A Gathering of Saints

by A Gathering of Saints (retail) (epub)

  Katherine stared at the picture. If Dranie was a chess fanatic, did that mean his killer was one as well? What was the connection?

  * * *

  Police Constable Swift turned the Austin Ruby towards the curb and switched off the engine. Seated beside him, Morris Black glanced out the window. They were parked in front of the windowless brick facade of the Westminster Baths at 88 Buckingham Palace Road. On the opposite side of the empty street the sooty iron wall of the Victoria Station train shed stretched for a hundred yards up to Grosvenor Gardens and Victoria Street.

  It was almost midnight but the sky in front of them was bright as dawn, lit by a hundred Docklands fires and the pulsing glow of the anti-aircraft guns in St James’s Park. The distant air was filled with their steady, pounding bark and the rolling thunder of the bombs but somehow this dark corner of the city seemed removed from it all, a shadowed, sombre limbo in the midst of chaos where the dead and those attending them were safe from further harm.

  Several grey-painted vans were parked in front of the Ruby, one with its wheels drawn up onto the pavement. An exhausted ARP worker stood slumped against the wing of the nearest ambulance, smoking a cigarette and watching as a crew of morgue attendants dressed in boilersuits came down the steps, each one carrying an empty canvas stretcher.

  The Westminster Baths, as well as most of the other municipal swimming facilities in London, had been take over as temporary mortuaries more than a year before, the pools emptied, covered and equipped to handle several hundred fresh corpses every night. The tile floors and powerful ventilation equipment used for the baths were also ideally suited for mortuary duty.

  Swift stayed behind the wheel of the little car, staring blankly ahead, both hands gripping the wheel, his eyes fixed on the blazing skyline, a small muscle in his jaw twitching slightly. To Black, his companion looked anxious, almost on the verge of panic.

  ‘Come along, Swift, they’ll probably have a mug of tea for you inside.’

  ‘No thank you, sir. I’ll stay here if it’s all the same to you.’

  ‘There’s a raid on, man, don’t be an ass.’

  ‘I’ll stay here, sir, with the car,’ Swift answered firmly. Black looked at his assistant then imagined what the inside of the baths would be like. Fresh corpses, the reek of blood and excrement. Too much like the beaches of Dunkirk and whatever other horrors Swift had lived through before that.

  Black nodded. ‘All right. Stay with the car.’

  ‘Thank you, sir.’ There was obvious relief in Swift’s voice.

  ‘If it gets worse, I want you to come inside.’

  ‘Of course, sir.’

  Black let himself out of the car and went up the steps to the main doors. The imagined interior of a few moments before didn’t even approach the terrible reality confronting the detective as he entered the building.

  He found himself in a small vestibule, lit only by a single shaded lamp on a rudely constructed table made with planks set across a pair of sawhorses. Behind the table a grey-faced man in an Auxiliary Pioneer Corps uniform was matching ‘Death Due to War Operations’ dockets to names on the local voters’ list. The marble floor was slick with blood and other fluids and the air was perfumed with a ghastly, pungent reek of charred wood and half-cooked meat.

  Black showed his warrant card to the Pioneer Corps guard. The man nodded silently, then offered him something that looked like a flat tin of shoe polish. Black twisted the lid off. The tin was filled with a thick, white cream that smelled heavily of concentrated mothballs.

  ‘Camphor ointment,’ said the guard. He shook his head wearily. ‘Bloody awful in there. The Sloan Square underground. Bomb and gas main. Twenty dead and more coming.’ He nodded at the tin in Black’s hand. ‘Put a fingerful up each nostril and try and breathe through your mouth.’ Black did as he was told, then handed back the tin. Leaving the guard, he walked down the wide hallway beyond then pushed through a pair of swinging doors that led into the baths themselves.

  The high-ceilinged chamber was a hundred feet long and half as wide. The pool had been drained, filled with a framework of scaffolding then covered with sheets of bile green marine plywood. At least fifty makeshift autopsy tables had been spread out over the new surface, and ranged around the perimeter of the covered pool were ranks of sawhorses, half of them set with loaded stretchers, their contents covered with everything from ragged blankets to newspaper. Only a very few of the remains had been put into rubberised shrouds like the one Stanislaw Rudelski had been found in.

  Every one of the autopsy tables was in use, a dozen white-coated attendants moving up and down the rows, checking and tagging each body, followed by uniformed Civil Defence workers carrying wire baskets and harvesting personal effects. All of this was lit by a score of pan-lights dangling low over the tables on lengths of flex, the bright pools alive with a strange chalky haze of floating dust.

  Squinting, Black spotted Spilsbury and Liddell in the far corner, standing over a standard-issue fibreboard casket raised on sawhorses. Spilsbury, his dark suit covered by a white lab coat, was watching as an attendant unscrewed the coffin lid. Liddell, in tweeds as usual, was standing to one side, smoking his pipe and staring upward.

  Black stepped out onto the pool platform, his footsteps echoing dully. He made his way between the rows of tables, trying not to look at the displays of carnage to left and right but betrayed by his peripheral vision.

  A frail woman with a mass of snow-white hair and wearing a red cardigan, apparently uninjured but with bulging eyes that Black knew were the sign of death by massive compression shock.

  The head of a man, covered in plaster dust and streaked with blood. Below the head a filthy, bloodstained shirt ending abruptly at the hips and below that nothing but a ghastly mess of white bone, torn flesh and entrails.

  The calm face of a sleeping girl, seventeen or so, lying on her side, but with her legs flat on the table, a hole in her chest so large that the glistening, bloody sheath covering her heart was visible.

  Three infants sharing a single table, so mutilated as to be unrecognisable. A large man on his stomach, wearing the remains of a long nightshirt, head crushed almost flat, the flailed flesh of his back exposing the entire length of his spine. A dust-covered bowler, half its brim torn away beside a large parcel bound in twine and leaking onto the table.

  Black kept his eyes on the two figures ahead, breathing through his mouth in quick, short pants, feeling the cold sweat breaking out on his brow and refusing to give in to a growing feeling of reeling vertigo that was turning his legs to rubber and lead. This was no mortuary; this was a human abattoir. Gritting his teeth, he kept on.

  He reached Spilsbury and Liddell just as the attendant removed the last screw in the lid of the plain grey coffin. The attendant stepped back and lifted up the wire and gauze mask that hung around his neck on a narrow rubber strap. Spilsbury and Liddell followed suit.

  ‘Just in time,’ said Liddell, handing Black a mask of his own. Spilsbury turned to the detective, his eyes cold above the white gauze covering the lower half of his face.

  ‘This is most irregular, Inspector Black. I’ve read over the records pertaining to this case. There is no doubt that the woman died of blast injuries and fire. A waste of valuable time.’ The pathologist waited for a response but Black said nothing. He’d already spent hours convincing Liddell that the exhumation had been necessary and he wasn’t about to go over it again. He was already in a precarious position; in a few moments he would either be vindicated or proved utterly wrong. The detective put on the mask he’d been given by Liddell and even through the cloying scent of the ointment in his nostrils he could smell the sour-sweet odour of Dettol disinfectant.

  Spilsbury waited for another long moment, then turned to the attendant and nodded. The man stepped forward and slid the top off the coffin, propping it against the nearest sawhorse. Spilsbury picked up a pair of surgical gloves from the table beside the coffin and snapped them on. Using a thumb and for
efinger, he tipped his glasses up onto his forehead and leaned over the coffin, breathing deeply. Black saw that the pathologist had no telltale trace of white ointment around his nostrils.

  Without turning, Spilsbury lifted one hand and gestured for Black and Liddell to join him. Black did so reluctantly, Liddell beside him. Knowing what he was about to see, the detective swallowed hard and forced his mind to become completely blank. He looked down into the narrow box containing the exhumed remains of the late Jane Luffington.

  After being claimed by her mother, Jane Luffington’s body had been taken to a funeral parlour and prepared for burial by way of a few simple procedures. The body was laid out, stripped then washed with a mild water-and-alcohol solution. Following this, two long trocar needles were inserted in a parallel pair of veins and arteries in the groin, while a third needle was inserted into the umbilicus, piercing the stomach wall. Tubes were then attached to the needles and a vacuum pump drained the body of blood and the contents of the abdominal cavity.

  Since the coffin was to be closed during the burial ceremony, no attempt was made to enlarge the sunken eyesockets in the charred, ruined face but in an effort to prevent too much gaseous odour from escaping the mouth was filled with a plaster and linen plug, then stitched shut. The rectum and vagina were also sealed to prevent gas from seeping out, as well as any remaining body fluids.

  After six weeks of decomposition, the body of Jane Luffington was covered with adipocere, a paraffin-like substance with an unmistakable rancid odour. Huge speckled slabs of it were layered onto the remains of her face like lumps of clay, her body bloated with it, sagging in the middle like melted mutton fat, joining the multiple strata of maggot castings on the bottom of the casket.

  The feet were blue-green sweetbreads; the hands, almost carbonised at the time of death, were nothing more than blackened claws. Here and there along the body bone showed through; the cartilage at the joints was a jaundiced yellow, the bones themselves a grayish green. The only thing about the body that was even remotely human was the teeth, two perfect rows of them showing whitely, grinning up out of the blackened face.

  ‘Christ!’ Liddell whispered from behind his mask. Beside him Morris Black said nothing.

  ‘Normal rate of decay considering the length of time involved,’ Spilsbury murmured to himself. He glanced up at Black. ‘I gather that you think she was killed in the same way as the men I looked at.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’ Black nodded, his mouth unpleasantly full of saliva. He swallowed, lifting one hand to press the fabric of the mask against his nose, breathing in as much of the Dettol smell as he could stand. Fay had turned to this before she turned to dust and bones. For an instant he thought he was going to vomit.

  ‘I’ll have to turn her head.’ Spilsbury reached into the coffin, placed a gloved hand under each side of the jaw and twisted slowly. There was a damp, rotted sound, like old splitting cloth. Black closed his eyes for a moment and swallowed again.

  Spilsbury leaned even farther forward, his spectacles threatening to drop off his forehead and into the casket. ‘Interesting,’ he said quietly.

  Liddell cleared his throat weakly and then spoke. ‘You’ve found something, Sir Bernard?’

  ‘Yes. A ligature mark.’ He raised a hand and waggled his fingers for the attendant. ‘The long forceps,’ he ordered. The man reached into the bag resting on the floor beside the pathologist and removed the gleaming tool. He put it into Spilsbury’s upraised hand and stepped back again. Using the forceps, Spilsbury poked under the chin and jaw of the woman’s head, digging deeply into the layers of the brownish, greasy adipocere. He twisted then retracted the instrument, drawing up a long, thick, wormlike strand of fabric.

  ‘What is it?’ asked Black, his nausea overtaken by a growing fascination. The object in the casket was no longer human. It was evidence that might take him one step closer to Queer Jack.

  ‘A length of fabric, twisted tightly into a rope. Silk. A scarf perhaps.’ Spilsbury held it up in the light. ‘Quite an odd knot.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ Black asked.

  ‘Some sort of complicated hitch with two running loops. I’ve never seen anything quite like it.’

  ‘A seaman? Someone in the Navy?’ Liddell offered.

  ‘Or a Boy Scout,’ Spilsbury said dryly. ‘A model-maker, even an electrician. Still it’s odd. He could just as well have used a bowline, any sort of slipknot.’

  ‘Proud of his expertise?’ said Black thoughtfully. ‘Could he be showing off?’

  ‘I suppose that’s possible.’

  ‘So she was strangled?’ said Liddell.

  ‘Not necessarily,’ Spilsbury replied. ‘The noose might have been used as a restraint.’

  ‘The other?’ asked Black.

  Spilsbury nodded, his interest piqued now, his irritation gone. ‘Just a moment.’ He put the forceps and the twisted length of silk down on the table and went back to the waxy remains in the coffin. He eased the head sharply to one side with his left hand firmly on the jaw then reached under the neck with his right hand, searching blindly for the top of the spine with a long index finger. Finding it, he pushed into the transformed flesh, digging cautiously between the easily separated vertebrae.

  ‘Anything?’ said Black.

  ‘Wait… there. Yes!’ Spilsbury withdrew his hand from under the woman’s neck. Using a pair of long tweezers, he poked into the hole then withdrew the delicate tool. It now held a tiny, multiple-vaned object. Identical to the ones that had killed all four other victims.

  ‘Well, I’m damned,’ said Liddell, staring at the vicious little instrument.

  ‘I must apologise, Inspector,’ said Spilsbury, bowing slightly towards Morris Black. ‘You were quite right after all. She was murdered, just like the others.’

  * * *

  The Number stood in the deeper pools of darkness offered by the spreading branches of the trees in St Michael’s Yard and watched the moon rise over the soaring spire of the cathedral. His first sight of it in the last of the daylight only a few hours before had been an epiphany, a moment of the purest truth, the completion of every anguished thought and moment that had brought him here. All fears and doubts had vanished in that instant. This was the hub of the wheel, a spike of holy stone at the centre of the centre, a dark sword uplifted to pierce the heavens.

  He’d known the numbers would be perfect even before he bought the little shilling pamphlet from the hawker on Bayley Lane. Three hundred and one feet high from base to tip, the foot of the tower thirty-one feet on a side.

  Staring up at it now, beams of light from the moon raking down through the thin, scudding clouds and cutting through the arched rows of windows, turning them to gold, The Number could feel his heart expanding and the blood scouring through his veins like liquid fire.

  Two months ago, after the Wren courier had discovered him pawing through her motorcycle panniers, he’d felt sure that his power had been taken from him. Her death and the false ritual of her sacrifice that had followed were nothing more than a mark of his failure – a humiliating mockery.

  Now he knew that it had been only an obstacle presented to test his determination and his resolve, a final skirmish before the real battle was finally joined.

  It had been difficult, and more than once during the last eight weeks he’d thought of abandoning the task, admitting to the depth of his weakness and forfeiting himself to his demons, but in the end he had triumphed and found another path. This was his reward. The blinding truth that had eluded him for so long: his perfection would come only out of chaos and from that chaos the partial would become complete.

  He watched the moon, his guide and mirror. Like him, it lacked only a final sliver of light to become whole. Soon now the last would be revealed and he would know. All the world would know and he would find his perfect peace.

  No detail had been overlooked. He’d arrived early that morning and gone to the proper address on Cherry Street in Radford, not far from the gasworks. He’
d identified his quarry then followed him to work on foot and by tram. He waited patiently until the day was over then followed him home again, keeping a careful distance as they went along the ancient medieval streets and narrow byways.

  In the early evening his chosen victim left the cramped little cottage on Cherry Street and went into the city once again, pausing briefly at a public house on Pond Street, then continuing on to the Gaumont Cinema.

  They were showing the new American film Gone With the Wind and sitting in the darkness, only two rows back from the man he would soon murder, The Number was astounded by the irony of it all as Atlanta burned, the leaping Technicolor flames destroying that earlier plague of sin and pestilence. Another omen, another subtle guide, telling him that his course was true.

  By the time the film ended it was fully dark but the depth of night and the blackout were overshadowed by the brilliant moon and he’d had no difficulty following the man to the cathedral. More than an hour had passed since then and it had taken all his strength to keep from following the man inside, to watch him as he practised, or perhaps even to have introduced himself as a member of the Society, but that would have been a foolish risk.

  Instead he stood beneath the trees, waiting, watching the moon and the low, scudding clouds, counting the ticking, turning moments, seeing the coming terrors in his mind’s eye, knowing that each thing was as it should be and knowing too that he was the linchpin of it all.

  He brought out The Book, slipped the postcard out from between the leaves, compared it to the image confronting him and smiled.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Wednesday, November 13, 1940

  10:30 a.m., Greenwich Mean Time

  Werner Steinmaur sat rigidly in the straight-backed chair and waited for the tribunal to begin. He was alone in the large room except for his escort, a uniformed corporal of the Royal Welsh Fusiliers seated by the door. The only other furniture consisted of a long wooden table and three office chairs with arms. A row of rain-streaked windows on the left looked out over Harris Promenade and Douglas Bay to the open Irish Sea. The Isle of Man. The camps.