Robert Walker: Blind Instinct

“You think so, Sharpie?” asked his young partner, but Sharpe ignored the silly question.

When officials had first arrived on scene, everyone expected the usual floater-some poor slob victim of a domestic dispute gone bad, or a whore whose badly beaten body had been thrown into the river and had washed to the embankment. No one could for a moment have suspected the woman to be the victim of crucifixion, least of all Sharpe.

Young Inspector Stuart Copperwaite, Sharpe's assistant, now ruminated over the hideous and grisly wounds they'd found, pleading for some meaning to surface, asking his superior to help him make sense of it all. Copperwaite's pained questions floated out over the nearby river: “Why? Why kill someone in so gruesome and complicated a fashion? Why bloody crucify her?”

Sharpe, his stem gaze having returned to the body, matter-of-factly replied, “Cruelty's really little different than any other vice, Stuart.”

“Say that again, sir?”

“Cruelty requires no motive outside itself. It merely requires opportunity.”

“My God but that's profound. Better put that up over my desk,” Copperwaite said, trying to make light of the heavy moment.

When Sharpe and Copperwaite had first arrived, the London constables stood horrified around the body. Each in turn gaping over the ugly crucifix scars and the wound to the side, like that of a knife or spear. The wounds to hands and feet could only have been caused by three grim and hefty spikes- one to each palm and a third to the crossed feet. The local authorities had eagerly stepped aside for the men of the Criminal Investigation Division. No one truly wanted this case. Sharpe thought it unlikely that there would be any special claims of jurisdictional boundaries or a dispute of any sort over where the deceased's body had fallen, as had been the case in the politically charged murder of a parliamentarian a few weeks before. No such concerns for what appeared to be a woman of simple means.

Inspector Sharpe at fifty-four had seen great cruelty in his thirty-four-year-long career. Police agencies all over England, Scotland, and Wales, who were more than relieved to turn the strangest, most inhumane and bizarre cases over to England's elite detective agency, had no idea the extent of horror the average CID man saw. The sight of a crucified woman certainly qualified.

In the muffled stillness of the fog, somewhere off in the distance, another Thames River ferry blew out its mournful anthem. Both Copperwaite and Sharpe looked across the river for the boat, but the distracting noisemaker remained a phantom. “Likely the only send-off she'll receive, wouldn't you say, Stuart?”

“ 'Less we uncover a relative.”

“Pray we do. Perhaps with more information about the victim, we might start to uncover the kind of animal that she ran into. The kind of animal who could nail another human being to a cross.”

“Where do you suppose it happened? In the forest? Where do you find a cross aside from a church these days?” asked Copperwaite. “Perhaps an old tree grown into the shape of a cross?” Telephone pole perhaps… long way to come from the nearest forest to Bow Bells.”

Charring Cross Pier bustled at daybreak. Again Sharpe thought it an unlikely place for a killer to dump a body, what with the two nearby river bus depots looking on. Unless the killer meant to weigh her down and dispose of the body beneath the surface. Still, why so busy a place as this? Even in the fog, a killer wasn't likely to be so brash, unless he blended in with his surroundings to the point that no one took notice?

Likely having similar thoughts to Sharpe's own, one of the uniformed bobbies had come forward to say, “I wager the body was put in upriver somewhere and floated to this spot.”

“Aye, now that makes all the sense in the world. Makes all the sense that the Thames-rough as she is this morning- could lift this body three feet, or four, up the bank and leave not a trace of water in her hair or mouth.” Sharpe pulled forth a pipe and began chewing on the stem.

The officer, taking the sting of his superior's remarks, bit back a reply and found himself relieved when Sharpe added, “What say we hold judgment till we've scanned the ground around here. All you men! Have a search. The body does look… washed in oils, not in the waters of the Thames.”

Everyone joined in the grounds search while Sharpe again stepped away. At odds with young Copperwaite and perhaps his colleague's entire generation, Sharpe thought of the irony of having been born and raised not too far from where they stood. Copperwaite by comparison hailed from Harrogate, a seaport city in Yorkshire summed up by Copperwaite as a place where “They've nothing but bails of quaint.”

This time Stuart Copperwaite pursued his superior and walked about the embankment beside him, saying, “The victim could be difficult to identify, having no distinguishing marks and nothing whatever to pinpoint her identity.”

“You state the obvious, Stuart. “Hie fact of it weighs heavily,” agreed Sharpe, who had seen his share of faceless, nameless victims, their killings going unresolved here in London. He resignedly muttered, “Stuart, get a sketch artist on hand at the morgue to make a likeness of Mum. Make the bloody Sun's morning edition. See what comes of it. Perhaps someone will recognize her. Have a run at Missing Persons, all that.”

“Yes, of course… Perhaps someone's looking for Mum as we speak.” Copperwaite took studious notes and added, “Consider it done, Richard.”

Both men felt the cold, nibbling presence of death as it hovered about the body like some primordial creature living just beyond sight, deep in the fog, a creature in search of more souls to take.

“She really isn't your usual age for a streetwalker,” Copperwaite said, breaking the stillness between them.

“Three or four I've known have lived to the ripe old age of fifty, even sixty, Stuart, so we won't completely discount the possibility. It's possible she was plying the trade, being smeared all over with oil, being nude as she is. Hard to say really. We won't know anything for certain until someone steps forward with some information about her.”

“As for now?”

Sharpe returned to the body. He again removed the sheet to stare at the naked body, drained of all color save her purple, puckering wounds. The dead woman's feet remained stiff and overlying one another where they'd been nailed together, rigor mortis having set in, telling Sharpe that she had not been lying here long before her discovery, since rigor released its grip after four or five hours. Yes, indeed, something evil this way had come.

The trinity of nail wounds told the story of how some madman had pinned her to his idea of a cross at some other, remote location-possibly a forest somewhere as Stuart surmised. Now the gashes resembled three dead eyes. The viscosity of the flesh having been thoroughly compromised, the holes puckered in on themselves like oversized, gaping, purple gunshot wounds.

“Doesn't require Karl Schuller or any autopsiest to tell us- nor any man here-that this woman's death began with the slow, agonizing torture of having her hands and feet nailed to somebody's idea of a resurrection cross. Likely some religious fanatic,” Sharpe guessed aloud but did not speculate further. “Is that what you make of it, Sharpie?” asked Copperwaite, a look of intense pain fluttering on and off his countenance where he stood in the glow of a streetlamp. Nearby on the recently completed London to Essex motorway, automobiles whined and zipped and occasionally called out with their horns like mewing, mildly annoyed cattle.

Sharpe said no more, keeping silent counsel for as long as he might possibly do so.

Copperwaite, an exasperated breath of air flowing from him, bit back an urge to again verbally prod his senior partner for words. He felt a powerful need to hear something-anything-from the worldly, former army colonel.