Simon Beckett - Whispers of the Dead

He’d just shift his priorities and carry on.

Paul hadn’t really been involved with the investigation until now, but there were plenty of others who might satisfy York’s apparent desire for high-profile victims. I wasn’t arrogant enough to think that I was one of them. Even so, for the first time in days I found myself fingering my stomach, feeling the scar tissue under the cotton scrubs.

It was after ten before I finished. Noah Harper’s bones revealed nothing else of significance, but then I hadn’t expected them to. The fractured cervical vertebra had said enough. I changed and set off down the mortuary’s main corridor. I seemed to have the place to myself. There was no sign of Kyle, but he would have finished his shift long ago. One of the fluorescent strips wasn’t working, making the corridor dim. Up ahead I could see a thin beam of light seeping out from beneath the door of one of the offices. I was walking past when a voice came from inside.

‘Who’s there?’

I recognized the bad-tempered bark immediately. I knew the intelligent thing would be to walk straight past. Nothing I could say would change anything; it wouldn’t bring Tom back. Leave it. It isn’t worth it.

I opened the door and went in.

Hicks sat behind the desk, paused in the act of closing a drawer. It was the first time I’d seen him since the scene at the cemetery. Neither of us spoke for a moment. The lamp cast a low circle of light on to the desk, throwing the rest of the small office into shadow. The pathologist stared at me sullenly from the edge of it.

‘Thought you were a diener,’ he muttered. I saw the half-full tumbler of dark liquid in front of him and guessed I’d interrupted him putting away a bottle.

I’d gone in there intending to let Hicks know what I thought of him. But as I looked at him slumped behind the desk, my appetite for confrontation vanished. I turned to go.

‘Wait.’

The pathologist’s mouth worked, as though he were trying out unfamiliar words before he spoke them.

‘I’m sorry. About Lieberman.’ He studied the blotter on the desk, one fat index finger tracing an abstract pattern on it. I noticed that his cream suit looked rumpled and soiled, and realized he’d been wearing it every time I’d seen him. ‘He was a good man. We didn’t always get on, but he was a good man.’

I said nothing. If he was trying to appease a guilty conscience I wasn’t going to help him.

But he didn’t seem to expect me to. He picked up the tumbler and stared morosely into it.

‘I’ve been doing this job for over thirty years, and you know what the worst of it is? Every time it happens to someone you know, it still surprises the hell out of you.’

He pursed his lips, as though puzzling over the fact. Then he raised the tumbler to his lips and emptied it. Reaching down with a small grunt he opened the drawer and produced a nearly full bottle of bourbon. For an awful moment I thought he was going to offer me a drink, propose some maudlin toast to Tom. But he only topped up his glass before putting the bottle back in the drawer.

I stood there, waiting to see what else he might say, but he stared into space as though he’d either forgotten I was there or wished I wasn’t. Whatever urge had prompted him to talk seemed to have been exhausted.

I left him to it.

The encounter was unsettling. The comfortably black and white terms in which I’d seen Hicks had been undermined. I wondered how many other nights he’d sat alone in the small office, a lonely man whose life was empty except for his work.

It was an uncomfortable thought.

Tom’s loss was a solid ache under my breastbone as I left the morgue and headed for my car. The night was cooler than usual, the damp chill a reminder that winter was still only recent history. My footsteps echoed off the darkened buildings. Hospitals were never truly abandoned, but when visiting hours had passed they could seem lonely places. And the morgue was always set well away from casual eyes.

It wasn’t far to the car park, and I’d left my car in an open, well-lit area in its centre. But Gardner’s warning whispered in my mind as I walked towards it. What had seemed safe in daylight now took on a wholly different aspect. Doorways were shadowy holes, the grassy spaces that I’d admired in the sunshine now fields of solid black.

I kept my steps regular and even, refusing to give in to the primal urge to hurry, but I was glad when I reached my car. I took out my keys and unlocked it while I was still a few paces away. I’d started to open the door before I realized there was something on the windscreen.

A leather glove had been slipped under one of the wipers, its fingers spread out on the glass. Someone must have found it on the ground and put it there for its owner to see, I thought as I went to remove it. A subliminal voice tried to warn me that it was the wrong time of year for gloves, but by then I’d already touched it.

It was cold and greasy, and far, far too thin for any leather.

I snatched my hand away and spun round. The darkened car park mocked me, silent and empty. Heart thumping, I turned back to the object on the windscreen. I didn’t touch it again. It wasn’t a glove, I knew that now. And it wasn’t leather.

It was human skin.

GARDNER WATCHEDas a crime scene agent lifted the windscreen wiper and carefully removed the scrap of skin with a pair of tweezers. He and Jacobsen had arrived twenty minutes ago, accompanied by the large van that was the TBI’s mobile crime scene lab. Lights had been set up round the car, and the entire area taped off.

‘You shouldn’t have touched it,’ Gardner said, not for the first time.

‘If I’d realized what it was I wouldn’t have.’

Some of my irritation must have leaked into my voice. Standing next to Gardner, Jacobsen took her eyes from the crime scene team dusting the car for fingerprints. She gave me a faintly worried look, the slight tuck visible between her eyebrows again, but said nothing.

Gardner, too, fell silent. He had a large manila envelope that he’d brought with him, although so far he’d made no mention of what it might contain. He watched, expressionlessly, as a forensic agent carefully placed the skin in an evidence bag. This was a different team from the one I’d seen before. I found myself wondering if they were on another job or just standing down for the night. Not that it mattered, but it was easier thinking about that than what this new development might mean.

Holding the bag carefully in a gloved hand, the agent brought it over. He raised it up so Gardner could get a better look.

‘It’s human, all right.’

I didn’t need him to tell me that. The skin was dark brown in colour, with an almost translucent texture. It was obvious now that it was too irregular to be a glove, but the mistake was understandable. I’d seen this sort of thing often enough before.

Just not on the windscreen of my car.

‘So does this mean that York’s been skinning his victims?’ Jacobsen asked. She was doing her best to appear unruffled, but even her composure had been shaken.

‘I don’t think so,’ I said. ‘May I?’

I held out my hand for the evidence bag. The forensic agent waited until Gardner gave a short nod before passing it across.

I held it up to the light. The skin was split and torn in several places, mainly across its back, but still retained a vague hand-like shape. It was soft and supple, and an oily residue from it smeared the inside of the plastic bag.

‘It wasn’t flayed off,’ I told them. ‘If it had been then it’d be in a flat sheet. This is split in places, but it’s still more or less whole. I think it sloughed off the hand in one piece.’