This Body of Death

by Elizabeth George

  He shoved the earpieces into his ears and turned up the volume. Intermittently, he’d been playing the “Ode to Joy” because he knew it was capable of taking up so much space in his brain that he could have no thoughts that were not those sounds and he could hear no voices that were not the chorus. That was what he needed to see him through, until he could return to the street.

  Because of the heat, his clothes had dried quickly, which was a blessing. This had allowed him to soak them a second and third time. Ultimately, the water had altered from bright crimson to cherry to the pale pink of spring blossoms, and while the shirt would not be white again without bleaching or professional laundering, the worst of the staining was gone. And on the trousers and jacket, it couldn’t be seen at all. What remained was the ironing, and he had an iron because how he appeared was important to him. He didn’t like people to be put off. He wanted them near, he wanted them listening, and he wanted them to know him as he really was. But that couldn’t happen if he was disheveled, with filthy clothes suggesting poverty and sleeping rough. Neither of those was accurate. He’d chosen his life. He wanted people to know that.

  …other choices. Here is one before you. The need is great. Need leads to action and action to honour.

  He’d sought it. Honour, only honour. She’d needed him. He’d heard the call.

  It had all turned out wrong. She’d looked at him and he’d seen the recognition in her eyes and he knew it meant surprise because she would be surprised but it also meant welcome. He’d walked forward and he’d known what had to be done and there were no voices in the moment, no chorus of sound, and he’d heard nothing, not even the music from the earphones he wore.

  And he had failed. Blood everywhere, on her and on him and her hands at her throat.

  He’d run. He’d hidden at first, rubbing himself with fallen leaves to take the blood away. He removed his shirt and balled it up. He turned his jacket inside out. The trousers were bad but they were black and the black obscured the crimson of her that had spilled down the front of him. He’d had to get home, which meant the bus, which meant more than one bus and he hadn’t known when to get off to make the switch, so it had taken hours and he’d been seen, gawked at, whispered about, and it could not matter because—

  …another sign and you should have read it. There are signs around you but you choose to guard when you are meant to fight… .

  —it was his job to get home and to clean himself so that he could do what he had been intended to do.

  No one, he told himself, would put it together. In the buses of London there were so many types of people and no one paid attention to anything and even if they had paid attention and had seen and had even remarked upon or remembered what they’d seen, it didn’t matter. Nothing mattered. He’d failed and he had to live with that.

  Chapter Six

  ISABELLE ARDERY WASN’T PLEASED THAT AC HILLIER PUT IN an appearance at the morning meeting of her team on the following day. It smacked of checking up on her, which she didn’t like, although his claim was that he’d merely wanted to say well done in reference to the news conference she’d held the previous afternoon. She wanted to tell him that she wasn’t a fool: She understood exactly why he’d turned up to stand importantly at the back of the incident room and she also understood that the head of an investigation—that would be me, sir—was meant to listen to whatever the duty press officer advised regarding information to be imparted to the media, so she hardly needed to be congratulated on having done her job. But she took the compliment with a formal thank you, sir, and she eagerly anticipated his immediate departure. He’d said Do keep me apprised, won’t you, Acting Superintendent? and again the message was received as intended. Acting Superintendent. She didn’t need reminding that this was her audition—for want of a better word—but it appeared to be the man’s intention to do that reminding at every possible opportunity. She’d said that the news conference and its call for information from witnesses to anything suspicious was already bearing fruit and asked if he wanted a compendium of each day’s phone calls, sir. He eyed her in a way that told her he was evaluating what lay behind her question before he declined the offer, but she kept her face bland. He apparently decided she was being sincere. He’d said, We’ll meet later, shall we? and that was that. Off he went, leaving her to the unfriendly gaze of DI John Stewart, which she happily ignored.

  The house-to-house in Stoke Newington was in progress, the slow process of the cemetery search was continuing, phone calls were being fielded and dealt with, diagrams and maps had been drawn. They were bound to get something from the news conference, from the resulting stories on the television news and in the daily papers, and from the e-fit that had been provided by the two adolescents who’d discovered the body. Thus things were clicking along as they were meant to click. Isabelle was satisfied with her performance so far.

  She had her doubts about the post mortem, however. She’d never been one for dissection. The sight of blood didn’t make her feel anything akin to fainting, but the sight of an open body cavity and the mechanics of removing and weighing what had so recently been living organs did tend to turn her stomach to liquid. For this reason, she determined to take no one with her to observe the proceedings that afternoon. She also skipped lunch in favour of emptying one of the three airline bottles of vodka she’d tucked into her bag for this precise purpose.

  She found the mortuary without any trouble, and within it, she found the Home Office pathologist awaiting her arrival. He introduced himself as Dr. Willeford—“but do call me Blake …let’s keep things friendly, shall we?”—and he asked her if she wanted a chair or a stool “in the event that the coming exploration proves rather more than you feel able to cope with.” He said all of this nicely enough, but there was something about his smile that she didn’t trust. She had little doubt that her reaction to the autopsy was going to be reported, Hillier’s long tentacles reaching out even here. She vowed to keep upright, told Willeford she didn’t anticipate any difficulty as she’d never had difficulty with autopsies before—an outright lie but how was he to know?—and when he chuckled, stroked his chin, observed her, and then happily said, “Right, then, here we go,” she stepped right up to the stainless-steel trolley and fixed her gaze on the body that lay there, chest up and waiting for the Y incision, with her fatal wound making a bloody lightning bolt down the right side of her neck.

  Willeford recited the salient superficial details first, speaking into the microphone that hung above the autopsy trolley. He did so in a chatty fashion, as if with the intention of entertaining whoever would do the transcription. “Kathy darling,” he said into the microphone, “we have a female before us this time. She’s in good physical condition, no tattoos and no scars. She measures five feet four inches tall—sort out the metrics, my love, as I can’t be bothered—and she weighs seven point eight five stone. Do the metrics there as well, will you, Kath? And by the way, how’s your mum doing, darling? Are you ready, Superintendent Ardery? Oh, Kath, that’s not for you, my dear. We’ve a new one here. She’s called Isabelle Ardery”—with a wink at Isabelle—“and she’s not even asked for a chair on the chance that just-in-case becomes the case. Anyway …” He moved to examine the wound at the neck. “We’ve got the carotid artery pierced. Very nasty. You’ll be glad you weren’t here, not that you ever are, my love. We’ve also got a tear in the wound, quite jagged, measuring …it’s seven inches.” He moved from the victim’s neck along the side of her body where he picked up one of her hands and then the other, excusing himself to Isabelle as he passed her and letting Kathy know that the superintendent was still on her feet and her colour was good, but they would see, wouldn’t they, once he cut the body open? He said, “No defensive wounds on the hands, Kath. No broken fingernails, no scratches either. Blood on them both but I expect this would have come from her attempt to stop the bleeding once the weapon was withdrawn.” He chatted on for a few more minutes, documenting everything the eye could see. He put
her age between twenty and thirty and then he prepared himself for the next step of the process.

  Isabelle was ready. Clearly, he expected her to faint. Just as clearly, she intended not to. She found she could have done with another shot of vodka when, after the incision and the exposure of the rib cage, he took out the shears to cut through the victim’s chest—it was the sound of metal cutting through bone that she found most repellent—but after that the rest was, if not easy, then at least more bearable.

  After Willeford had done his bit, he said, “Darling Kath, as always, it’s been a pleasure. Could you type that up and get it over to Superintendent Ardery, darling? And by the way, she’s still upright so I daresay she’s a keeper. Remember DI Shatter—what an appropriate name, eh?—falling headfirst into the body cavity up in Berwick-on-Tweed that time? Lord, what an uproar. Ah, ‘but what do we live for but to give’ …whatever it is that we give to our neighbours and ‘to laugh at them in our turn.’ I cannot ever remember that quote. Adieu, dear Kath, till next time.”

  At that point, an assistant swept forward to do the cleanup and Willeford stripped off his scrubs, tossed them in a bin in the corner, and invited Isabelle to “‘step into my parlour said the spider,’ et cetera. I’ve a bit more for you in here.”

  A bit more turned out to be the information that two hairs had been caught up in the victim’s hands, and he had little doubt that SOCO would soon inform her that fibres aplenty had been taken from her clothing. “Got rather close to her killer, if you know what I mean,” Willeford said with a wink.

  Isabelle wondered if this counted as sexual harassment, as she asked blandly, “Intercourse? Rape? A struggle?”

  Nothing, he said. Absolutely no evidence. She was, if he might put it this way, a willing participant in whatever went on between herself and the owner of the fibres. Likely that was why she’d been found where she’d been found, as there was no evidence she’d been dragged anywhere against her will, no bruises, no skin under the fingernails, that sort of thing, he said.

  Did he have an opinion on what position she was in when she was attacked? Isabelle asked the pathologist. What about time of death? How long had she likely lived after the assault upon her? From what direction did the injury occur? Was the killer left-or right-handed?

  Willeford fished in the pocket of his windcheater at this point—he’d left it behind a door and he fetched it over to where they were sitting—and brought out a nutrition bar. Had to keep his blood sugar up, he confessed. His metabolism was the curse of his life.

  Isabelle could see this was the case. Out of his scrubs, he was thin as a garden hoe. At a height of at least six feet six inches, he likely needed to keep eating all day, which had to be difficult in his line of work.

  He told her that the presence of the maggots put time of death at twenty-four to thirty-six hours before the body was found, although considering the heat, the closer call would be twenty-four. She’d have been upright when she was attacked, and her assailant was right-handed. Toxicology would show if drugs or alcohol was involved, but that would take some time, as would the DNA from the hair, as there were “follicles attached and isn’t that lovely?”

  Isabelle asked if he reckoned the killer had been in front of or behind the young woman.

  Definitely standing in front of her, the pathologist said.

  Which meant, Isabelle concluded, that she may have known her killer.

  ISABELLE ALSO WENT alone on her next call that day. In advance she studied the route, and she was relieved to see that the direction she needed to follow to Eaton Terrace was not a complicated matter. The important bit was not to bollocks things up in the vicinity of Victoria Station. If she kept her wits about her and did not become unnerved by the traffic, she knew she should be able to work her way through the skein of streets without ending up either at the river or—in the other direction—at Buckingham Palace.

  As it happened, she did make one wrong turn when she got to Eaton Terrace, choosing left over right, but she saw the error of her ways when she began reading the house numbers on the stately front doors. After turning round, things were simple although she sat in her car for a full two minutes when she arrived at her destination, considering what approach she wished to use.

  She finally decided that the truth was best, which, she admitted, was generally the case. Still, in order to speak it, she found that she wanted something to assist, and that something was tucked into the bottom of her bag. She was glad she’d thought to bring more than one airline bottle along for her workday.

  She drained the vodka. She rested the last of it on her tongue for a good long while till it heated up. She swallowed and then fished for a piece of Juicy Fruit. She chewed this on her walk to the front steps of the house, and on the marble draughtsboard that marked what went for the porch, she removed the gum, ran some gloss over her lips, and touched the lapels of her jacket to smooth them. Then she rang the bell.

  She knew he had a man—what an odd term, she thought—and it was this individual who answered the door, youngish, owlish, and dressed in tennis gear, which seemed an odd enough getup for a servant, personal assistant, butler, or whatever an earl-in-hiding would have. For that was how Isabelle thought of DI Thomas Lynley, as an earl-in-hiding, because it was frankly inconceivable to her why someone in his social position would choose to spend his life as a cop unless it was an incognito sort of thing in which he hid himself away from the rest of his kind. And his kind were the sort of people whose pictures one saw on the cover of tabloids when they got themselves into trouble, or inside the pages of Hello!, OK!, Tatler and the like, hoisting champagne flutes at the photographer. They went into nightclubs and stayed till dawn, they skied in the Alps—French, Italian, or Swiss, what did it matter?—and they traveled to places like Portofino or Santorini or other multisyllabic Mediterranean, Ionian, or Aegean locations ending in vowels. But they didn’t work at ordinary jobs, and if they did because they needed the money, they certainly didn’t choose to be coppers.

  “Afternoon,” the tennis-clad man said. He was Charlie Denton. Isabelle had done her homework.

  She showed her ID and introduced herself. “Mr. Denton, I’m trying to locate the inspector. Is he at home by any chance?”

  If he was surprised that she knew his identity, Charlie Denton was too careful to let it show. He said, “As it happens …,” and he admitted her into the house. He indicated a doorway to her right, which led into a reception room done up in a quite pleasant shade of green. He said, “I expect he’s in the library.” He gestured to a simple arrangement of furniture round a fireplace and said he could fetch her a drink if she’d like one. She thought about accepting the offer and tossing back a vodka martini straight up, but she declined as she reckoned he was referring to something more in line with the fact that she was still on duty.

  While he went to find his …Isabelle wondered what the term was: his master? his employer? his what? …she took in the room. The building was a town house and it likely had been in Lynley’s family for quite some time, as no one had got inside to destroy the features that had gone into its making in the nineteenth century. Thus it still possessed its plaster ceiling decorations along with its mouldings above, below, and around. Isabelle reckoned there were endless architectural terms for it all, but she didn’t know any of them although she was perfectly capable of admiring them.

  She didn’t sit but rather walked to the window overlooking the street. A table sat beneath its sill and this held several framed photographs, among them a wedding picture of Lynley and his wife. Isabelle picked this up and studied it. It was casual and spontaneous, the bride and groom laughing and glowing amid a crowd of well-wishers.

  She’d been very attractive, Isabelle saw. Not beautiful, porcelain, classic, doll-like, or whatever else one wished to call a woman on her wedding day. She was no English rose either. She’d been dark haired and dark eyed, with an oval face and an appealing smile. She’d been fashionably slender as well. But were
n’t they always? Isabelle thought.

  “Superintendent Ardery?”

  She turned, the picture still in her hands. She’d expected grey-faced grief—perhaps a smoking jacket, a pipe in hand, and slippers on his feet or something equally and ludicrously Edwardian—but Thomas Lynley was quite tanned, his hair was lightened to blond by exposure to the sun, and he wore blue jeans and a polo shirt with three buttons and a collar.

  She’d forgotten his eyes were brown. They were watching her without speculation. He’d sounded surprised when he’d said her name, but whatever else he might be feeling, he didn’t reveal it.

  She said, “Acting superintendent only. I’ve not been given the position permanently. I’m auditioning for it, for want of a better word. Much like you did.”

  “Ah.” He entered the room. He was one of those men who always managed to move with an air of assurance, looking as if they’d fit in anywhere. She reckoned it had to do with his breeding. “There would be something of a difference,” he said as he joined her at the table. “I wasn’t auditioning, just helping out. I didn’t much want the position.”

  “I’ve heard that, but I’ve found it difficult to believe.”

  “Why? Climbing the greasy pole never interested me.”

  “Climbing the greasy pole interests everyone, Inspector.”

  “Not if they don’t want the responsibility, and certainly not if they’ve a marked preference for woodwork.”