by Dan Abnett
Wrex looked sidelong at him, as if he was questioning her ability. ‘Because of the nature of the dismemberment. Because of the way the remains were disposed of.’ She looked at me. ‘In my experience, inquisitor, a serial killer secretly wants to be found, and certainly wants to be known. He will display his kills with wanton openness, declaring his power over the community. He thrives on the terror and fear he generates. Great efforts were made to hide these bodies. That suggests to me the killer was far more interested in the deaths than in the reaction to the deaths.’
‘Well put, captain,’ I said. ‘That has been my experience too. Cult killings are often hidden so that the cult can continue its work without fear of discovery.’
‘Suggesting that there are other victims still to find...’ said Bequin casually, a chilling prophecy as it now seems to me.
‘Cult killings?’ said the minister. ‘I brought this to your attention because I feared as much, but do you really think–’
‘On Alphex, the warp-cult removed their victims’ hands and tongues because they were organs of communication,’ Aemos began. ‘On Brettaria, the brains were scooped out in order for the cult to ingest the spiritual matter – the anima, as you might say – of their prey. A number of other worlds have suffered cult predations where the eyes have been forfeit... Gulinglas, Pentari, Hesperus, Messina... Windows of the soul, you see. The Heretics of Saint Scarif, in fact, severed their ritual victims’ hands and then made them write out their last confessions using ink quills rammed into the stumps of–’
‘Enough information, Aemos,’ I said. The minister was looking pale. ‘These are clearly cult killings, sir,’ I said. ‘There is a noxious cell of Chaos at liberty in your city. And I will find it.’
I went at once to the mid-rise district. Grevan, Hewall and Fasple had all been residents of that part of Urbitane, and Mombril, though a visitor to the metropolis, had been found there too. Aemos went to the Munitorum records spire in high-rise to search the local archives. I was particularly interested in historical cult activity on Sameter, and on date significance. Fischig, Bequin and Wrex accompanied me.
The genius loci of a place can often say much about the crimes committed therein. So far, my stay on Sameter had only introduced me to the cleaner, high-altitude regions of Urbitane’s high-rise, up above the smog-cover.
Mid-rise was a dismal, wretched place of neglect and poverty. A tarry resin of pollution coated every surface, and acid rain poured down unremittingly. Raw-engined traffic crawled nose to tail down the poorly lit streets, and the very stone of the buildings seemed to be rotting. The smoggy darkness of mid-rise had a red, firelit quality, the backwash of the flares from giant gas processors. It reminded me of picture-slate engravings of the Inferno.
We stepped from Wrex’s armoured speeder at the corner of Shearing Street and Pentecost. The captain pulled on her Arbites helmet and a quilted flak coat. I began to wish for a hat of my own, or a rebreather mask. The rain stank like urine. Every thirty seconds or so an express flashed past on the elevated trackway, shaking the street.
‘In here,’ Wrex called, and led us through a shutter off the thoroughfare into the dank hallway of a tenement hab. Everything was stained with centuries of grime. The heating had been set too high, perhaps to combat the murky wetness outside, but the result was simply an overwhelming humidity and a smell like the fur of a mangy canine.
This was Idilane Fasple’s last resting place. She’d been found in the roof. ‘Where did she live?’ asked Fischig.
‘Two streets away. She had a parlour on one of the old court-habs.’
‘Hewall?’
‘His hab is about a kilometre west. His remains were found five blocks east.’
I looked at the data-slate. The tannery where Mombril had been found was less than thirty minutes’ walk from here, and Greven’s home a short tram ride. The only thing that broke the geographical focus of these lives and deaths was the fact that Greven had been dumped in the bay.
‘It hasn’t escaped my notice that they all inhabited a remarkably specific area,’ Wrex smiled.
‘I never thought it had. But “remarkably” is the word. It isn’t just the same quarter or district. It’s an intensely close network of streets, a neighbourhood.’
‘Suggesting?’ asked Bequin.
‘The killer or killers are local too,’ said Fischig.
‘Or someone from elsewhere has a particular hatred of this neighbourhood and comes into it to do his or her killing,’ said Wrex.
‘Like a hunting ground?’ noted Fischig.
I nodded. Both possibilities had merit.
‘Look around,’ I told Fischig and Bequin, well aware that Wrex’s officers had already been all over the building. But she said nothing. Our expert appraisal might turn up something different.
I found a small office at the end of the entrance hall. It was clearly the cubbyhole of the habitat’s superintendent. Sheaves of paper were pinned to the flakboard wall: rental dockets, maintenance rosters, notes of resident complaints. There was a box-tray of lost property, a partially disassembled mini-servitor in a tub of oil, a stale stink of cheap liquor. A faded ribbon-and-paper rosette from an Imperial shrine was pinned over the door with a regimental rank stud.
‘What you doing in here?’
I looked around. The superintendent was a middle-aged man in a dirty overall suit. Details. I always look for details. The gold signet ring with the wheatear symbol. The row of permanent metal sutures closing the scar on his scalp where the hair had never grown back. The prematurely weathered skin. The guarded look in his eyes.
I told him who I was, and he didn’t seem impressed. Then I asked him who he was and he said, ‘The super. What you doing in here?’
I use my will sparingly. The psychic gift sometimes closes as many doors as it opens. But there was something about this man. He needed a jolt.
‘What is your name?’ I asked, modulating my voice to carry the full weight of the psychic probe.
He rocked backwards, and his pupils dilated in surprise. ‘Quater Traves,’ he mumbled.
‘Did you know the midwife Fasple?’
‘I sin her around.’
‘To speak to?’
He shook his head. His eyes never left mine. ‘Did she have friends?’
He shrugged.
‘What about strangers? Anyone been hanging around the hab?’
His eyes narrowed. A sullen, mocking look, as if I hadn’t seen the streets outside.
‘Who has access to the roofspace where her body was found?’
‘Ain’t nobody bin up there. Not since the place bin built. Then the heating packs in, and the contractors has to break through the roof to get up there. They found her.’
‘There isn’t a hatch?’
‘Shutter. Locked, and no one has a key. Easier to go through the plasterboard.’
Outside, we sheltered from the rain under the elevated railway.
‘That’s what Traves told me too,’ Wrex confirmed. ‘No one had been into the roof for years until the contractors broke their way in.’
‘Someone had. Someone with the keys to the shutter. The killer.’
The soil stack where Hewall had been found was behind a row of commercial properties built into an ancient skin of scaffolding that cased the outside of a toolfitters’ workshop like a cobweb. There was what seemed to be a bar two stages up, where a neon sign flickered between an Imperial aquila and a fleur-de-lys. Fischig and Wrex continued up to the next scaffolding level to peer in through the stained windows of the habs there. Bequin and I went into the bar.
The light was grey inside. At a high bar, four or five drinkers sat on ratchet-stools and ignored us. The scent of obscura smoke was in the air.
There was a woman behind the counter who took exception to us from the moment we came in. She was in her forties, with a powerful, almost masculine build. Her vest was cut off at the armpits and her arms were as muscular as Fischig’s. There was a small tatt
oo of a skull and crossbones on her bicep. The skin of her face was weathered and coarse.
‘Help you?’ she asked, wiping the counter with a glass-cloth. As she did so I saw that her right arm, from the elbow down, was a prosthetic.
‘Information,’ I said.
She flicked her cloth at the row of bottles on the shelves behind her. ‘Not a brand I know.’
‘You know a man called Hewall?’
‘No.’
‘The guy they found in the waste pipes behind here.’
‘Oh. Didn’t know he had a name.’
Now I was closer, I could see the tattoo on her arm wasn’t a skull and crossbones. It was a wheatear.
‘We all have names. What’s yours?’
‘Omin Lund.’
‘You live around here?’
‘Live is too strong a word.’ She turned away to serve someone else.
‘Scary bitch,’ said Bequin as we went outside. ‘Everyone acts like they’ve got something to hide.’
‘Everyone does, even if it’s simply how much they hate this town.’
The heart had gone out of Urbitane, out of Sameter itself, about seventy years before. The mill-hives of Thracian Primaris eclipsed Sameter’s production, and export profits fell away. In an effort to compete, the authorities freed the refineries to escalate production by stripping away the legal restrictions on atmospheric pollution levels. For hundreds of years, Urbitane had had problems controlling its smog and air-pollutants. For the last few decades, it hadn’t bothered any more.
My vox-earplug chimed. It was Aemos. ‘What have you found?’
‘It’s most perturbatory. Sameter has been clear of taint for a goodly while. The last Inquisitorial investigation was thirty-one years ago standard, and that wasn’t here in Urbitane, but in Aquitane, the capital. A rogue psyker. The planet has its fair share of criminal activity, usually narcotics trafficking and the consequential mob-fighting. But nothing markedly heretical.’
‘Nothing with similarities to the ritual methods?’
‘No, and I’ve gone back two centuries.’
‘What about the dates?’
‘Sagittar thirteenth is just shy of the solstice, but I can’t make any meaning out of that. The Purge of the Sarpetal Hives is usually commemorated by upswings of cult activity in the subsector, but that’s six weeks away. The only other thing I can find is that this Sagittar fifth was the twenty-first anniversary of the Battle of Klodeshi Heights.’
‘I don’t know it.’
‘The sixth of seven full-scale engagements during the sixteen-month Imperial campaign on Surealis Six.’
‘Surealis... that’s in the next damn subsector! Aemos, every day of the year is the anniversary of an Imperial action somewhere. What connection are you making?’
‘The Ninth Sameter Infantry saw service in the war on Surealis.’
Fischig and Wrex had joined us from their prowl around the upper stages of the scaffolding. Wrex was talking on her own vox-set.
She signed off and looked at me, rain drizzling off her visor.
‘They’ve found another one, inquisitor,’ she said.
It wasn’t one. It was three, and their discovery threw the affair wide open. An old warehouse in the mill zone, ten streets away from Fasple’s hab, had been damaged by fire two months before, and municipal work-crews had moved in to tear it down and reuse the lot as a site for cheap, prefab habitat blocks. They’d found the bodies behind the wall insulation in a mouldering section untouched by the fire. A woman and two men, systematically mutilated in the manner of the other victims.
But these were much older. I could tell that even at a glance.
I crunched across the debris littering the floorspace of the warehouse shell. Rain streamed in through the roof holes, illuminated as a blizzard of white specks by the cold blue beams of the Arbites’ floodlights shining into the place.
Arbites officers were all around, but they hadn’t touched the discovery itself.
Mummified and shrivelled, these foetally curled, pitiful husks had been in the wall a long time.
‘What’s that?’ I asked.
Fischig leaned forwards for a closer look. ‘Adhesive tape, wrapped around them to hold them against the partition. Old. The gum’s decayed.’
‘That pattern on it. The silver flecks.’
‘I think it’s military-issue stuff. Matt-silver coating, you know the sort? The coating’s coming off with age.’
‘These bodies are different ages,’ I said.
‘I thought so too,’ said Fischig.
We had to wait six hours for a preliminary report from the district Examiner Medicae, but it confirmed our guess. All three bodies had been in the wall for at least eight years, and then for different lengths of time. Decompositional anomalies showed that one of the males had been in position for as much as twelve years, the other two added subsequently, at different occasions. No identifications had yet been made.
‘The warehouse was last used six years ago,’ Wrex told me.
‘I want a roster of workers employed there before it went out of business.’
Someone using the same m.o. and the same spools of adhesive tape had hidden bodies there over a period of years.
The disused tannery where poor Mombril had been found stood at the junction between Xerxes Street and a row of slum tenements known as the Pilings. It was a foetid place, with the stink of the lye and coroscutum used in the tanning process still pungent in the air. No amount of acid rain could wash that smell out.
There were no stairs. Fischig, Bequin and I climbed up to the roof via a metal fire-ladder.
‘How long does a man survive mutilated like that?’
‘From the severed wrists alone, he’d bleed out in twenty minutes, perhaps,’ Fischig estimated. ‘Clearly, if he had made an escape, he’d have the adrenaline of terror sustaining him a little.’
‘So when he was found up here, he can have been no more than twenty minutes from the scene of his brutalisation.’
We looked around. The wretched city looked back at us, close packed and dense. There were hundreds of possibilities. It might take days to search them all.
But we could narrow it down.
‘How did he get on the roof?’ I asked.
‘I was wondering that,’ said Fischig.
‘The ladder we came up by...’ Bequin trailed off as she realised her gaffe.
‘Without hands?’ Fischig smirked.
‘Or sight,’ I finished. ‘Perhaps he didn’t escape. Perhaps his abusers put him here.’
‘Or perhaps he fell,’ Bequin said, pointing.
The back of a tall warehouse overshadowed the tannery to the east. Ten metres up there were shattered windows.
‘If he was in there somewhere, fled blindly, and fell through onto this roof...’
‘Well reasoned, Alizebeth,’ I said.
The Arbites had done decent work, but not even Wrex had thought to consider this inconsistency.
We went round to the side entrance of the warehouse. The battered metal shutters were locked. A notice pasted to the wall told would-be intruders to stay out of the property of Hundlemas Agricultural Stowage.
I took out my multi-key, and disengaged the padlock. I saw Fischig had drawn his sidearm.
‘What’s the matter?’
‘I had a feeling just then... like we were being watched.’
We went inside. The air was cold and still, and smelled of chemicals. Rows of storage vats filled with chemical fertilisers lined the echoing warehall.
The second floor was bare-boarded and hadn’t been used in years. Wire mesh had been stapled over a doorway to the next floor, and rainwater dripped down. Fischig pulled at the mesh. It was cosmetic only, and folded aside neatly.
Now I drew my autopistol too.
On the street side of the third floor, which was divided into smaller rooms, we found a chamber ten metres by ten, on the floor of which was spread a sheet of plastic, smeared with old
blood and other organic deposits. There was a stink of fear.
‘This is where they did him,’ Fischig said with certainty.
‘No sign of cult markings or Chaos symbology,’ I mused.
‘Maybe not,’ said Bequin, crossing the room, being careful not to step on the smeared plastic sheet. For the sake of her shoes, not the crime scene, I was sure. ‘What’s this? Something was hung here.’
Two rusty hooks in the wall, scraped enough to show something had been hanging there recently. On the floor below was a curious cross drawn in yellow chalk.
‘I’ve seen that before somewhere,’ I said. My vox bleeped. It was Wrex.
‘I’ve got that worker roster you asked for.’
‘Good. Where are you?’
‘Coming to find you at the tannery, if you’re still there.’
‘We’ll meet you on the corner of Xerxes Street. Tell your staff we have a crime scene in the agricultural warehouse.’
We walked out of the killing room towards the stairwell. Fischig froze, and brought up his gun.
‘Again?’ I whispered.
He nodded, and pushed Bequin into the cover of a door jamb.
Silence, apart from the rain and the scurry of vermin. Gun braced, Fischig looked up at the derelict roof. It may have been my imagination, but it seemed as if a shadow had moved across the bare rafters.
I moved forwards, scanning the shadows with my pistol. Something creaked: a floorboard.
Fischig pointed to the stairs. I nodded I understood, but the last thing I wanted was a mistaken shooting. I carefully keyed my vox and whispered, ‘Wrex. You’re not coming into the warehouse to find us, are you?’
‘Negative, inquisitor.’
‘Standby.’
Fischig had reached the top of the staircase. He peered down, aiming his weapon.
Las-fire erupted through the floorboards next to him, and he threw himself flat.
I put a trio of shots into the mouth of the staircase, but my angle was bad.
Two hard round shots spat back up the stairs, and then the roar and flash of the las came again, raking the floor.
