Simon Beckett - Whispers of the Dead

‘Do you want to take a look down there?’ I asked, looking down at the pond glinting through the trees.

Gardner considered it without enthusiasm. ‘Not yet. Let’s wait till the crime scene truck gets here.’

He still showed no inclination to go back inside. He stared down the hillside towards the pond, hands thrust deep into his pockets. I wondered if it was to stop them shaking. He’d just killed a man, and no matter how unavoidable it might have been that couldn’t be easy to deal with.

‘Are you OK?’ I asked.

It was like watching a shutter come down across his face.

‘Fine.’ He took his hands from his pockets. ‘You still haven’t told me what the hell you thought you were doing, coming in here by yourselves. Do you have any idea how stupid that was?’

‘Sam would be dead if we hadn’t.’

That took the heat out of him. He sighed. ‘Diane thinks York was waiting till the last minute, right till she was actually giving birth. He would’ve wanted to make the most of the opportunity. Two lives for one.’

Christ. I stared across at the mountains, trying to dispel the images that had been conjured.

‘You think she’ll be OK?’ Gardner asked.

‘I hope so.’ Providing they got her to hospital in time. Providing there were no complications with the baby. It was a lot to hope for, but at least now she had some sort of chance. ‘How did you manage to get here so fast? I wasn’t sure you’d heard my directions.’

‘We hadn’t. At least, none that made sense,’ he said, with a touch of his old acerbity. ‘We didn’t need to, though. After York left the skin on the windscreen we put a Bird Dog on your car.’

‘A what?’

‘A GPS tracking device. We knew where you’d left the car, but the old road you took isn’t on any maps. So I took the one that seemed nearest and it led us right to the front gate.’

‘You put a tracker on my car? And didn’t bother to tell me?’

‘You didn’t need to know.’

That explained why I hadn’t seen anyone following me the night before, and how the TBI agents had arrived at Paul and Sam’s so quickly. I felt a flash of annoyance that no one had seen fit to let me know about it, but under the circumstances I could hardly complain.

I was just glad it had been there.

‘So how did you know you’d got the right place?’ I asked.

He gave a shrug. ‘I didn’t. But there was a new padlock on an old gate, so someone obviously wanted to keep people out. We’d bolt cutters in the trunk, so I cut the lock off and came to take a look.’

I raised my eyebrows at that. Breaking into private property without a warrant was a cardinal sin, and Gardner was a stickler for protocol. His face darkened.

‘I decided your phone call constituted probable cause.’ His chin came up. ‘Come on, let’s get back inside.’

The cloying odour of decomposition wrapped itself around us as we went back down the corridor. The light from the French doors didn’t reach into the spa, and after the bright sunshine the dim chambers seemed more dismal than ever. Even though I knew what to expect, it didn’t lessen the impact of seeing the corpses heaped in the plunge pool like so much rubbish.

York’s body lay as we’d left it, as unmoving as his victims.

‘Lord, how did he stand the smell?’ Gardner said.

We went into the small chamber where we’d found Sam. The severed ends of the leather strap that Paul had cut from her throat lay like a dead snake on the old massage table. The windlass bolted to its head had been crafted with obvious care. The ends of the strap fed into an intricate arrangement of finely machined cogs, operated by a polished wooden handle. Turning it would cause the strap to tighten, while the cogs would prevent it from slipping when the handle was released.

A much simpler construct would have been just as effective, but that wouldn’t have been good enough for York. Narcissist that he was, he wouldn’t have been satisfied with a cord twisted round a piece of wood.

This was his life’s work.

‘Helluva device.’ Gardner sounded almost admiring. Suddenly, he stiffened, cocking his head. ‘What’s that?’

I listened, but the only sound was the still-dripping tap. Gardner was already out of the treatment room, hand poised on his gun. I followed him.

Nothing in the spa had changed. York still lay unmoving, the blood pooled around him as black and still as pitch. Gardner quickly checked through the archway leading to the blocked-off rooms. He relaxed, letting his jacket fall over his gun again.

‘Can’t have been anything…’

He seemed embarrassed, but I didn’t blame him for being jumpy. I’d be relieved myself when the back-up arrived.

‘You better show me the other bodies,’ Gardner said, all business again.

I didn’t go with him into the small chamber where Paul and I had found Summer. I’d already seen more than I wanted. I waited in the spa, standing by York’s body. It lay sprawled on its side in the shards of broken mirror, the jagged fragments like silver islands in the blood.

I stared down at the unmoving form, struck as ever by the gulf between its utter immobility and the roaring energy it had possessed a short while ago. I felt too empty for either hate or pity. All the lives York had sacrificed had been a futile attempt to answer a single question: Is this all there is?

Now he had his answer.

I was about to turn away, but something stopped me. I looked back at York, uncertain whether I was imagining it. I wasn’t.

Something was wrong with his eyes.

Careful to avoid the blood, I crouched beside the body. The sightless eyes were so bloodshot that they looked scalded. The skin around them was badly inflamed. So was his mouth. I leaned forward and flinched back as acrid fumes made my own eyes water.

Darkroom chemicals.

My heart was thumping as I tugged York’s body on to its back. The bloodstained hand with the knife flopped limply as it rolled over. I remembered how Gardner had kicked at it before checking his pulse, yet the knife remained clenched in the dead fist. Now I saw why.

Clotted with drying blood, York’s fingers had been nailed to the handle.

In that instant, everything fell into place. The agonized keening and York’s unintelligible screams; the frenzied slashes of the knife. He’d have been in agony, the toxic chemicals searing his mouth and all but blinding him as he’d tried to pull the nails from his hand. We’d seen only what we’d expected, the crazed attack of a madman, but York hadn’t been attacking us.

He’d been begging for help.

Oh, dear God. ‘Gardner!’ I shouted, starting to scramble to my feet.

I heard him emerge from the chamber behind me. ‘For Christ’s sake, what the hell do you think you’re doing?’

What happened next unfolded with the treacle-slow helplessness of a dream.

The remains of the big mirror that York had broken was still fixed to the wall in front of me. In its fragmented surface I saw Gardner pass the plunge pool. As he did, one of the bodies in it moved. My voice died as it detached itself from the others and rose up behind him.

Time started up again. I gave a shout of warning, but it came too late. There was a strangled cry, and I came to my feet to see Gardner struggling to pull free of the arm that was clamped vice-like round his throat.

Chokehold, I thought, dumbly. Then the figure standing behind him shifted its grip, and I felt a shock of recognition as the dirty light from the shuttered windows fell on to its face.

Kyle was breathing raggedly through his open mouth. The round features were the same, but this wasn’t the amiable young morgue assistant I remembered. His clothes and hair were clotted with fluid from the putrefying bodies, and his face had a deathly, consumptive pallor. But it was his eyes that were the worst. Without the usual smile to disguise them, they had the flat, empty look of something already dead.