They started walking out of the office and back along the corridor with its deep blue flooring and pale walls. ‘I realise that,’ Conway said softly. ‘But if you’re going to lead this case, I have to assume you’re itching to get out there to take a look at the scene for yourself. In all honesty, I don’t remember a great deal about your work with SOCA during my time there, but I do know you have a reputation for being hands-on and thorough.’
The Superintendent accompanied him back down the stairs, while Bliss contemplated in silence. ‘You want me to send a gatepost with you?’ Conway asked.
Bliss almost smiled. It was common to refer to officers at the rank of sergeant as gatekeepers, and when their colleagues were feeling particularly droll they’d use the derogatory term instead. Bliss had known officers who became slow and lazy after their promotion to DS; no longer in the frontline when the grunt work was being handed out, and not high enough up the greasy pole to slide back down again if they chose to sit behind a desk. He thought of Chandler and Bishop and knew there was no way either of them would ever be compared to a gatepost.
He shook his head. ‘No, I’ll be fine on my own, thanks.’
Conway did not argue. ‘Fair enough. Take a ride over, have a look around. There’s a team briefing here at six. Come back, listen to what we have, study the evidence, share your thoughts with us. I’ll put you up in a nice hotel for the night, then you can choose to either drive home in the morning or give us a day of your time tomorrow as well.’
Bliss took a breath. He did not enjoy being painted into corners, but he also recognised the position Conway was in. If there was the slightest chance of their victim still being alive, he would take help where he could find it. Realising he would have done precisely the same thing had he been the superintendent, he dipped his head in acknowledgement and said, ‘I’ll stick around for now, sir. No promises, though. Those carvings mean absolutely nothing to me, but I can’t deny I’m both intrigued and excited by this second find.’
‘Excellent. Give us the rest of today and tomorrow, Jimmy. That’s all I ask.’
‘Sure. But I think we both know your victim won’t be found alive. Neither of them will be, in my opinion.’
Four
According to the roadside signage, the city centre was straight ahead, but Bliss knew the route meant encountering the Magic Roundabout, a notorious abomination consisting of five mini roundabouts surrounding a larger sixth. After a brief holdup, he eventually turned left and headed towards the M4, though his tyres would not be touching the motorway itself.
Bliss sat back and allowed the drive to flush irrelevant thoughts from his system. Ignoring the racial discrepancy between the two slices of flesh, he kept returning to the carvings. If they were meant to be a clue, why had the combined intelligence and imagination of two entire teams of detectives been unable to decipher them? Something was off. But what? What were they all overlooking? Were the figures deliberately vague? Were the individual carvings making their own unique statement, or was the person responsible feeding them information in stages? Neither OHSM nor WSHO had triggered anything substantive in him or his colleagues, and Conway’s team had got no hits from their FE04. Put them together in either combination and they still amounted to nothing, as far as Bliss could tell. So the obvious question now was: what if the message was incomplete?
The thought chilled him, physically causing hair to stand erect on his arms and at the base of his neck. It made him shudder, because it suggested whoever was responsible was set on playing a long game. A second find of human flesh showing up less than ten days after the first seemed to confirm the theory. It implied something about their quarry: the person responsible was thinking several steps ahead, like a chess player. This type of personality was the most terrifying of all opponents, and Bliss felt his stomach clench.
There were also the victims to consider. Were he and his colleagues looking for two men minus a considerable chunk of flesh each, living in agony beyond all imagination, or should they be searching for two dead bodies? Bliss leaned towards the idea that the Peterborough victim was dead; the only reason to suspect otherwise was that no remains had been discovered – so far. Nor had there been any other grotesque surprises left for the police in plastic bags.
Bliss adjusted the direction of his thoughts. Why remove the portions of flesh? Perhaps the perpetrator thought of himself as a man to be feared, teasing it out by depositing his victims piece by piece, and this was his way of revealing his proclivities to the police and the public at large. Did these findings imply both current victims were dead, and this nutjob was out there waiting to choose his next? Bliss was having trouble getting a handle on it, not seeing the ultimate goal. It felt like some outlandish twist on Schrödinger’s cat – except that in reality nothing was ever both dead and alive.
His mind reached out to DS Chandler, his partner. He imagined what she would say to him questioning their offender’s endgame.
‘Perhaps he doesn’t have one.’
‘Oh, they all have one,’ Bliss would scoff in reply. He shook his head bitterly. Mundane or twisted, sordid or run-of-the-mill, they all have a goal. They don’t always know what it is themselves, but it’s there, lurking in the absence of light at the back of their minds.
Bliss’s pool Ford Mondeo ate up the miles. He put his foot down when gaps opened up, blowing past slow-moving vehicles as he approached Avebury, before turning west on the A4. Conway had told him his team and the forensic unit were gathered together at the scene.
‘Much media up there?’ Bliss had asked as he’d been about to head out the door.
‘Enough. They’ve been drifting in throughout the day. We’ve set them well back, but you know what they’re like.’
Bliss pictured the scene. He didn’t relish the thought of getting caught up in all the official hoopla, so continued further along on the A4. He drove past the entrance to West Kennet Long Barrow, before pulling into a lay-by which had been designated a visitors’ car park. He realised it would be a harder slog trudging uphill to the scene, but he also knew he needed the exercise.
As he got out of his car, Bliss glanced along and across the road to a large mound that looked like an enormous upturned bowl covered by grass. He recognised Silbury Hill, though it had been many years since he had visited the area. He remembered a lot of its history still: the largest artificial mound in Europe, over four thousand years old. Built during a time of great change in and around Britain, but especially in this particular region. As he’d breezed through the winding roads of Avebury, he’d admired the village’s remarkable standing stones, which were erected during the same Neolithic period – as was the Long Barrow he now approached.
At the gated entrance to the burial site, a lone uniformed constable barred his way. The PC’s cheeks were glowing red and the overbearing heat looked to be taking its toll on him. He wore a short-sleeved shirt and his arms were turning a deep shade of pink. ‘Sorry,’ he said cheerfully, ‘the Long Barrow site is closed for the rest of the weekend at least. There’s been an incident up there and I’m afraid I can’t allow you entry.’
Bliss flashed his warrant card. The officer began feeding him directions to the spot where the official vehicles were parked, but Bliss insisted on entering through the kissing gate. One quick check on the officer’s two-way communications device and he was allowed through.
As the sun descended over to his right, its heat gradually dissipated. A procession of wispy clouds appeared to be following it into the far horizon, spectators on the trail of a major celebrity. Out on the exposed hillside a faint breeze stirred the tall grass, but it was cooling and welcome. As he made his way up towards the site, Bliss continued to dredge his memory regarding the historical significance of the burial chamber he was climbing towards. Its construction had begun four hundred years before that of Stonehenge. Forty-six bodies, from children to elders, were believed to have been
entombed inside it, all seemingly within three decades of each other, though the Long Barrow had remained open for over a thousand years. The side chambers were arranged inside a precise isosceles triangle, drawing admiration from historians and geometrists alike.
Once again, Bliss heard Chandler’s voice grating inside his head.
‘How do you know all this shit?’
He leaned into the climb; the chambers themselves were half a mile from the road and all of it on a steep incline. ‘It’s not “shit”,’ he would have replied, with no small measure of exasperation. ‘It’s our nation’s history, our heritage. I happen to be fascinated by it, and have been since my parents brought me here. After that, I wanted to know more, so I borrowed books from the library.’
Yet none of what he had learned from his studies was going to help him explain why somebody would leave a bag of human meat up there now. Given its remote location, he and his team would have to ask themselves why anyone would go to such lengths to deposit the product of their insanity there. Maybe the site was chosen deliberately, something symbolic, at least to whoever had taken the time to leave the macabre item.
Nudging the thought aside, Bliss worried about his state of mind. Chandler wasn’t in her usual spot beside him, yet still he was conversing with her. It was taking place inside his head, but the discussion reminded him of how inseparable they had become. He had long considered her to be the Yin to his Yang. Chandler had once told him she thought of herself as the Jiminy Cricket character, whispering words of advice in his ear. After Bliss had told her that Pinocchio kills the talking cricket in the original version of the story, she never mentioned it again.
Feeling the pinch in his calf muscles and along the backs of his thighs, Bliss was relieved when he reached the long mound. An outcrop of large standing stones, several of them ten or twelve feet high, concealed the entrance. The place was swarming with forensic techs, uniformed officers and a few suits standing in the background, each of them in animated discussion.
Bliss took a moment to gather his breath. Hands on hips, he sucked air in and blew it out in a steady stream. He was parched and felt the nagging twinge of a stitch in his side. He also needed to prepare himself mentally for what lay ahead, because from the moment he’d heard from Conway, he had been unable to shake one thought in particular. The kind of person who went around slicing flesh off living men and creating a puzzle for the police from the pieces, was the kind of person who would eventually kill and kill again. Because by the time they had reached such an extreme, theirs was an existence of escalation and experimentation wrapped around a central core of intent.
It was simple: there was every chance the police were witnessing either the birth or rebirth of a serial killer.
Five
A uniform with three chevrons on his shirt sleeves spotted Bliss approaching, broke away from the group he’d been in deep conversation with, and introduced himself as Sergeant Malcolm Talbot. In his role of duty officer, he had attended the scene after the first responding PCs reported in. Having examined the slab of flesh and declared it real rather than a latex prop from a horror movie, Talbot had set about securing the entire site, summoning both CID and the CSI team, as well as informing the police surgeon. He also arranged for the family of Welsh tourists who had discovered the bag to be interviewed and provide statements.
‘The poor sods were keen to get an early start because they wanted to visit both here and Avebury today, and figured they’d kick off with the site most liable to be quiet first thing in the morning.’ Talbot, sweating in his hi-vis vest, raised his eyebrows. ‘Not their day, I guess.’
‘Any idea what time window we’re working with?’ Bliss asked.
‘Not as such. Mr Lewis says they arrived shortly after eight. We can’t know for certain when the last visitor was here yesterday, however. Or an earlier one today, for that matter. It’s mostly a tourist spot, but it’s also used by pagans for ritualistic worship. People are expected to visit during reasonable hours of daylight – but given the site is wide open, there’s no way of officially recording how many come to the Long Barrow, nor precisely when.’
‘Did you say pagans?’
‘Yes.’ Despite the affirmative, Talbot shook his head. ‘And I can imagine where your thoughts are leading, so let me stop you right there. No, this would not be part of their ritual worship. Around the time this place was built, maybe. But not now.’
Bliss nodded. He knew something about pagans. ‘As I understand it, they have closer ties to Wicca than Satanism. Earth worshipper types. Quite peaceful in this modern age.’
‘So far as we’re aware, yes. Apparently they prefer… intimacy, rather than bloodshed, if you know what I mean.’ Talbot waggled his eyebrows and allowed himself a smirk. He had angular features, and red hair which extended to a light dusting of trimmed beard. His skin tone did not cope well beneath a burning sun.
‘The condition of the flesh may provide us with a clue in regard to timing,’ Bliss suggested, steering them back on course. ‘I’ve not been told of any blood being discovered here, so any body the slice was removed from has to be elsewhere, but possibly close by. If pathology and forensics can tell us how much time passed between the loss of blood flow and the discovery, then we get our window. Any thoughts on how whoever left the bag for us got here?’
Talbot shrugged. ‘Impossible to say at this point. There are any number of ways to approach the site, and plenty of spots where he could’ve parked up. We’re searching for fresh tyre marks and footprints, but it’s not the cleanest of locations. It’s too well-travelled, so I wouldn’t bank on us identifying the method of access.’
As they talked, the two men were ambling around the perimeter of the site itself, keeping outside the blue and white ribbon of tape erected by the first responders. Talbot stopped opposite the entrance to one of the chambers. A ring of stones, several of which towered over the rest, protected the aperture. He pointed at a gap between the largest boulder and one of its lesser brethren.
‘They discovered the carrier bag in there. About two or three paces in. Mr Lewis said they thought perhaps another visitor had dropped it accidentally, so they were keen to return its contents to whoever had misplaced it. You can imagine his reaction when he opened it up.’
Bliss could. Vividly. As a police officer, you got to see up close an awful lot of things nobody was ever supposed to encounter. The human form was designed to remain intact, but the bloody mess of those times when its internal composition was uncovered revealed stark imagery of an intense, graphic nature; few who were exposed ever forgot their first time. Unless he worked for the emergency services or had served in the military, Mr Lewis was unlikely ever to have encountered fragments of human flesh before today.
‘I take it you’ve checked out their story?’ Bliss asked.
‘As far as possible. Their B&B landlady in Marlborough confirms they left immediately after breakfast, shortly before seven-thirty. It’s a fifteen-minute drive and a ten-minute hike up here from the main road. So unless they brought the bag with them, I think we can safely rule them out.’
Bliss already had, but he’d hate anything to slip through the net. Opening his mouth to suck down a decent lungful of warm air, he looked around. It wasn’t far off fifty years since he had last visited the Long Barrow, but it didn’t look to have changed a great deal compared with the images bubbling out of his memory like an unwatched pot boiling over. He didn’t recall the path across the burial mound, nor the wooden fencing along its edges, but everything else was familiar. He spotted no other markers that could have been intended for his eyes only.
‘Is it okay if I go inside?’
Talbot nodded. ‘The crime scene manager has cleared the area. You need to follow the designated pathway in and out. It’s tight in there, so you go on your own. Yellow marker number one indicates the original location of the bag, according to the Lewis family. H
ave a look around. Any questions, I’ll be waiting right here for you.’
Beyond the protective upright boulders, a supporting structure of smaller rocks and stones led into the entrance on a slight decline, above which a huge stone lintel had been mounted. Battery-powered Nomad LED floodlights illuminated the tunnel. The densely compacted, flinty tunnel floor was solid underfoot, and levelled out once inside the chamber. Bliss found uneven surfaces hard going due to his Ménière’s disease; the condition often triggered vertigo attacks, so he was grateful to re-establish some equilibrium after the vagaries of the climb and the undulating terrain outside the burial site.
The marker showing the precise location of the carrier bag was, as described, between two and three paces into the chamber. Not immediately visible from the outside, but not so far in that a casual observer would miss it. I’d have to know what was inside the bag if I saw it lying on the floor, Bliss thought. Most people would.
Three further markers stood on the floor of the chamber. He made a mental note to ask the crime scene manager for a list of items found during the forensic sweep. Whatever they collected might still be in their van; if not, Bliss would need to check with the exhibits officer when he got back to Gablecross.
Recalling his conversation with Conway, Bliss scoured both the ground beneath his feet and the rocks and stones used to create the chamber. He walked further in, looking for any sign left expressly for the police by the perpetrator. He was amazed to find the pale grey stones – now stained a light shade of green – unblemished by graffiti; the place was a paradise for would-be taggers, he imagined. But neither could he see any mark, symbol or message carved or painted for his attention.
When Bliss emerged back into daylight, Sergeant Talbot was talking to another man, whose white protective suit had been pulled down around his waist. ‘You the crime scene manager?’ Bliss asked, walking up to the two men, his hand already extended.
Slow Slicing (DI Bliss Book 7) Page 3
