Séance Infernale

by Jonathan Skariton

“How do you make that out?”

  “No clue.”

  Whitman conceded, as if the man had a point. The trapdoor was situated a story or so beneath road level.

  It took the strength of both men to pull it up. The trapdoor latched open with a solid thump, as if it was a living organism taking its first breath in a century. Darkness lingered within.

  “We’re gonna need a light.”

  Whitman instantly pulled a flashlight out of his seemingly endless Sport Billy coat pockets. At the sight of this, Dickson made a whistling sound.

  “You’re gey graithed, aren’t ya?” he muttered.

  Whitman expected the door to open to a basement or vault space, but he was wrong. For such a big hatch, it opened to a limited space, no more than three feet down. There was a grating, and air was coming out of it. It had been open to all kinds of nasty things, but it was over a shaft, so it had never flooded within. Whitman couldn’t discern anything on the grating; he shoved his hand into the opening. It was dirty and damp, numbing him. As his fingers worked through the gap, he felt something. He grabbed hold of the can and pulled it out, then struggled to turn it open.

  “Whit is that?” The contractor sounded disappointed.

  Whitman didn’t answer. He ran his fingers through the soft and mushy material of the film.

  “Pictures?” Dickson said. He seemed uninterested, even disgusted, as if this had been part of a bad joke.

  Whitman backed away from the trapdoor and, squatting, placed the film in front of him. Precisely calculated, the successive wrappings of the paper rolls had protected it. Each time they were wrapped around, the picture underneath was protected. He examined the end of one of the rolls. He silently read the words.

  “Eastman Paper Film.” It might as well have read “jackpot.”

  Dickson was bending over the hatch, his hands in there up to his arms.

  “You a historian or something?”

  “Or something.”

  “A right gunk. Some pictures.” He chuckled again. “I thought it been a posie in there; why in God would someone scouk pictures?”

  Whitman seemed to remember something, and reached into his overcoat to pull out his wallet. The sight seemed to please and embarrass the contractor at the same time.

  “If you tell your employer about this, he’s going to take away these things and throw them in the trash. I mean”—he turned the mushy film over—“it’s just pictures.” He snapped his wallet open and held it close to the man, letting him catch sight of the bills inside.

  Dickson nodded.

  “I can take them off your hands for…say, two hundred?”

  The man stood with his mouth agape. With effort, he closed it and swallowed hard.

  Even the most ethical man only needs a devil to become a sideshow; there is no man alive who will not give in, as long as it is the right temptation offered at the right time. Whitman was a whiz when it came to the right temptations at the right time.

  “No one will know,” Whitman continued. “Not with a little floor leveler.” He winked at him.

  The contractor blinked at the floor. “Three huyner,” he said.

  Whitman stood for a second, a hint of a grin touching his lips. “Three hundred it is.”

  He handed a wad of bills over to the man. The man placed the money in his workman’s front pocket.

  “Nice doing business with you,” Whitman said. “If anything else springs up, you know how to reach me.” As he turned away, he heard the contractor call out to him.

  “These bangers worth anything?” Dickson said.

  “Honestly? It’s worthless,” Whitman answered without turning back.

  —

  He met up with Charlie at the junction with Castle Street. The fog enveloped them, rising from the wet grass of Princes Street Gardens, hovering amid the faint glow of the streetlights, forming a Gothic gossamer.

  “What happens now?” Charlie asked.

  Rose Street was busy—workers walking home eased past; groups of students on a pub crawl. Girls out at a hen party blew kisses at Charlie as they stumbled past, then turned their attention to a crowd of young men smoking outside the Black Rose Tavern.

  “I called Valdano and told him what I found; my flight leaves tomorrow night. I carry these babies over to him, his minions do their mumbo jumbo, and we see what’s in them. If this really belonged to Augustin, then we’re on the right track. If it’s the film Valdano’s looking for, so much the better: I get the rest of my pay, everyone goes home happy.”

  Charlie bowed his head, staring at the ground as they walked. “Yeah, great, isn’t it?”

  “You tired or what?” Whitman said. “I thought we were going to check out The 39 Steps.”

  “Yeah, I mean, I want to. I really do…but aren’t you just a bit curious?”

  “What do you mean?”

  He stopped walking and Whitman paused, looking into his friend’s eyes.

  “Well, here we are with maybe the first film ever made—and I don’t mean the first footage ever recorded, I mean the very first motion picture. Don’t you want to see what’s in it?”

  Whitman drew from his cigarette. He had been so fervent on tracking down the lost item that he hadn’t considered what would happen if he actually found it.

  “And I’m not saying that this actually is the ‘Séance Infernale,’ ” Charlie continued, “or whatever its title is supposed to be.” His hands were telling the story now, a signature gesture inherited from his Sicilian lineage. “But it’s a fact that this place was once the French dude’s workshop. That means it’s probably his film, and it doesn’t matter if it’s the one Valdano is looking for. It doesn’t change the fact that it’s maybe the first of its kind.”

  “You know that thing you do with your hands? Gets me every time,” Whitman said. “I swear, it’s like you used to be deaf at some point.”

  “I knew you would say that. Like I know you will agree to screen the film before Valdano gets his hands on it.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “You said ‘Augustin.’ You’re calling him by his first name. Like you know this dude. Like you share something, some connection.”

  Whitman coughed on the smoke of his cigarette. He dropped it on the ground and stubbed it with his foot. He cleared his throat. “Even if we wanted to screen the damn thing, we can’t. We need equipment. It’s paper film, Jabba; put it in any kind of modern projector and we’re screwed.”

  Charlie grinned; he had an ace up his sleeve.

  “You’ve thought this through already, haven’t you?” Whitman said.

  “Guy I met at USC, he’s been working at some film archive right here in Edinburgh for the past three years. He has the right equipment. I haven’t told him what we need it for, but I bet he can help.”

  “Can he be trusted?”

  “Does it make a difference? You don’t trust anybody.”

  “I just lower my expectations to the point where they’re already met.”

  “I can make an appointment with him for tomorrow morning.”

  Whitman looked at Charlie, and weighed their options. “Twenty-four hours,” he finally said. “That’s how long I can stall Valdano.”

  12

  The fog was receding, but there were puddles all about them as they got out of the Volvo. The parking spaces in front of the city mortuary were taken.

  “Something about the morgue, after hours,” Johnson said.

  It wasn’t the morgue, nor the late hour, McBride knew. The Cowgate was part of the lower level of Edinburgh’s Old Town, built around the elevated streets of South Bridge and George IV Bridge. As a result, many of its sections were gloomy and dark. The street had once been the loan along which byres of cows were driven out to pasture. Now it was dotted with nightclubs; the only grazing taking place was by the drunks roaming its spaces. But the city was hidden; it still had a lot to give to the attentive viewer. Every now and then an old close in the most visited part of town
would reopen. You could have walked past it every day on the way to work and you wouldn’t have noticed it, padlocked behind doors or hidden underground. It was right there, for everyone to see, yet it was unknown. But that was Edinburgh, revealing itself only in the constant vigilance of dark, steady eyes.

  One of the most famous Edinburgh stories had to do with the construction of the New Town. During the construction, a shopkeeper called George Boyd began to deposit the stone and plank from the building work onto an artificial hill, which would directly link the New Town to the Old. Others soon followed, resulting in the formation of the Mound. Unfortunately for poor old George Boyd, the construction of the Mound entailed the demolition of his own shop.

  The façade of the mortuary looked down at them; McBride frowned at the tomatoes being grown on the windowsill. Dr. Ermis Mareth had temporarily set up his forensic medical lab in this building. He met them through a set of double doors, and then guided them into the lab.

  The autopsy room was an assault of acrylic, formaldehyde, and moonlight. It was a twenty-by-twenty-foot chamber with a ceramic tile floor. Overhead, the cavernous skylight cast glimpses of the moon on the surgical cart, autopsy saws and scalpels, enameled dishes, organ scales, evidence cabinets. Every inch of the walls was painted with gray acrylic. There were no windows in the room proper; only a gallery walkway and observation glass for the medical students.

  The walk-in refrigerator was built into a wall at the far end of the room. Its door lay ajar, inviting. It was flanked by a series of capacious sinks and stainless-steel cabinets. An integrated ventilation system suctioned deleterious odors and pathogens out through a noisy exhaust fan.

  The highlight of the room was a transportable postmortem table supported by iron legs and swivel wheels. Shallow channels cut into the tabletop, allowing the discharge of fluids into a wall-mounted dissecting sink. This wouldn’t be necessary today; there was nothing left to drain out of the body. On top of the stainless-steel surface, what remained of the girl lay inside a black pouch that looked like an infernale cocoon.

  Mareth had just walked in, having spent a few minutes in the men’s locker room to suit up in the appropriate medical garb. He handed Johnson and McBride two pairs of blue nitrile gloves, asking whether they would need face masks. They both said they wouldn’t.

  “Two objects can’t interact without leaving traces on each other,” he said.

  “Excuse me?”

  The M.E. parked the table near the sink and locked the swivel casters. He squinted through the frames of the rimmed glasses he wore behind his own mask. His voice was now muffled.

  “That’s the motto I base my whole working life on, Detectives,” he said. “That’s why, no matter how smart a criminal thinks he is, I’m smarter.”

  He gestured toward the autopsy table. His hands were always stained and soiled with chemical compounds, yet he possessed an extraordinary delicacy of touch, as both detectives frequently had occasion to observe.

  From the moment she stepped into the morgue, Georgina McBride had been biting her lip. In her law enforcement career, she had seen all kinds of damage done to people, but a child victimized was a different thing altogether.

  If you’d caught this bastard, she wouldn’t be here.

  The medical examiner unzipped the pouch and spread it open, its plastic rustling. A putrid stench of decomposing flesh reached their nostrils. The charred remains of the hand-stitched rag doll now lay across the stainless-steel surface. Each of the bones was marked, the larger pieces with stickers and the smaller ones with string tags, all of them with notations.

  “Let’s see what we have so far,” Ermis said.

  There was almost nothing left of her face. Thick sutures lined her forehead; half of her face had been peeled back to examine the skull. McBride wanted to turn away, to jump back and cover her nose and mouth. But there is no cover from that stench, unlike any other, clinging to the roof of the mouth.

  Don’t do it. Don’t fuck yourself.

  Mareth switched on a magnifying lamp and positioned it above the body. Both uniforms stepped closer to the table.

  “Hairline fractures on right wrist and rib, bruise marks on breast and arms,” he said.

  “Consistent with restraint?”

  “Yes, but like I said, that was before the burning took place.”

  He pointed to the lower limbs.

  “Deeper contusions on the legs.”

  “Knee marks.”

  McBride picked up a folder from the countertop and glanced through the girl’s autopsy control and initial investigation. She was three foot six and weighed thirty-nine pounds. On a body diagram, the M.E. had drawn the observed contusions.

  “But she died from the fumes, right?” Johnson said. “I mean, the perp sets her on fire, she breathes the carbon monoxide, then—bam!—she’s down before the flames reach her vital parts.”

  Mareth shook his head. “Carbon monoxide levels in her blood suggest that the fire wasn’t large; it was set with skill and applied so that it progressively burnt first the calves, then the thighs and hands, followed by the torso, forearms, breasts, upper chest, face…”

  “And then death.”

  “Heatstroke and loss of blood plasma resulting in death, yes.”

  McBride watched her partner remove a black ballpoint pen from the holder of a concealed tape recorder. He slipped out a small spiral notebook, ready to scribble. She had seen him fiddle around with pens, papers, key rings, his eyes never on the deceased. She understood why.

  He had once told her about the World’s End murders. In October of 1977, two seventeen-year-olds who had finished their pub crawl at the World’s End Pub, on the High Street, had gone missing. Their bodies were found the following morning, beaten, raped, and strangled. Johnson, and others she knew, had worked the case; they all carried with them the exasperation of a mystery unsolved, and most of them would carry it to the grave. Because a murder investigation is first and foremost a hired investigation; your client may be silent and dead, but he is still screaming out for justice. Sometimes, if McBride listened carefully, she could still hear the victims screaming—not ghosts, nothing supernatural, merely moments in time, trapped in horrible injustice. Screaming.

  These cases had sent her back into the vortex of their screams. Sometimes it took all her strength to pull her back to the here and now.

  This is what happens when they get away. When I don’t catch them.

  “Any evidence of penetration?” she asked.

  “No scars on her vaginal area or anus. Also, I’m just waiting on the rape kit to be vouchered; looks like she’s negative for semen.”

  “So she wasn’t raped.”

  “No. Whoever you’re looking for is sicker than I thought.”

  “Burning her isn’t sick enough?”

  “The rape kit’s negative, but I found traces of semen in the urine at the scene.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning,” Mareth said, “the perpetrator had either just had intercourse before the act or…”

  “Or he had a little fun of his own during the act,” Johnson said.

  “So he burns her and urinates on her—he doesn’t rape her, but then masturbates over the body?” McBride said.

  “Sure sends a message.”

  “What about the sealing tape?” McBride asked. “The debris in her lungs also contained some kind of cloth, right?”

  “Yes, it was cotton cloth. But the amount of it found in her lungs was insignificant, and none of it was found at the scene per se,” Mareth said. “It was probably removed before the burning took place.”

  “He wanted to hear her scream.”

  “But in such a crowded place? He would risk being seen. Are we wrong here or is this guy careless?”

  “Sounds like he’s in his comfort zone. He places her in plain sight; he’s taunting us. It’s like saying, ‘This is what I’m doing, and there’s nothing you can do to stop me.’ ”

  “Maybe he l
ives nearby. It would be easier for him to dispose of a dead body.” McBride breathed in deeply, producing a sharp pain in her ribs; her body was craving nicotine, but it was more than that. She knew this emotion from the moment she had looked down at the remains in that narrow close; it was dread. Another story of horror had emerged, but not in a living person’s home or workplace; this time it had emerged from the dark depths of the city.

  “Do we know at least how long ago she died?”

  “Based on insect activity, I’d say between fifteen and eighteen hours ago. Looking at the mummification on the parts of the skin that hadn’t burned, he must have kept her in a cool place.”

  “You mentioned something about identifying the victim.”

  “Well, in such a situation, the identification of the victim is better investigated using dental anatomical findings. Because of muscular stiffness, I had to remove mandible and maxilla in order to examine the teeth.”

  McBride looked at the electric saw, the spare face mask and the eyeglasses lying on a table adjacent to the body. She shook her head. “So you cut open her face and mouth.”

  “There was extensive stiffness of the soft tissues that hadn’t been burnt, so I had to cut lateral anatomical structures of the face. It’s a lateral labial commissurotomy extended to the mandibular rami; it was imperative if we wanted to identify her.”

  “And?”

  “I spoke to our forensic odontologist, who then compared the antemortem and postmortem data. We have a positive identification.”

  He went to a nearby desk and retrieved a photograph. He held it out for them to see. It was a girl around five years old, straight black hair, refreshing blue eyes, smiling for the camera next to a lit Christmas tree.

  “Meet Emma Wallace. Parents reported her missing six weeks ago.”

  “Are we sure this is her?”

  “Ninety-nine-point-five percent sure.”

  He noted a scraped, stitched area between her thorax and pelvis.

  “And the scar agrees with the findings. It’s surgical. Appendix removal.”

  “How old was she?”

  “Five. The estimate we gave based on the sutures of the skull and the condition of the heart and blood vessels was accurate.”