Relics

by Shaun Hutson

  Lawrence’s body began to spasm uncontrollably but the killer took no notice.

  There were other tasks to perform.

  Twenty-Seven

  The first thing that struck Wallace as he entered the house was the smell.

  He could not help recoiling at the pungent odour as he stepped into the sitting room and looked at the shattered patio doors. Pieces of broken glass were scattered everywhere. It looked as if someone had been at the windows with a sledgehammer.

  ‘Subtle, wasn’t he?’ Wallace muttered to a constable who was standing close to the doors. ‘Have you found a tool he could have used to get in?’

  ‘Not yet, sir.’ the PC told him.

  Wallace took one last look at the doors, then turned his back and headed for the stairs.

  As he ascended the stench grew more powerful. The odour reminded him of bad meat.

  On the landing he was greeted by Bill Dayton, and Wallace was surprised to see that the sergeant looked a little pale.

  ‘What have we got, Bill?’ he said.

  ‘I’m buggered if I know, guv,’ murmured Dayton, wiping the corners of his mouth with a handkerchief. ‘I’ve never seen anything like it in my life.’ He swallowed hard and apologized for his lack of composure. ‘Young Buchanan was the first one in there.’ He hooked a thumb in the direction of the room behind him. ‘He’s still in the toilet throwing up. I bloody nigh joined him.’

  ‘Has the place been dusted?’ Wallace wanted to know.

  ‘Yes. Dr Ryan and the photographer are in there now. I didn’t leave any of the men inside. I didn’t think it was fair to them.’

  Wallace nodded slowly and walked past the sergeant into the room.

  He paused at the door, nodding a greeting to the elderly man who sat on the edge of the bed looking down at something which, as yet, Wallace could not see.

  Rick Piper clicked off another photo, his flash gun momentarily bathing the room in cold white light.

  ‘Morning, Steve,’ said the photographer. ‘I think you’ve got problems.’

  He nodded towards the object sprawled at his feet.

  ‘Jesus Christ Almighty,’ whispered the inspector, struggling to retain his breakfast. His stomach lurched violently as he gazed at the body of Stuart Lawrence.

  The surveyor was spreadeagled on the floor of the bedroom, the carpet all around him matted with dried blood. There was a large quantity splashed over the bed and the walls, too. His mouth was open in a soundless scream and Wallace could see the congealed blood clogged inside, as well as in the torn eye sockets. But, if anything, the ravaged face was the least offensive of the catalogue of atrocities inflicted on Lawrence. Stepping closer, Wallace saw with renewed revulsion that the man’s stomach had been torn open. A jagged gash fully twelve inches long had been hacked into his belly from sternum to groin. Lumps of torn intestine protruded from the hole like mushy fingers, and pieces of the entrails had also been scattered around the room like so many bloodied streamers. Clots of blood so dark they looked like tar had formed in the shredded ends of the colon, most of which had been pulled from the riven torso and now lay draped over the shrivelled groin.

  Wallace shook his head, fumbling for a cigarette, his eyes compulsively returning to the body time and time again, as if to convince himself that he wasn’t imagining what was possibly the worst atrocity of all.

  Stuart Lawrence had been flayed as completely as a rabbit in a butcher’s shop. Nearly every inch of skin had been stripped from the disembowelled body.

  The inspector stuck a cigarette in his mouth and reached for his lighter, flicking it in vain, getting only sparks. He had to be content to chew on the unlit Rothmans.

  ‘The killer must have been covered in blood,’ said Ryan, scratching his head. ‘There would have been massive haemorrhage from a wound like the one in the abdomen.’

  ‘Have you found a weapon?’ the inspector wanted to know.

  ‘It’s not my job to find them, Inspector,’ Ryan said, smiling.

  ‘Sorry, I meant what do you think was used on him?’

  ‘Well, it’s impossible to say for certain until the autopsy has been carried out, but from initial examination, especially of the face, I’d say that there was no weapon.’

  Wallace shot the doctor a disbelieving glance.

  ‘Those injuries,’ Ryan continued. ‘were inflicted by hand. Someone literally tore his eyes out, and judging from the appearance of the abdominal wound 1’d say the same for that.’

  ‘But who’s got the strength to tear through a man’s stomach with their bare hands?’ Wallace said incredulously as if doubting what the physician had told him.

  ‘You’re the policeman, not me. I merely gave you a medical opinion. As for the other injuries, particularly the flaying, I can only assume that a knife or some sharp object was used. Although whoever did it was clumsy.’ He pointed to a particularly deep gash on Lawrence’s right thigh. ‘Not only has the skin been removed but a large portion of the muscle has also been torn away.’

  ‘Flayed,’ Wallace murmured. He looked at Ryan. ‘You know we found the remains of a goat up in that wood near Dexter Grange. It had been flayed too.’

  ‘You think the killer’s graduated from goats to human beings?’ Ryan asked, cryptically, the slightest hint of sarcasm in his voice.

  ‘It wasn’t just that. There are other similarities in the mutilations.’ The inspector looked down at the body once more, thoughts turning over in his mind. He shook his head slowly and then glanced up at the doctor again.

  ‘What about the intestines?’ he said, removing the unlit cigarette from his mouth and pushing it back into the packet.

  ‘They wouldn’t have been too difficult to remove once the torso was opened. Merely a case of pulling,’ Ryan said, shrugging his shoulders.

  ‘So where are the eyes?’ the inspector wanted to know.

  ‘Nobody has found any trace of them,’ Piper told him. ‘Nor the skin.’

  ‘Oh, shit, that’s all we need,’ Wallace sighed. He turned as Dayton re-entered the room. ‘Is that right, Bill? There’s no trace of the eyes or the skin?’

  Dayton nodded, trying not to look at the body.

  ‘We searched every inch of the house,’ he said. ‘The sick bastard must have disposed of them afterwards.’

  ‘Or kept them,’ Ryan offered.

  Wallace looked at the doctor for a moment, then sighed and chuckled humourlessly.

  ‘You’re a great comfort, doctor,’ he said.

  ‘He must be a total fucking nutter to do this,’ Piper added.

  ‘I couldn’t agree more,’ Wallace said, reaching for a cigarette once again. ‘Have any of you got a light?’ he asked hopefully.

  ‘Don’t look at me,’ said Ryan, reproachfully.

  Piper obliged and the inspector hungrily sucked in the tobacco smoke. He drew a hand across his forehead and exhaled deeply.

  ‘Who found the body?’ he asked.

  ‘His sister,’ said Dayton. ‘She was the one who called us. They took her to hospital suffering from shock.’

  ‘I wonder why?’ the inspector said, bitterly. ‘Well, get on the blower and tell the ambulance to pick this poor sod up. Once the autopsy’s been done maybe we’ll have a bit more to go on.’

  ‘Inspector, I’m afraid there’s something else you ought to see,’ Ryan told him, getting to his feet.

  Wallace followed the doctor around to the other side of the bed, where a sheet had been laid on the floor to cover something. Blood was soaking through the material.

  As the policeman watched, the doctor carefully pulled the sheet back.

  On the blood-soaked carpet was a thick length of intestine, lying there like some bloated greyish-pink worm.

  It had been carefully shaped to form the letter M.

  Twenty-Eight

  Wallace flipped silently through the pile of photographs, pausing for as long as he could over each one. The fact that they were in black and white didn’t make them a
ny easier to look at. The subject matter remained the same. An obscene horror that he wished he could simply expunge from his memory.

  There were ten photos in all. Of Stuart Lawrence. Of the room where he was killed. Wallace paused on the last of the batch.

  He inhaled deeply on his cigarette and ran the tip of his pencil across the monochrome print, tracing the shape of the letter M which had been created using at least two feet of the dead surveyor’s colon. The inspector knew that it was the large intestine because he also had the autopsy report on his desk. He looked once more at the photos, then put them aside and picked up the report, scanning through it to find the salient points. He still could not quite fully comprehend some of the things he read on the carefully typed sheets:

  . . .EXTENSIVE DAMAGE TO BOTH ZYGOMA DOUBTLESS CAUSED BY REMOVAL OF THE EYES. . . SPHENOID BONES CRUSHED . . .SOME DAMAGE TO BOTH OCCIPITAL AND PARIETAL BONES INDICATING THAT CONSIDERABLE FORCE WAS USED TO REMOVE THE EYES.

  Wallace blew out a long stream of smoke and turned the page, glancing as he did so at the photo of Stuart Lawrence’s face. It was a silent affirmation of what was written in the report:

  . . .X-RAY TESTS SHOW NO EVIDENCE OF WEAPON USED

  TO REMOVE EYES . . .

  No evidence of weapon, the inspector thought, shaking his head. He looked again at the photos, noting the savage gashes on Lawrence’s cheek bones, then he turned his attention to the shots of the eviscerated torso and the report’s conclusions about this:

  . . .LARGE PORTIONS OF BOTH THE COLON AND THE DUODENUM REMOVED WITH SUBSEQUENT DAMAGE TO THE BLADDER AND ALSO THE STOMACH . . .CAUSE OF DEATH CARDIAC ARREST PROBABLY PRECIPITATED BY LOSS OF BLOOD BUT EXTERNAL CAUSE CANNOT BE RULED OUT.

  And once more:

  NO EVIDENCE OF WEAPON.

  Wallace looked at his own hands. They, he knew, were not powerful enough to tear open a man’s stomach and rip out his entrails. What kind of man, then, was he looking for?

  ‘A right bloody head case,’ he muttered aloud, answering his own question. He picked up each of the photos of Stuart Lawrence again, studying them one at a time, his attention drawn particularly to the last one.

  That obscenely fashioned letter M

  An initial? If so was it the first or last name?

  M.

  For Maniac?

  Wallace almost smiled.

  He turned and looked out of his office window at the grey sky with its swollen clouds that promised rain. Somewhere out there he would find the killer but right now he just wished he knew where to start.

  He was still gazing out into the gloomy afternoon when the phone rang.

  Twenty-Nine

  The skull was heavy, despite its small size.

  Charles Cooper took the small brush from his belt and flicked some fragments of dirt from the eye sockets, studying the skull a moment longer before putting it into the small wooden crate with the others he had removed. There was still a large pile of them left, however, built in a pyramid shape which rose as high as the archaeologist’s waist. He felt as if they were watching him with their sightless eyes, angry that he was disturbing their final resting place.

  He had been in the chamber for the last four hours, working alone, resentful of any intrusion by his colleagues. A number of them were working in the tunnels close by, but they had come to realize that Cooper was best left alone while he worked amongst the pile of skulls. And, unlike the others, he seemed not to feel the constant chill which permeated the chamber and tunnels.

  It was not only the skulls which interested him.

  The carvings on the walls of the chamber were beginning to show up with greater clarity as he removed more dirt. As yet. Cooper was still unable to make much sense of the drawings and the chiselled script. He wondered if it had been done by the same people or person who had been responsible for the stone tablets which had been removed to the museum. He decided to determine this as soon as possible.

  The lights inside the chamber glowed with a feeble yellow tinge that belied their hundred-watt strength. They periodically flickered or went dim, but Cooper seemed unconcerned. Now they went out completely, but he merely stood silently in the darkness waiting for the restoration of power.

  After a few minutes the lights came back on with a brilliant flash and he saw George Perry standing at the entrance to the chamber.

  ‘Bloody generator must be on the blink again,’ Perry said and Cooper noticed that he was shivering, his breath clouding in the dank air.

  ‘What do you want?’ Cooper asked, taking a step towards the chamber entrance.

  ‘They’ve found some more relics in the other tunnels. Gold statuettes and ornaments. I thought you might like to see them.’

  ‘I’ve got too much to do here,’ Cooper told him.

  ‘Charles, you’ve been down here for four hours,’ Perry said, wearily. ‘Ever since we found this chamber you’ve spent most of your time in here. Isn’t the rest of the dig important to you any longer? We know that the skulls belonged to those. bodies we found. What more can you discover by hiding yourself away in here every day?’

  ‘I don’t have to justify myself to you. This chamber could be the key to the whole site, and there’s still a great deal of work to be done here. I intend to find out what these carvings on the walls mean.’

  ‘Then let me help you,’ said Perry, taking a step forward.

  Cooper moved towards him, blocking the entrance to the chamber, his steely eyes boring into his companion.

  ‘I don’t need any help,’ he snapped.

  ‘What have you found?’

  ‘Look, just leave me to get on with my work, will you?’

  The two men eyed each other for long moments, then Perry shrugged and walked away. Cooper watched him disappear along the subterranean passage, making sure he was well out of sight before stepping back inside the cell-like chamber. The silence enveloped him as he returned his attention to the strange series of symbols on the wall before him. There were a number of drawings, each one hacked into the stone, he guessed, with a piece of flint. Beneath each one were letters, some of which formed recognizable words. Others he could make no sense of. As he scraped away more dirt from the stone he saw that the words were beginning to form a sentence. Cooper used a tracer to remove the last vestiges of debris and give himself a clear view of the writing. He read the sentence, mouthing the words silently to himself, his speech slowing as he reached the end.

  ‘My God,’ he whispered, his eyes riveted to what he’d read. He scanned it again. And again. More of the Celtic script was carved into other parts of the chamber and he knew that it must all be uncovered, but his eyes kept on returning to the single complete sentence he had so far revealed.

  He tried to swallow but his throat felt as if it were full of chalk.

  As he stepped back he found that his hands were shaking.

  Thirty

  ‘Not bloody cheese again.’ groaned Mike Spencer, pulling back one edge of his sandwich and examining the contents. He bit into the bread and chewed quickly.

  ‘Why don’t you ask your wife to put something else in them?’ Colin Mackay asked.

  ‘I make them myself,’ Spencer told him, grinning. ‘Cheese was all we had in the fridge, except salami, and I didn’t fancy any of that stuff. I’d have ended up smelling like a bloody Italian.’

  The other men inside the Portakabin laughed. There were half a dozen of them, all on their lunch break. Outside, on the building site itself, earth-moving machines rumbled back and forth and the roar of powerful engines was a constant background to the men’s conversation. Close by, a bulldozer was flattening some ground, the excess earth being scooped up by a JCB. The clanking of caterpillar tracks reminded Spencer of a war film he’d seen the night before. The lorry which he drove back and forth to remove the excess earth was parked on a small incline about thirty feet from the Portakabin. Usually he’d had his lunch at a cafe in Longfield, but that was proving to be expensive so he’d decided to start bringin
g sandwiches. He’d just come in, having retrieved them from the parcel shelf of the ten-ton Scania.

  ‘You know, I bet the leisure centre is a wreck within six months,’ Keith Riley said, gazing out of the window towards the building beyond. ‘Once the bloody vandals get at those walls with their spray cans and what have you.’

  ‘I saw a good bit of grafitti in town the other night,’ Spencer announced. ‘It was sprayed on the bottom of a poster for abortion, and it said “You rape ’em, we scrape em.” ’ He laughed throatily, almost choking on his sandwich.

  ‘I know what Keith means, though,’ Mark Little added, pouring himself a cup of tea from his thermos flask. ‘I mean, we spent weeks painting that place and it’s going to be ruined.’

  ‘You don’t have much faith in kids do you?’ said Frank King. ‘Wait until you’ve got a couple of your own.’

  ‘Sod off, I’m not having kids,’ Little told him. ‘They tie you down.’

  ‘Only for the first twenty-five years.’ chuckled King.

  ‘So what happens if your old lady gets pregnant, then?’ Spencer asked his companion. ‘You haven’t got the money to pay for an abortion.’

  ‘You can get it done on the National Health, you berk,’ Little said. ‘Anyway, she’d better not get pregnant. She’s been on the pill long enough.’

  ‘My wife’s got the coil,’ Spencer informed his colleagues. ‘On a good day she can pick up Radio One on it.’ He burst out laughing again. ‘She was going to use the Dutch cap but we couldn’t find one to fit her head.’

  ‘How much longer are we supposed to be working on this site, Frank?’ Colin Mackay asked the foreman.

  ‘That depends on what Cutler decides to build next,’ he said. ‘Your guess is as good as mine.’

  ‘I don’t care how long we’re here,’ Spencer said. ‘At least the money’s good.’