Do you know what that means? She can recognize me. I’ll have to kill her. I’m undoing the knot. When she opens her eyes, she dies.”
“I found them! They’re here!”
“Put them on.”
“I have to put the phone down to zip them up.”
“No you don’t.”
“It’s not poss—”
“Do you think I’m stupid, Sylvia? Do you think I haven’t done this before? There are dead girls up and down this country. You read about them in the newspapers and see their pictures on the TV. Missing teenagers. Their bodies never found. I did that! It was me! Don’t fuck with me, Sylvia.”
“I won’t. You will let Alice go. I mean, if I do what you say, you’ll let her go?”
“One or two get spared, but only if someone is willing to take their place. Are you willing, Sylvia? Don’t disappoint me. Don’t disappoint Alice. Either you do it for me or she does it for me.”
“Yes.”
I direct her to the bathroom. In the second drawer of the vanity there is a lipstick. Glossy. Pink.
“Look at yourself in the mirror, Sylvia. What do you see?”
“I don’t know.”
“Oh, come on. What do you see?”
“Me.”
“A slut. Wear the lipstick for me. Make yourself beautiful.”
“I can’t do it.”
“You do it for me or she does it for me.”
“All right.”
“Now in the bottom drawer—there’s a pink bag—take it with you.”
“I can’t see a pink bag. It’s not here.”
“Yes it is. Don’t lie to me again.”
“I won’t.”
“Are you ready?”
“Yes.”
I tell her to walk to the front door of the flat, to take her car keys and the pink bag.
“Open the door, Sylvia. Take one step at a time.”
“And you’ll let Alice go.”
“If you do as I say.”
“You won’t hurt her.”
“I’ll keep her safe. Look at that—Alice is nodding. She’s happy. She’s waiting for you.”
Sylvia is downstairs. She opens the main door. I tell her not to look at anyone or signal anyone. She says the street is empty.
“Now, walk to your car. Get in. Plug in the hands-free. You have to talk and drive.”
“I don’t have one.”
“Don’t lie to me, Sylvia. There’s one in the glove compartment.”
“Where am I going?”
“You’re coming to me. I’m going to give you directions. Don’t take any wrong turns. Don’t flash your lights or sound your horn. I’ll know. Don’t disappoint me. Go straight ahead, through the roundabout and turn right into Sydney Road.”
“Why are you doing this? What have we done to you?”
“Don’t even get me started.”
“I’ve done nothing wrong. Alice has done nothing.”
“You’re all the same.”
“No, we’re not. I’m not like you say—”
“I’ve watched you, Sylvia. I’ve seen what you’re like. Tell me where you are.”
“Passing the museum.”
“Turn into Warminster Road. Stay on it until I tell you.”
Sylvia changes her tactics, trying to find a way through to me. “I can be very good to you,” she says, hesitatingly. “I’m very good in bed. I can do things. Whatever you want.”
“I know you can. How many times have you cheated on your husband?”
“I don’t cheat—”
“Liar!”
“I’m telling the truth.”
“I want you to slap yourself, Sylvia.”
She doesn’t understand.
“Slap yourself on the face… as punishment.”
I give her a moment to obey. I hear nothing. I whack the phone against my fist. “You hear that, Sylvia. Alice took your punishment again. Her lip is bleeding. Don’t blame me, little one, it’s Mummy’s fault.”
Sylvia screams at me to stop but I’ve heard enough of her mewling, pathetic pesthole excuses. I slam the phone into my fist again and again.
She sobs. “Please don’t hurt her. Please. I’m coming.”
“Alice is such a sweet thing. I have tasted her tears. They’re like sugar water. Has she had her period yet?”
“She’s only eleven.”
“I can make her bleed. I can make her bleed from places that you can’t even imagine.”
“No. I’m coming. Where’s Alice?”
“She’s waiting for you.”
“Let me talk to her?”
“She can hear you.”
“I love you, baby.”
“How much do you love her? Will you take her place?”
“Yes.”
“Come to me, Sylvia. She’s waiting. Come and take her home.”
24
The tree is an ogre with outstretched arms. A body hangs beneath it, suspended from a branch, motionless, white. Not white. Naked. Hooded.
Behind the branches, across the valley, a monochrome landscape is slowly emerging from the darkness. Fields divided by hedges and patches of evergreen scrub. Twisting trails of beech trees that follow the streams. The sun is hiding behind a bruised sky. Nosegays of primroses and daffodils are beneath the ground. Colors might not exist.
The wide metal gate has been sealed off with blue and white police tape. Spotlights have been set up around an adjacent barn. The weathered wood seems to be whitewashed by the brightness.
More police tape seals off the farm track. Vehicle tire prints are being photographed and cast in plaster. At the end of the track is a narrow lane, blocked in both directions by police cars and vans.
The police have erected makeshift barriers and a checkpoint. I have to give my name to a constable with a clipboard. Picking my way along the track, avoiding the puddles, I reach the barn and can look across a plowed field to where the body is hanging.
Duckboards cover the rest of the journey, white plastic stepping-stones, leading to the base of the tree, fifty feet away. The blades of a plow have created a teardrop shape around the trunk. The furrowed earth is dusted with frost.
Veronica Cray is standing beside the body, looking like an executioner. A naked woman, hanging by one arm, is suspended from a branch by a set of handcuffs. Her left wrist is raw and bleeding beneath the locked metal band. A white pillowcase encases her head, bunching on her shoulders. Her to
es barely touch the earth.
Lying on the ground at her feet is a mobile phone. The battery is dead. She’s wearing knee-length leather boots. One of the heels has broken off. The other is embedded in mud. A flashgun fires in rapid bursts, creating the illusion that the body is moving like a stop-motion animation puppet.
The same Geordie pathologist who examined Christine Wheeler’s car at the lockup is working again, issuing instructions to the photographer. For the next few hours at least the scene belongs to the evidence gatherers.
Ruiz is already here, slapping his arms against the cold. I woke him at the pub and told him to meet me.
“You interrupted a great dream,” he says. “I was in bed with your wife.”
“Was I there?”
“If I ever have that dream, we can no longer be friends.”
Both of us listen as the pathologist briefs Veronica Cray. The unofficial cause of death is exposure.
“Hypostasis indicates that this is where she died. Upright. There are no obvious signs of sexual assault or defense wounds. But I’ll know more when I get her to the lab.”
“What about time of death?” she asks.
“Rigor mortis has set in. A body normally loses a degree of temperature every hour but it dropped below freezing last night. She could have been dead for twenty-four hours, perhaps longer.”
The pathologist scrawls his signature on a clipboard and goes back to his staff. The DI motions me to follow her. We pick our way across the duckboards to the tree.
Today I have my walking stick—a sign that my medication is having less effect. It is a nice stick, made of polished walnut with a metal tip. I’m less self-conscious about using it nowadays. Either that or I’m more frightened of my leg locking up and sending me over.
The photographer is shooting close-ups of the woman’s fingers. Her nails are slim and painted. Her nakedness is marbled with lividity and I can smell the sweet sourness of her perfume and urine.
“You know who this is?”
I shake my head.
The DI gently rolls the hood upwards, bunching the fabric in her fists. Sylvia Furness is staring at me, her head hanging forward, twisted to one side by the weight of her body. Her ash-blond hair is matted into curls and is darker at her temples.
“Her daughter, Alice, reported her missing late Monday afternoon. Alice was dropped home after a horse-riding lesson and found the front door open. No sign of her mother. Clothes lying on the floor. A missing persons report was filed on Tuesday morning.”
“Who discovered her body?” I ask.
She motions over my shoulder towards a farmer who is sitting in the front seat of a farm truck. “Last night he thought he heard foxes. He came out early to take a look. He found Sylvia Furness’s car parked in the barn. Then he saw the body.”
Veronica Cray lets the hood fall and cover Sylvia’s face. The death scene has a surreal, abstract, achingly theatrical sensibility; a whiff of sawdust and face paint, as if somehow it has been laid out like this for someone to find.
“Where is Alice now?”
“Being looked after by her grandparents.”
“What about her father?”
“He’s flying back from Switzerland. He’s been away on business.”
DI Cray plunges her hands into the pockets of her overcoat.
“This make any sense to you?”
“Not yet.”
“There’s no sign of a struggle or defense injuries. She hasn’t been raped or tortured. She froze to death, for glory’s sake.”
I know she’s thinking about Christine Wheeler. The similarities are impossible to ignore, yet for every one of them I could find an equally compelling difference. Sometimes in mathematics, randomness itself becomes a pattern.
She’s also contemplating whether Patrick Fuller could have been involved. He was released from custody on Sunday morning having been charged with stealing Christine Wheeler’s mobile.
Uniformed officers have gathered beside the farm shed, waiting to begin a fingertip search of the field. Veronica Cray makes her way towards them, leaving me standing beside the body.
Nine days ago I glimpsed Sylvia Furness through an open door as she undressed in her flat. Her muscles were sculptured from hours in the gym. Now death has turned the sculpture to stone.
Stepping across the duckboards, I reach the perimeter of the roped area and begin walking up the slope towards the oak ridge. My polished cane is useless in the mud. I tuck it under one arm.
The sky has a porcelain quality as the sun fights to break through the high white clouds. The last of the mist has burned off and the valley has fully materialized, revealing humpback bridges and cows dotting the pastures.
I reach the fence and try to scramble over it. My leg locks and I fall into a ditch full of knee-high grass and muddy water. At least it was a soft landing.
Turning back, I scrutinize the scene, watching as the SOCOs lift Sylvia’s body down from the tree and lay it upon a plastic sheet. Nature is a cruel, heartless observer. No matter how terrible the act or disaster, the trees, rocks and clouds are unmoved. Perhaps that is why mankind is destined to chop down the last tree and catch the last fish and shoot the last bird. If nature can be so dispassionate about our fate, why should we care about nature?
Sylvia Furness froze to death. She had a mobile phone, but didn’t call for help. He kept her talking until the battery ran out. Either that or he was here, taunting her with it.
This was a piece of twisted sadistic theater, but what was the artist trying to say? He gained pleasure from her pain; he reveled in his power over Sylvia, but why did he leave her body so obviously on display? Is it a message or a warning?
There he is again, the man who knows Johnny Cochran’s distant cousin; the one who tried to talk to my fallen angel. He’s a regular corpse chaser, isn’t he? The grim reaper.
I watch him cross the field, ruining his shoes. Then he falls over the fence into the ditch. What a clown!
I’ve known my share of shrinks, doctor-major types who administer mental enemas, trying to get soldiers to bring their nightmares into daylight like some steaming pile of crap. Most of them were bullshit artists, who made me feel like I was doing them a favor by telling them things. Instead of asking questions, they sat and listened—or pretended to.
It’s like that old joke about two shrinks meeting at a university reunion and one looks old and haggard while the other is bright-eyed and youthful. The older-looking one says, “How do you do it? I listen to other people’s problems all day, every day, year after year, and it’s turned me into an old man. What’s your secret?”
The younger-looking one replies, “Who listens?”
A guy I know called Fellini, my first CO in Afghanistan, used to have nightmares. We called him Fellini because he said his family came from Sicily and he had an uncle in the Mafia. I don’t know his real name. We weren’t supposed to know.
Fellini had been in Afghanistan for twelve years. At first he fought alongside Osama bin Laden against the Soviets and then finished up fighting against him. In between times he reported to the CIA and DEA monitoring opium production.
He was the first westerner into Mazar-e-Sharif after the Taliban captured the city in 1998. He told me what he saw. The Taliban had gone through the streets, strafing everything that moved with machine guns. Then they went from house to house, rounding up Hazaras, before locking them in steel shipping containers in the broiling sun. They baked to death or suffocated. Others were thrown alive into wells before the tops were bulldozed over. No wonder Felini had nightmares.
Strangely, none of that changed how he felt about the Talibs. He respected them.
“The Talibs knew they were never going to win over the locals,” he told me. “So they taught them a lesson. Each time they lost a village and won it back again, they were more savage than before. Payback can be a bitch, but it’s what you have to do,” he said. “Forget about winning hearts and minds. You rip out their hearts a
nd break open their minds.”
Felini was the best interrogator I’ve ever seen. There was no part of the body he couldn’t hurt. Nothing he couldn’t find out. His other theory was about Islam. He said that for four thousand years the guy who carried the biggest stick had been in charge and been respected in the Middle East. It’s the only language the Arabs understand—Sunni, Shiite, Kurdish, Wahhabi, Ismaili, Kufi—makes no fucking difference.
Enough of the nostalgia. They’re taking the bitch’s body down.
A bird flies out of the trees in a clatter of wings. It startles me. I brace my hands against the top strand of wire, feeling the cold radiate from the metal.
On the lower reaches of the field, dozens of police officers are shuffling forward in a long unbroken line. Clouds of condensed vapor billow from their faces. As I watch the strange procession, a realization washes over me, a sense that I’m not alone. Peering into the trees, I scan the deeper shadows. On the periphery of my vision I notice a movement. A man is crouched behind a fallen tree, trying not to be seen. He is wearing a woolen hat and something dark is covering his face.
Without even realizing it, I am moving towards him.
He hears a sound. Turning, he tucks something into a bag and then scrambles to his feet and begins to run. I yell at him to stop. He carries on, crashing through the undergrowth. Big, slow and shiny-faced, he can’t stay ahead of me. I close the gap and he stops suddenly. Unable to slow down, I hurtle into him, knocking him to the ground.
I scramble to my knees and raise my walking stick, holding it above my head like an ax.
“Don’t move!”
“Christ, mate, ease up.”
“Who are you?”
“I’m a photographer. I work for a press agency.”
He sits up. I look at his bag. The contents have spilled across the sodden leaves. A camera and flash, long lenses, filters, a notebook…
“If anything’s broken you’re fucking paying,” he says, examining the camera.
My shouts have summoned Monk, who vaults the fence with far more proficiency than I did.
“Shit!” he says. “Cooper.”
“Morning, Monk.”
“Detective Constable Abbott to you.” Monk hauls him to his feet. “This is a crime scene and private property. You’re trespassing.”
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