Séance Infernale

by Jonathan Skariton

  Another sound—as if an object in another room had been dropped. No question about it. Things couldn’t be displaced randomly in unoccupied spaces; there had to be a cause; someone—or something—had moved it.

  Whitman walked to the kitchen. He moved his hand toward the light switch but stopped halfway. There was a new sound now, a continuous sound, close to him. Whispers. He stood there in the dark, his reconfigured flesh and his hand frozen on the light switch. The whispering permeated the room.

  He flicked the switch, the voice in him that wanted to rationalize this repeating over and over, Forget it—you can’t run, you fool. All those things you fear will reach from into the shadows and pull you down there with them. But it did work, the scatter of light in the kitchen banishing the morbid thoughts, revealing everything as it had always been. No more shadows.

  The sound of dripping from the faucet.

  He went up to the sink and tightened the water valve. There. But he still wasn’t certain.

  “Hello?” he called, and that immediately sounded stupid to him. He took a step out toward the kitchen door, nothing but the hollow darkness hovering beyond, and then paused. The apartment was a concave chamber.

  Had there been whispering? It would never hurt to check. He picked up a knife from the rack. He held it in attacking position and listened intently. Could there be someone leaning against the opposite wall, similarly listening for him? He quietly moved to the hall.

  He searched every room, closet, and storage space in the apartment without finding any burglars. He searched everywhere, except for one room. The spare bedroom would have been Ellie’s when they returned as a family from Scotland; it was now an office and projection room. If there was an intruder, he would have to be in there, maybe contemplating whether he could pawn those projectors or that Ernst Lubitsch picture on the wall.

  He took a deep breath, preparing to react. By now he was anxious to find out who was hiding in there. Gripping the knife, he tried to ease the office door open with his free hand. For a second the door gave way, but it stopped two inches open.

  Someone was behind it.

  He instinctively pulled away and threw his back against the wall adjoining the door. He waited another second. Then, his back touching the wall, he slowly put his hand against the door and tried again. It was still obstructed, but the sound, he realized now, was material, as if it was an object.

  Stop it. It’s not a dead person.

  How do you know? You thought you saw your daughter outside a Walmart just an hour ago.

  He shoved his body against the door. The door flew open, throwing what was behind it against the room’s far wall. When he heard the ring, he realized what it was.

  He stood past the door, a quiver on his lips. He stared at his daughter’s bicycle, lying on the floor against the wall. The dolly seat had broken from the crash and lay there like unwanted plastic trash. The training wheels were still intact, as was the bell on the handlebars. Ellie had been missing for more than ten years, yet Alex hadn’t been able to dispose of most of her belongings; these were still in her room in Edinburgh, exactly as she had left it. The only thing he had taken back to Los Angeles with him was the bike, the token of that day’s remembrance. This macabre reminder he always kept in the far corner of the room, next to the desk, where his gaze would sometimes linger. The bike had never been moved. But now it lay at an angle, the seat against the wall, the dolly seat broken and the rest of it slanted.

  Still holding the knife, he glanced at the empty room as if it could provide the answers. He couldn’t fathom how the bicycle had been positioned behind the door; it made no sense. He examined the window; it was closed shut, as he had left it. He set the knife down and stooped over his missing daughter’s broken bike.

  As he brushed his fingertips against the bicycle’s parts, the possibilities behind this encounter struck him. Had he, in a horrible seizure of grief, come into the room and moved the bike? He didn’t want to think what that meant. Madness. Maybe walking in his sleep and moving objects around the house?

  He picked up the broken pieces, then what was left of the bike, and moved them to the kitchen, where he placed them inside a plastic bag and began to cry.

  Part II

  December 3

  5

  When they were home, Elliot used to see them almost every morning, because their apartment was opposite his own. Her mother or the babysitter usually took her out for walks. Elliot did not like the babysitter; he found her reproachful to the daughter.

  He used to stand by the window and look up to the road over the steps and sometimes he’d see her, holding her mother’s hand with her mitten.

  He stood right behind them once in line at the bakery on South Bridge. The girl didn’t once look at him, but he watched the back of her head and the braids from her ponytail coming down just below her shoulders in intricate strands.

  Another time when they were out, he realized the mother had left the back window unlocked. He slid the window open and crept into the apartment. Their smells reached him. He lay on the girl’s bed, and then tried the mother’s. He went through her clothes inside the armoire, holding them against his nose and taking it all in. They smelled heavenly. He didn’t want to leave.

  The first time he saw them, walking out that door, time just seemed to stop. He knew it was a fantasy; he was not crazy. But this was the Grand Plan. His heart, his mind, they were irrevocably caught. He used to think about what would happen if he bumped into them in an adorable “how we met” story, maybe in the process of saving the girl in some heroic act. Then they would discover the things he did; the mother would marvel at them and applaud him, and then she would marry him and the rest would be history. Nothing filthy; that only came later.

  There were other times; once he saw the mother go into a young man’s house in the afternoon and come out late at night, her hair a mess, and he knew what she had been up to. Elliot followed the man for days after that, always waiting, always on the verge of doing it. One time he sat on the seat behind him on the bus to St. Andrew Square. He watched him for twenty minutes, until he got off. He was this close to doing it. But she never met up with the man again, and he let it go. Until the next young man came along, and the next, and the same thing happened.

  Those were the days Elliot tormented himself with the bad dreams. In the dreams, she usually cried before he fucked her and burned her alive. The daughter would watch, silent, expressionless, unlike her dear, bright self.

  “See what I have to do?” he would tell the girl, and she would then begin to cry. “See what I have to do so you won’t turn out like her?” Then he would let the gasoline wash over the mother. She would apologize profusely. Sometimes he accepted the apology, and the daughter would join him, and he would penetrate them both, soaking in the gasoline, a match nearby ready for action. Most of the times, though, he would watch her being claimed by the flames. She would scream and scream and her daughter would scream and scream and he would wake up soaked in sweat and other nasty things. Those were peculiar times.

  6

  The body had been pronounced dead, shrouded in questionable happenstance.

  It was on one of the narrow passages (called “closes”) found on either side of the Royal Mile, running between old buildings. The entrance to the paved close darted from the High Street, flanked by a sandwich shop and an Indian restaurant, and ran through to the stone courtyard of both shops.

  Covenant Close. More than three hundred years ago, a copy of the National Covenant was signed in a residence in that claustrophobic lane, preceded by thousands of lives lost. In the early hours of that frosty Edinburgh morning, another life had been lost, turning up dead between the close’s stone walls.

  Georgina McBride—late twenties, shoulder-length hair, and a detective sergeant’s badge tucked in her breast pocket—turned into the close, and that was when she caught the first acrid whiff of combustion. The scene-of-crime van had been parked—illegally—on the road o
utside the close. The first SOC doctor had already declared death. The SOC officers had taped off the close at top and bottom. A white sheet had been pinned up so that passersby could see nothing but the shadows on the other side. A camera team had just arrived and the mortuary van was standing by. McBride stood for a while on the foot of the close, hesitating, until a deputy waved her in, past the incident tape cordoning off the area where the body lay. In the gathering twilight, the close looked beautiful but desolate.

  A lonely place to die.

  The deputy escorted her through the close, talking fast as he handed her a clean pair of disposable nitrile gloves.

  “M.E. says she’s under eighteen,” he said.

  “I heard she’s badly burnt.”

  He gave a grim smile. “Oh, it’s badly burnt all right. But I think you better see for yourself,” he said, leading the way farther into the close.

  The forensic and photography crews were gathering around a small area, which she guessed contained the body. She recognized a couple of junior CIDs from St. Leonards and some Fettes uniforms, all suited up in the SOCO-trademarked white disposable overalls. They were taking final photographs. She found it bizarre what it all came down to, this bedlam neatly arranged into a fine-grained assortment of puzzle pieces; clean paintbrushes sweeping dirt from the ground into plastic evidence bags, cameras and tripods being repositioned, context photographs being skillfully acquired, everything being bagged, labeled, ordered, and entered into the system. Few things generate more paperwork than murder.

  A procurator fiscal was talking to the medical examiner, Dr. Mareth. The M.E. saw McBride coming toward the body and gave her a nod. Dr. Ermis Mareth had a weak chin and a face that looked like it rarely saw the sun. His hair, the color of early-morning summer fog, looked as if it had been used for an experiment with the powers of electricity. Sharp eyes squinted like shards of blue glass behind steel-framed glasses. He always had that hunched, anemic look that hinted at years of hard work. He was the program director for forensic medicine at the University of Edinburgh, and he would frequently serve as forensic medical examiner to the Lothian and Borders Police. It was in this capacity that he had coordinated the pathological aspects of a number of high-profile investigations, like the Lockerbie disaster and the shooting incident at Dunblane Primary School.

  On the side of the close, McBride spotted her partner, Detective Inspector Guy Johnson, flicking through the paperwork. She did not acknowledge his presence. She was captivated by the remains that lay between them. As she approached the body, the stink of fire was unmistakable. She looked at the remains and her breath caught in her throat.

  The fire had devoured the skin and tissue, turning the body—what was left of it—into a blackened thing of flesh and bone, a charred little doll that resembled a human being only in the most distant of degrees. Internal organs jutted out from the black, shapeless mass that had once been the torso. The larger bones remained, but the smaller ones had calcined, the carbon eradicated from them until they were a crisp gray. Slanted to the top side, a great overseer, the skull lay like a tossed pumpkin. She looked at the hands: small, belonging to—

  Oh, God, no, it’s a child. It’s a child.

  Its fingernails were unvarnished and bitten to the quick. The ends of the shafts of the radius and ulna protruded from the exposed tissue of the wrist, the dark amber surrendering to blackness closer to the flesh.

  The charred shafts of the tibia and fibula emerged from each of the masses of blackened bone fragments that were the feet. She saw short, burnt stubs protruding from the end of the limbs; she realized these were the child’s ribs. There was further damage, lacerations and scabbing; rodents had gnawed at the remaining flesh and bones. She felt a rush of pity and something more: sorrow, or even love, born out of a feeling of intense loss.

  The poor, poor child.

  She pushed the regrets away; they wouldn’t help.

  “Thought you would have beat me to it,” a husky voice said. D.I. Guy Johnson sneaked next to her from behind. He had called her into the office saying they had a fresh one at Covenant Close.

  “Had some things to take care of back at headquarters,” she said, her eyes never leaving the remains. She looked up and saw his grim expression, staring at the burnt child.

  Johnson was a slim man with a freckled complexion and neat, kempt auburn hair in a cut that hadn’t changed in the five years McBride had known him. For all she knew, he had emerged from his mother’s womb with that haircut. His mouth was shaped by a short, pointed, gray mustache. He had a long nose, which jutted out between two keen eyes set close together and behind eyelids that often twitched from lack of sleep. His expression was always intent and serious, his demeanor not often so.

  Medical Examiner Mareth walked over to them. “Good news is,” he said. “We got enough urine to test. Might get some DNA around her.”

  “He gave the victim a golden shower?”

  Mareth nodded. “In all likelihood after the burning.”

  “Making the humiliation complete.”

  “How do you know it’s a she?”

  “Because of the skeleton.” Mareth pointed to what was left of the pelvis, obscured by ash but still visible. “The pubic bone of the pelvis is too wide for a male. Then the bone landmarks for muscle attachments—brow ridge, eye sockets, jaw—they are too small; she’s female. Judging from the length of the femur and the lack of epiphyseal plate fusion, I’d say she couldn’t have been more than six.”

  “Any evidence of restraint?”

  “Her legs and arms had been tied, but that was before the burning.”

  “How can you tell? I thought the rope would have been burnt with everything else.”

  “The heat from the fire makes the muscles contract as water evaporates. The stronger muscles bring your arms and legs into a flexed position, resulting in this defensive, bracing posture that we see here, with the hands tightened into fists, similar to those of a boxer in a ring—what we call the pugilistic posture, or boxer’s stance. If the limbs had been tied when the fire was set, the arms and legs would have been straight.”

  “Hard to see how this could happen without fuel oil or something. You’d have to add an accelerant to light her up like that, right?”

  Mareth nodded. “We’ll run a gas chromo, see what he used.”

  “Any ID, rings?”

  “Everything melted under. No jewelry, as you can see. There is a scar in the abdomen, though. Looks surgical. Can be a point for identification.” He made a movement with his head as if making a mental note of it.

  “I’ll run the details through the missing-persons database,” Johnson said. “See if we get a match. Race, size, age—anything that can help the profile.”

  “Are you sure nothing was taken from the body? Maybe any trace of belongings found about?” McBride said, and Johnson gave her a puzzled sideways look. “Why do you say that?” he asked, but McBride didn’t reply.

  The stone ground below the body was coated in an unctuous, brownish tan. The same oily substance also lay around the remains.

  “What’s this brown stuff?” she said.

  “Body fat.”

  “Would make you stay away from sausages in a pan,” Johnson said.

  “Speak for yourself,” Mareth said. “Most important meal of the day.”

  There was a sound behind them. One of the uniforms was vomiting onto the side of the close. A colleague had propped an arm on his back, trying to comfort him.

  McBride turned back to the remains. “Time since death?”

  “Normally,” Mareth said, “I would need to trace the extent of decomposition in amino and volatile fatty acids from the muscle. These are normally destroyed by fire, but the condition of this body means that the amount of soft tissue may be enough to perform the necessary tests. Based on insect activity on the unburnt tissue, I’d guess we’re looking at no more than ten hours. The precise time of death will take longer to establish, for a number of reasons. Fir
st, the cold weather will have slowed the rate of decay. Second, because of the nature of the death.”

  He saw their faces—a perplexed expression he had seen too many times on his students’ faces—and explained. “Normally, rigor mortis sets in the muscles because the energy source for muscle contractions has been depleted. This happens around three hours after death, leaving the muscles rigid until the body starts to decompose. But struggling before her death would have hastened the process; energy residues become depleted during the struggle and rigor mortis occurs more quickly.”

  Johnson pointed at the skull. It lay faceup, flexed to one side among the ashes, its crown marred by a cavernous hole. “Is that a blow to the head?”

  Mareth shook his head. “Not necessarily. In fires of high intensity, temperatures will rise enough that the fluids inside the skull will vaporize. The pressure inside the skull will continue to build, since its only outlets are plugged by soft tissue. The surge of gas pressure means there will be a point that the vessel can no longer hold, and then”—he placed his palms facing each other and retracted them at once—“kaboom.”

  “Christ.” McBride considered all the ups and downs of teenage and adult life that the girl wouldn’t get to experience: travels, university, driving a car, falling in love. She tried to grasp what must have been going through the girl’s mind during the last minutes of her short life.

  Put aside the person. Look at the puzzle.

  She pointed out of the close, where two bulky trash dumpsters rested on the pavement of the High Street. “Those bins are normally located on the entrance to the close. It’s so narrow here that they block the way to pedestrians, right?”

  Johnson nodded. “So you’re saying…”

  “He either came through the back of the close or threw the body from the front entrance and over the bin.”

  “He sure has to be strong to carry her such a long way without her struggling.”