“Did you know that druids are kind of the intellectual wing of paganism?” he said to Priestman, as she drove them back to Newcastle. She enjoyed driving. It helped her to marshal her thoughts.
Priestman admitted that she had not known this about druids. Hynes was eating a sandwich, and so couldn’t immediately elaborate, not without spraying the contents of his mouth across the windshield. In Priestman’s experience, Hynes was always eating, or thinking about eating. He probably dreamed of food when he slept.
“Not necessarily the ones who’ve been calling us, mind,” said Hynes, after he’d swallowed what he’d been chewing. He contemplated his sandwich for a moment, perhaps checking it for signs of sorcery. “They’re just mad.”
Hynes had spoken to Kevin Moon again after the police interview with Simon Harris, just to corroborate some details of what Harris had told them.
“Did he say anything more about Harris?” asked Priestman.
“Only that he liked him, and was sorry when it didn’t work out between him and his daughter, but he said she’d always been one to know her own mind.”
“And she didn’t mention arguments, or problems with Harris or any other men?”
“No.”
“What about the school?”
“Mainly female teachers. Gackowska and I will start talking to them first thing in the morning. The headmistress has organized a rota, so the classes can be supervised while the teachers are being interviewed.”
DC Lisa Gackowska was Hynes’s latest protégée. She and Hynes operated well together.
“And the hospitals?”
“Already on it. Gackowska’s been working the phones, pulling together lists from emergency units and walk-in clinics in Northumbria, Durham, Tyne and Wear, and Cumbria, as well as Scottish Borders, and Dumfries and Galloway: broken ankles, legs, serious sprains over the last thirty-six hours or so. I may be jumping the gun, but my guess is there’ll be a lot.”
The moorlands gave way to civilization, and Priestman could see Hynes relaxing the closer they drew to concrete and cafés.
“He must have been watching her,” she said.
“He’d have to be a planner,” said Hynes, “taking her out to a place like that to kill her. Still went wrong for him, though.”
He finished his sandwich, and carefully wiped the crumbs from his hands and clothing into the wrapper before folding it up and storing it away. Hynes was like that: fastidious. It was easy to underestimate him.
“She weighed about a hundred pounds soaking wet,” Hynes continued. “She wouldn’t have been able to put up much of a struggle, not against even a moderately strong man. Didn’t do self-defense or weights, wasn’t a runner, just a teacher. She might have begun to tell on him once he started to carry her body back to his vehicle—I imagine killing someone takes it right out of you—but it wouldn’t have bothered him too much if he was fit enough. I was wondering about the vehicle, too.”
“What about it?”
“It’s hard to drive with an injury. Not impossible, just difficult.”
“Maybe an automatic?”
“Worth considering.”
“Or an accomplice.”
“Likewise.”
Again, Priestman made some mental notes.
“You should get some rest once we’re back,” she told him.
“Says you.”
“I will.”
“You mean it?”
“Yes.”
And she did, so she had mixed feelings when Sisterson called her shortly after 6 p.m.: pleasant surprise at the fact that he had apparently completed the autopsy by close of business, but diluted by his first words.
“I think,” he said, “you might want to come over here.”
* * *
HOLMBY WAS MONITORING THE news bulletins, flipping between the television and the Internet coverage on his phone, and stretching his leg in an effort to ease a cramp.
They’d had the body for long enough, he thought. By now, they must have found what he’d left for them inside Romana Moon.
He closed his eyes and pictured the windows at Fairford.
Closed his eyes and listened to the voices in the glass.
CHAPTER XXXVII
Marcus Godwin didn’t dislike Odda’s Chapel, not by any means. He wouldn’t have been sitting with his back to its wall otherwise. It simply lacked the grandeur of St. Mary’s—both the Deerhurst and Fairford incarnations, although he had always found the former more welcoming, increasingly so following his unpleasant experiences in the latter.
Now he stood by the chapel gate, uncertain of what he’d heard, if he’d truly heard anything at all. He’d been frightening himself, sitting out here on his chair, thinking about Fairford, and dead Oliver Lewin. He certainly hadn’t seen anyone go inside. He was by the gate all this time, and no cars were in the little yard off the lane. It was getting colder, too. He’d catch his death, if he wasn’t careful.
There! He heard it again: a kind of scratching, like a dog digging in the earth for a bone. Perhaps a fox had sneaked in there. You had to be prudent with those buggers. If you cornered one, it could give you a nasty bite.
He sniffed the air and caught a taint upon it. Whatever was inside had dragged something along with it, something dead and rotten.
“Hello?” he said, just in case he had somehow missed a visitor, although he hadn’t, he knew he hadn’t. He was getting older, but he hadn’t lost all his marbles.
Marcus opened the gate and stepped into the chapel.
* * *
THE REGIONAL TEAM OF consultant forensic pathologists operated out of Newcastle, and provided services for the Northumbria Police as well as forces in Durham, Cleveland, and North Yorkshire. Craig Sisterson was the longest-serving by some distance, but was due to retire before the end of the year. Priestman had met a few pathologists in her time, and they didn’t really conform to a type, but had central casting been searching for a figure that screamed “Pathologist!” then they could have done a lot worse than Sisterson. As Hynes once put it, “If he lies down for too long, he’ll be mistaken for a corpse himself.” Sisterson was attenuated and slightly yellowed, with long, delicate fingers and an expression of permanent disappointment with the world. It was said that he had been studying for the priesthood before throwing it all in to follow medicine—and a woman. She was a nun, so the whole business had probably involved the Vatican as well, all of which lent an element of transgression to Sisterson’s general peculiarity.
“Do you want to look at her again?” he asked Priestman, once she had been admitted to his office. She would usually have sent Hynes or one of the other detective sergeants in her stead, but it wasn’t often that Sisterson made this kind of request.
“Would it help?” she asked.
“Not particularly.”
“Then I’ll pass, thank you.”
Sisterson shrugged, as if to say each to her own, but Priestman didn’t know what she was missing. She noticed a thick cigar sticking out of the upper pocket of his jacket. It looked like something Winston Churchill might have waved in his fingers as he left 10 Downing Street. Now that she’d noticed it, she couldn’t unnotice it. Sisterson followed the direction of her gaze.
“An early retirement gift,” he said. “It’s a shame I don’t smoke.”
Priestman agreed that it was a shame.
“You don’t know anyone who might enjoy it, do you?”
Priestman believed that DS Hynes might, but only if he wasn’t told it had come from Sisterson. The cigar wasn’t wrapped in plastic, and one never knew where Sisterson’s hands might have been. Actually, one did, which was part of the problem.
“I’m afraid I don’t.”
“Pity.”
He clasped those hands before him, the thumbs crossed.
“You’ll have my written report in the morning, but the basics are as follows: stab wound to the right of the back, diagonally oriented, twenty-five inches below the top of the head, four inche
s from the front of the body; three to three and a half inches in length, superiorly tapered wound. Cut a path through the skin and the subcutaneous tissue without penetrating the chest or abdominal wall. Superficial: my opinion is that it was the first blow struck.
“It was followed by a second transversely oriented stab wound to the left side of the back, thirty inches below the head and four inches to the front of the body, again involving the skin and subcutaneous tissue but not the chest or abdominal walls. Both ends of the wound tapered. Probably the second blow.”
He wanted to put her down before he cut her throat, thought Priestman, or maybe he believed it was easier to kill someone by stabbing her from behind than it actually was. The third possibility was that Romana Moon had been his first victim, and he had to work his way toward killing her. Whatever the reason for these injuries, they had only added to her pain.
“And then?” she asked.
“The fatal wound: a deep, obliquely placed, long-incised injury to the front side of the neck, starting below the left ear at the upper third of the neck, and deepening gradually with severance of the left carotid artery. The right-sided end of the injury was at the mid-third of the neck with a tail abrasion. No defense injuries. Lungs show aspiration of blood. Cause of death: severed throat. But you probably already knew that.”
“Still, nice to have it confirmed by an expert.”
Sisterson raised an eyebrow.
“Do I detect a note of sarcasm?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Well, perhaps I should have it confirmed by an expert.”
“No shortage of experts in sarcasm around here. You said you had something to show me?”
Priestman wanted to go home to her kids. If she put her foot down, she might even be back in time to eat with them. She could call Steve, and ask him to delay dinner until she arrived.
Sisterson produced a transparent sample bag from a drawer and placed it on the table before her.
“I found these lodged in the victim’s throat,” he said.
Priestman picked up the bag and examined its contents without removing them. An already bad situation had just become much worse.
She was looking at a bloodied set of Muslim prayer beads.
* * *
MARCUS GODWIN STARED AT the shape in the corner of Odda’s Chapel. It crouched naked over the little drain by the wall, its body blackened like charred meat, stripes of pink and red visible where the skin had broken. It stank, and the drain was overflowing with its excretions, a mix of blood and whatever else it had voided. And then—
And then it wasn’t there at all, and Marcus could see only shadow, and the beams of a dying sun, but he could still smell the presence in the chapel. Yet as he stepped back it manifested itself again, turning its head toward him, and he was reminded of the twin beast heads that stood at either side of the inner porch door of St. Mary’s, Deerhurst, of the faces barely visible in its nave capitals, and of the tormentors in the windows at Fairford, because this was all and none of them.
Now the chapel around him was no longer old and bare but held a cross and an altar, and he inhaled incense and heard prayers being intoned, except no mass was being said because the chapel was empty of priests; and when Godwin looked behind him he saw a woman kneeling naked on the cold stones, a man standing behind her with a blade, and the man was whispering, “You see it? You see it, don’t you?” and Godwin understood that this man and this woman were both here and elsewhere, modern and ancient, and as the blade began its work Godwin knew all that had come to pass before must surely come to pass again, was happening now as then, and would go on happening even after all trace of men had vanished, and nature had reclaimed their works and buried them.
The woman’s blood overflowed the drain, soaking the earth, but by then Marcus was stumbling from Odda’s Chapel, and the present reasserted itself like an image projected on gauze over a faded backdrop. His feet splashed in mud and floodwater. He saw no one on the road, and no lights in the houses. He tried to call for help, but no words came. He heard only the wheezing of his own breath, and a soft splash from behind as something passed through the puddles, following in his footsteps, but he did not look back. He made for the church, striking the gate against the stone of the pillar as he went, only to hear that sound repeated moments later as his pursuer shadowed him. Marcus reached the church, but the door was locked because of the hour, and he pounded on the wood in the hope that someone might yet be inside, but there was no answer. In his despair, he risked a glance to his rear, and saw what was following him.
It was a girl of perhaps twelve or thirteen. She had dark red hair, and wore a cream dress. Her face was familiar, but he struggled to place it. She reached out her right hand, and he almost extended his own in return until he noticed that all of her fingernails were gone, except for one that was filthy with dirt, the same dirt that was in her hair, her nostrils, and her ears, the same dirt that besmirched her shroud and her bare feet, and tumbled from her mouth in clumps as she spoke.
“Come,” said Margrett Lewin. “I’m to let you play with me. Oliver told me so.”
Margrett Lewin, now long dead, drowned in a pond while still a child; drowned herself, if the stories were to be believed, rather than remain alive in a world that placed her at the mercy of men like her brother. But it was as though her skin were just a layer deep, because Marcus could glimpse what was inside her, the black and the red of it, and he backed away from her, fearing to let her out of his sight now that he had acknowledged her presence. He retreated down the stone stairs that led to the south wall of the ruined apse, Oliver Lewin’s dead sister—or whatever had temporarily taken her form—keeping pace with him, but he missed the last step and landed painfully on his left side. A farmhouse stood at the back of the church, and he could see someone moving in its kitchen, but he had no strength left to make it across the yard to the door, and no breath to waste on cries for help. Instead he crawled toward the south wall, and he prayed as he went, even as he heard the gentle scuff of small bare feet descending the stairs after him.
St. Mary’s, Deerhurst, was noted for its antiquity, and its ornate font, but perhaps most of all the church was famous for the carving high on the exterior of the apse wall: the piece of Saxon sculpture known as the Deerhurst Angel, a stylized representation long exposed to wind and rain, yet beautiful even in its slow decay. It was beneath this relic that Marcus Godwin chose to lie, and face what was coming for him. He grabbed a handhold in the uneven stonework, and used it to raise himself to his knees. He pressed his forehead to the wall, and waited for the girl’s touch, but it did not come.
He looked over his shoulder, but the girl was gone.
Marcus went limp, and let oblivion take him.
CHAPTER XXXVIII
Louis had booked a table at a seriously upscale Italian restaurant by Columbus Circle. They arrived early so he could order a cocktail, and express loud skepticism about the state of modern jazz within earshot of the patrons heading into that evening’s performance at Lincoln Center.
“You don’t even like jazz,” said Parker.
“It’s my people’s music,” said Louis, as he sipped his old-fashioned. “It’s in our blood.”
“So you’re all critics?”
“Can’t take that away from us. It would be racist.”
The maître d’—it seemed impolite to describe him merely as a host, given the price of the food—came over to say that their table was ready, and led them to a corner booth, although they were still waiting for one more of their party: Bob Johnston, the most curmudgeonly antiquarian book dealer in Portland, Maine—and possibly in the country—would be joining them at Parker’s instigation. Johnston didn’t like flying, and had insisted on taking the train down to New York. Parker didn’t mind, even though the Amtrak ticket had cost more than his own flight. Johnston’s expertise might yet lead them to Quayle.
“Does he still want to hire me to kill someone?” Louis asked.
>
Johnston was a clever man, and hugely knowledgeable about books, but his people skills left a lot to be desired.
“I find it’s better not to raise the subject with him,” said Parker. “I think his list of targets is potentially endless.”
“How can a book dealer build up so much resentment?” said Angel.
“He says people don’t know how to treat books.”
“People don’t know how to treat people.”
“Yeah, except people eventually die, no matter how you treat them. But if you look after books, they abide.”
“Please tell me he said that, not you.”
“It was Johnston, but he kind of has a point.”
At that moment the man himself appeared, carrying two cloth bags heavy with books. The bags, Parker knew, were of Johnston’s own design, with waterproof exteriors and cushioned inner layers, because Johnston had described them to him at length back in Portland before Parker could find an excuse to flee. Johnston had made an effort for the occasion, and was dressed in cottons and tweeds of various greens and browns, like a college professor experimenting with rural camouflage. Parker introduced him to Angel, whom Johnston had not met before.
“And you remember Louis.”
Johnston did.
“Still have that money set aside, if you’re interested in some work,” he said.
“I’m not,” said Louis.
Johnston hid his disappointment manfully.
“Well, if you hear of anyone who’s in the market for a commission—”
“A contract,” Louis corrected him, not for the first time. Parker figured Johnston was doing it deliberately. He had a certain penchant for mischief.
“Sorry, a contract, you let me know.”
“Sure, if I don’t shoot you first.”
“Ha-ha,” said Johnston mirthlessly. He took his seat and ordered a beer, but not before casting a final suspicious glance at Louis, just in case he might not be above following through on the threat before Johnston got to his entrée.
A Book of Bones Page 16
