by Peter Hayes
“It was in Jai’s safe, along with my treasures. I swept them all up and into my bag.”
“And leaving it behind? Tell me again why we did that?”
“Because, without the gun, it’s murder. Justifiable, maybe, but murder all the same. With the gun, suicide’s at least a possibility.”
“A suicide,” I asked, “who shot himself twice?”
She turned on me, angrily. “That’s not what you heard!” She closed her eyes and took several deep breaths. “I realized as I left, the scene wouldn’t play.”
“Why’s that?”
“FDR.”
“FDR?”
“Firearm discharge residue. So I put the gun in his hand, and fired a shot across the meadow. They won’t find the slug. And I caught the ejected shell. But his hand is now tainted. Without that, even with the gun, they’d have known he couldn’t be the shooter.”
I understood. In the States, we called it GSR, gunshot residue. “Can I ask you something?”
“Don’t ask if you can ask it. Just ask,” she said irritably. She started scrabbling through her pocketbook, then stopped and looked around. “I thought I left a plastic change purse here. On the dash. It had some cigarettes in it.”
“How do you know this stuff? About . . . GSR? And murder investigations?”
“I know firearms,” she said, setting down the bag, and placing her hands in her lap, apparently resigned to doing without one. “I was taught to shoot when I was a girl. As for the other, it’s common knowledge. Don’t you read mysteries?”
“You mean murder mysteries? No. I read field reports, research papers.”
“Well, bully for you!”
I laughed. I deserved it.
“It’s vital the body isn’t found for some time. The gun’s pointed backward, his thumb on the trigger. But even then”—she extended her arm toward the windshield—“it can’t be more than eighteen to twenty inches.”
“He was a big man. Say, twenty-four.”
“And I shot him from at least four feet away. The residue around the wound won’t match the shorter distance.”
“Unless,” I said, “the evidence is degraded by a week in the sun. And by whatever critters find him.”
“Yes,” she sighed, “or, at least, that is the plan.”
1.The Shrī Lalitā Sahāsranāma
2.Translator’s Note: it is difficult to fix the exact location of the action. This cannot be the same Indore as the later princely state, since modern Indore is east of Rajasthan and was founded in 1731.
Part IV
ALBION
In one corner
of the infinite and indivisible
Supreme Consciousness,
there is a mirage-like appearance.
This we call the world.
The Yoga Vasishtha
Chapter 19
While I drove, Vidya nodded off, her head bouncing lightly on my shoulder. The gray dawn was suffused with a fine pelting rain that smelled of Scotland and the sea. If it were raining in America like this, no one would have been about. But here, in the English countryside, old ladies in macs and wellies went about their marketing unfazed, riding their bicycles through puddles down the country highway.
I thought of the rain falling on the face of Henry Carlson Lewis Jones, and wondered if it would wash away the evidence. Then I remembered he was face down. His killing, coming so close upon Jai’s, was chilling. What bothered me most was the thought that he hadn’t been a mortal threat at all, that despite the knife (and his forced entry of our vehicle) he was just some old fool sticking his nose where it didn’t belong. I mean, how could Vidya be so certain of the man’s intent? He couldn’t have been more than a silhouette. Or maybe she hadn’t been certain at all, but was only pretending. Maybe, like me, she was scared shitless, and had overreacted, killing a phantom.
But if his death was chilling, leaving him felt even colder. He was likely someone’s father, husband or son, whose presence would be missed. Then again, the prospect of years in a British prison was absolutely freezing. And though with luck and a great solicitor we might get off with eighteen months plus time already served, even eighteen months was not an option. There was nothing for it now but to accept what had happened, let it be and carry on.
When I parked, Vidya woke. “There?”
“Almost. But first, I need to talk to someone. Do you want to sleep? I won’t be long.”
She looked through the bug-smeared windshield at the hospital’s faded brick façade. “No.” She stretched. “I’ll come with you.”
We went inside. In her long skirt, Vidya seemed to be floating almost footless, down the hall, her hips swaying to some African beat. I admired her spirit. Her husband was dead, we had a homicide charge hanging over our heads, we’d killed a man and covered it up—yet despite it all, she seemed composed and, you might have thought, unburdened.
I brought her first to the hospital canteen, where we chewed stale biscuits and sipped mugs of milky tea. We held hands, for the sweetest intimacy had developed between us.
Not that I knew much more about her, for she was closemouthed to an extraordinary degree. Don’t get me wrong. I liked this about her: that she didn’t continually chatter like some, turning every hangnail or broken heel into a psychodrama. On the other hand, this made it difficult to find out much about her.
After breakfast, we headed for Strugnell’s office. I wanted to tell him firsthand what had happened and see what sort of advice he could give. On the way, we passed a familiar door.
“Do you want to see something . . . amazing?” I said, and I turned the handle on impulse, letting the door swing open wide.
My Lady was lying on an aluminum gurney, looking—I don’t know any other word to use—horrific. After the autopsy, they had not sewn her back up. An incision ran from her throat to groin.
But my shock was nothing compared to Vidya’s. It took her a moment, I think, to comprehend what she was seeing. Then, when she did, she jerked as though scalded. “What is this?” she demanded.
“It’s . . . the body of . . . Albemarle. The girl whose grave the book was in.”
“But you said you were showing me something amazing!” Vidya glared at me with a fury I had not seen till now, and for a moment I thought she might go for my eyes; then her features reefed and she began to weep, rocking gently in the classical way that women have mourned the dead forever.
Whatever possessed me to do what I had, given all she’d just been through? “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, Vidya,” I said, taking her back out into the hall. There, she continued to weep, though no one paid us any mind. People cry in hospitals all the time, I suppose.
“I killed a man last night,” she said. “I’ve never killed a man before.”
“I know,” I said. “And we’ll have to live with it. And you know what? We can—and will.”
I drew her close and held her until her tears had ceased. She sniffed and rubbed her eyes, smearing her cheeks and fingers with kohl. Accepting a tissue, she blew her nose—honk!— a comical noise that only endeared her to me the more, then excused herself and headed for the WC. I watched until she disappeared into the bathroom, then went back inside.
Christ alive, what the hell had I been thinking? For the creature before me was a patent horror, an eviscerated witch. She looked positively insectival, like those larval skins cicada nymphs, after years underground, bequeath to trees and fences. For this was the impression I had of my Lady. She was no longer there. Whatever presence I had sensed was gone, leaving behind this torn and empty shell.
Just then, the coroner came in. He blinked behind his rimless glasses and offered me an embarrassed smile that said he’d seen our little drama. “You’re back!”
“Wooland . . . tell me, what’s wrong with this picture? This really is obscene, the way she’s been left. I mean, she may be just a ‘specimen’ now, but once upon a time, she was a living human being.”
“Didn’t mean to upset you . . .or your friend.
Don’t believe I know her . . . do I?”
“No.”
He waited for more, but I wasn’t in the mood.
I wanted to cover my Lady’s remains. I found a piece of plastic sheeting.
“As the coroner, you have access to the police database, do you not?”
“I do, I . . .”
“I need you to look up a name for me. Henry Carlson Lewis Jones. White male, 52. Address in Surrey.”
“It’s a bit irregular.”
“Yeah, well, so are you.” It came out wrong. Here I was asking the man for a favor while insulting him.
He looked hurt. “C’mon,” I said. “A joke. It’s been a rough few days.”
He nodded and started to go, when there was a god-awful noise and a sudden stench. The coroner was huddled over the sink. He came up teary-eyed, wiping his lips with the back of his hand.
“Bit of a bug, I’m afraid.” He ran the water. “Donne, I’ll give you a call a bit later. Right now, I really need to go home.”
Chapter 20
What had we hoped to find in Dorset? Peace, sanctuary, acceptance, freedom? Would any one of these have been so much to ask?
The report of Jai’s murder had made that morning’s Daily Mirror, and the phone was already ringing as we came in the cottage door. Apart from reporters requesting interviews, most of the calls were from colleagues and acquaintances, ringing to express their sympathy and concern. Still, the subtext of most, if not all, was clear: I’d been besotted by a foreign enchantress. For my own sake and for my career’s: dump her, ditch her, head for the hills!
Even more disappointing were my contacts at the Dorset Constabulary. After bragging for months about their influence and power, they claimed to have little leverage with New Scotland Yard—and they certainly couldn’t be seen meddling in an ongoing murder investigation!
One of the more supportive calls was from my department head at Exeter. Expressing his shock and horror at Jai’s murder, he wanted me, “Al,” to know the college stood behind me all the way. What a “tip-top job” I’d been doing lately! What with my Lady and the commission. Total faith, feather in their cap, chin up, pip, pip.
With Houlihan, we’d called his bluff, at least. Obviously, he had no hard evidence against us; all he could offer was intimidation and, this time, it had failed. Not that I thought we were out of the woods, but the fact that the CID wasn’t waiting to arrest us upon our arrival was a clear indication they didn’t yet have a case. Now, if we could just keep our heads down, they had to come up with better suspects than Vidya and I.
Until then, I decided, I was going to try to live and work as before. I’d be damned if I’d let my life be turned upside down by a crime I hadn’t even committed. The one caveat was that I was afraid of leaving Vidya alone. For Jai’s attacker was still unknown, and I had the recurring, uneasy feeling the intended target was Vidya, not Jai.
“Don’t worry, darling. I’ll be fine. I know you have things to do.” She had showered and was seated at the kitchen table, wrapped in a white terrycloth robe, her wet black hair shining as though oiled.
“What will you do?”
“Unpack. Get settled. I love Dorset.”
“Oh? Been here before?”
“Not really.”
I found her answer extremely annoying. What did that mean? Either you had been to Dorset or not. There really wasn’t some third option, was there?
Maybe she sensed my mood, for she looked up again and said, “I’m a frightful nuisance, aren’t I, darling?”
“Hardly.”
“Oh, I am.” She gestured at The Dorset Echo, folded open to another sensational account of the crime. She gazed out the window. “Perhaps I should go.”
“Go?” I cried. “We just arrived. Go where?”
After some consideration, she swung her gaze back to mine. “Is it the servants’ day off?”
“Uh . . .” I lied. “That was yesterday. They’ll be in by noon.”
Taking my hand, she slipped something on my wrist. It was a torc, forged of reddish gold with terminals bearing Celtic-looking heads.
“What’s this?”
“Just a little gift. For your kindness. And devotion.”
“My, God,” I said. “It looks real!”
“Oh, I’m sure it is. Lakshmi Auntie said it had been in the family for generations.”
“But Vidya,” I protested, “do you know what this is worth?”
“Nonsense. It is a trinket only.” And with a quick kiss to both my cheeks, she disappeared into the bathroom.
On my way to the college, I stopped in the village to have the Mercedes’s window replaced, the gas gauge fixed, and the car cleaned inside and out. Henry Carlson Lewis Jones’s fingerprints were surely all throughout it. I also took the clothes we’d worn and dumped them. The bullet’s impact had surely sprayed us with his DNA. Finally, I stopped at Ruby O’Connell’s. Ruby had cooked and cleaned for me on occasion and I asked her now if I might hire her as housekeeper. She allowed I might, provided I took on Willie, her husband, “as the gardener, sir.”
Willie waved back from his seat by the telly where, at ten forty-five on a Tuesday morning he was sucking down a bottle of brown Badger Ale.
“Don’t have to pay ‘im much,” she winked. “But I wouldn’t trust ‘im on his own, I wouldn’t.”
“You have a shotgun, Willie?”
He nodded.
“Bring it.”
“Got something else,” he said, and responding to his whistle, a wolfhound appeared, the size of a small war pony.
I nodded. I felt good not leaving Vidya alone.
My inbox held a six-inch stack of anthropological reports pertaining to “Holders Woman,” as my Lady of the Bog was now officially known. I withdrew them with anticipation. Jones’s and Jai’s deaths still sat like great undigested lumps in my stomach, rising, at intervals, into my craw. So, it would be a relief to attend to tragedies other than my own.
The lab analysis of my Lady’s stomach indicated it was nearly empty, save for a thin gruel of grain and wild herbs. There were traces of ergot—a psychotropic growing naturally on rye—which meant that my Lady might have been high and hallucinating. The amount was small and the report didn’t state the clinical dosage, so she might just as well have been stone-cold sober. It was one of those facts open to diametrically opposed interpretations, of which there seemed to be so many.
Her intestines contained eggs of Trichuris and Ascaris— parasitic worms that had probably caused her some gastric discomfort—and the roots of her hair harbored nits, though no adult lice were found. Other than that, there was “a total absence of necrophiliac fauna on the skin.” In other words, my Lady had no flies on her, from which one could almost certainly deduce that she was buried immediately upon her murder.
One of the more interesting studies analyzed the pollen in her nasal cavities, lungs and hair. These tiny spores, borne on the wind, are practically indestructible and can paint a detailed picture of the climate, flora and precipitation for years and seasons long since gone. The data confirmed my wingéd surmise that my Lady had been buried in mid-to late-July. Spores of land clearance weeds and a noticeable absence of pine and oak indicated a landscape extensively farmed. Further, by correlating the pollen record with conditions reflected in the rings of ancient pines, the palynologists had arrived at a death year of 1327. This was in broad agreement with the language of both the book and the runes. Everything, so far, was lining up nicely—until we came to the radiocarbon dating.
Here, the findings were wildly at odds. Though my Lady’s body yielded dates of 1290, 1260 and 1222 ACE (± about 120 years), the wooden stakes and surrounding peat dated to the seventeenth century!
I sought out a copy of the runic tracings. One line of the inscription was carved upon each stake. However, on the reverse side of the third stake were four more runes: and a group of three others: or D-O-M.
I discovered Rumple in a temporary office down the hall.
He stiffly and kindly offered his condolences and—remembering my final conversation with Jai—I graciously accepted them. As I still had not found a historical reference, I asked: “Could it be that her name wasn’t Albemarle? That those runes say something else?”
“Unlikely. In binding runes, the name was all important. It had to be included. ‘Ic beshrew,’ ‘I curse,’ had no effect. ‘Ic beshrew, Donne.’ Ah, now that’s a rune of power.”
“I found several more. A sort of capital P.”
“Wunjo. Stands for joy, bliss. In Spencer, it adorns the flag of fairyland . . . associations with the grail. But used alone, as it is here, it’s said to induce madness.”
“Madness? In whom? In Albemarle?”
“Oh, I think not. Albemarle was dead. Or about to be. Did you find three others?”
I nodded. “D-O-M.”
“A second o was likely dropped.”
“ ‘Doom?’ ”
He nodded. “The doom of madness, of wunjo. On whomever breaks the holy runes.”
“Breaks the runes . . . ?”
“Well . . . removes the stakes.”
I smiled grimly and soldiered on. “The stakes are a different age than the body. Could it be from anomalies in the C-14?”
“Unlikely. The fluctuation for that period was factored in. There’s still a three-hundred-year difference.”
This was baffling. For if both sets of dates were true, then Holders Woman had died around thirteen hundred. Three hundred years later, she’d been buried and staked. That didn’t make sense.
“I noticed,” I said, “that her blood is B negative. That’s uncommon here and, as I recall, is often found in gypsies. Since she has a pierced nose, I was wondering if perhaps she could be a gypsy girl, killed, you know, for telling fortunes.”
Rumple chuckled. “You surprise me, Donne. I’d have thought you more conversant with basic European history.”
I smiled.
“Gypsies—or Roma, as they prefer to be called—do not appear in Western Europe until the mid-fifteenth century. So she can’t be what you call a ‘gypsy,’ now can she?” He sniffed. “Another odd thing: the body was found in conjunction with a number of artifacts.”
