Simon Beckett: Whispers of the Dead

‘How is he?’ I asked the agent kneeling by him.

‘Hard to say,’ she said. ‘Paramedics are on their way, but we weren’t expecting to need them. The hell happened here?’

I didn’t have the energy to answer. I turned to where Kyle lay sprawled on his back. His chest and stomach were coated with blood, and his eyes gazed sightlessly at the ceiling.

‘Don’t bother, he’s dead,’ the agent told me as I reached down to feel his throat.

He wasn’t, not quite. There was the faintest whisper of a pulse under the skin. I kept my fingers there, looking down into the open eyes as his heart gave its final stutters. They grew weaker, the gaps between them longer and longer until eventually they stopped altogether.

I stared into his eyes. But if there was anything there I couldn’t see it.

‘You’re hurt.’

The agent kneeling by Gardner was looking at my hand. I saw that it was dripping blood. I must have gashed it on the piece of broken mirror, although I’d no memory of it happening. The cut sliced across the existing knife scar on my palm like a thin mouth, blood welling between its lips.

I’d felt nothing until then, but now it started to burn with a cold, clean pain.

I clenched my hand on it. ‘I’ll live.’

IT WAS RAININGin London. After the vivid sunshine and lush mountains of Tennessee, England seemed grey and dull. The tube was busy with the tail end of the evening rush hour, the usual day-worn commuters crammed into each other’s personal space. I flicked through the newspaper I’d bought at the airport, feeling the usual sense of dislocation as I read about events that had happened while I’d been away. Coming home after a long trip is always like finding yourself transplanted a few weeks in the future, a mundane form of time-travel.

The world had gone on without me.

The taxi driver was a polite Sikh who was content to drive in silence. I stared out at the early evening streets, feeling grubby and jet-lagged after the long flight. My own street looked somehow different when we turned on to it. It took me a moment to realize why. The branches of the lime trees had been barely shading green when I’d left; now they were shaggy with new leaves.

The rain had slowed to a drizzle, varnishing the pavement with a dark gloss as I climbed out and paid the driver. I picked up my flight bag and case and carried them to the front door, flexing my hand slightly when I set them down. I’d taken the dressing off several days before, but my palm was still a little tender.

The sound of the key turning in the lock echoed in the small hallway. I’d put a stop on my post before I’d gone away, but there was still a forlorn pile of fliers and leaflets on the black and white floor tiles. I pushed them aside with my foot as I carried the cases inside and shut the door behind me.

The flat looked exactly the same as when I’d left it, except dulled by several weeks’ accumulation of dust. I paused in the doorway for a moment, feeling the familiar pang of its emptiness. But not so sharply as I’d expected.

I dumped the case on the floor and set my flight bag on the table, cursing as a heavy clunk reminded me what was inside. I unzipped the bag, expecting to be greeted by the reek of spilt alcohol, but nothing was broken. I set the odd-shaped bottle on the table, the tiny horse and jockey perched on the cork still frozen in mid-gallop. I was tempted to open it now, but it was still early. Something to look forward to later.

I went into the kitchen. There was a slight chill in the flat, reminding me that, spring or not, I was back in England. I switched the central heating back on, then as an afterthought filled the kettle.

It had been weeks since I’d had a cup of tea.

The message icon on my phone was flashing. There were over two dozen messages. I automatically reached out to play them, then changed my mind. Anyone who needed to contact me urgently would have called my mobile.

Besides, none of them would be from Jenny.

I made myself a mug of tea and took it to the dining table. There was an empty fruit bowl in its centre, a slip of paper lying in it. I picked it up and saw it was a note I’d made before I’d left: Confirm arrival time w. Tom.

I balled it up and dropped it back in the bowl.

Already, I could feel my old life starting to reclaim me.

Tennessee seemed like an age ago, the memory of the sunlit garden of dragonflies and corpses, and the nightmare scenes in the sanitarium, starting to assume the unreal quality of a dream. But it had been real enough.

Forty-one bodies had been recovered at Cedar Heights; twenty-seven from the grounds, the rest from the spa and treatment rooms. Kyle hadn’t discriminated. His victims were a random mix of age, sex and ethnicity. Some of them had been dead for almost ten years, and the task of identifying them was still going on. The wallets and credit cards he’d saved speeded the process to an extent, but it soon became apparent that there were more bodies than there were IDs. Many of his victims had been vagrants and prostitutes whose disappearances weren’t always noticed, let alone reported.

If Kyle hadn’t felt the need to prove himself, he could have carried on indefinitely.

But not all the victims were anonymous. Irving’s body had been recovered from the same chamber as Summer’s, and amongst the others who had been identified three names stood out. One was Dwight Chambers. His wallet and driver’s licence were in the pile in the sanitarium’s kitchen, and his body was found in the spa, confirming York’s story about the casual worker he’d hired at Steeple Hill.

The second name to ring alarm bells was that of Carl Philips, a forty-six-year-old paranoid schizophrenic who had gone missing from a state psychiatric hospital more than a decade before. Not only were his remains the oldest that had been found at the sanitarium, but his grandfather had been the founder of Cedar Heights. Philips had inherited the derelict property but never bothered to develop it. It had lain fallow and forgotten, inhabited only by the termites and dragonflies.

Until Kyle had put it to use.

But it was the discovery of the third ID that caused most consternation. It belonged to a twenty-nine-year-old morgue assistant from Memphis, whose faded driver’s licence was lying on the cabinet under the victims’ photographs. His remains had been recovered from undergrowth by the pond and positively identified from dental records.

His name was Kyle Webster.

‘He’d been dead eighteen months,’ Jacobsen told me, when I’d called her after seeing a news report on TV. ‘There’re going to be questions about how an impostor could have secured a job in the morgue, but in fairness his documentation and references were authentic. And there was enough of a resemblance to the real Webster to fool anyone who only had old photographs to go on.’

I supposed it was in keeping with everything else he’d done. The man we’d known as Kyle Webster had delighted in misdirection all along. It shouldn’t have come as a surprise that he’d slipped into the life of one of his victims as easily as he had the sloughed skin from their hands.

‘So if he wasn’t Kyle Webster, then who was he?’ I asked.

‘His real name was Wayne Peters. Thirty-one years old, from Knoxville originally, but worked as a morgue assistant in Nashville and then Sevierville, until he disappeared off the map two years ago. But it’s his background before then that’s interesting. Father unknown, mother died when he was an infant, so he was brought up by his aunt and uncle. Extremely bright by all accounts, did well at high school and even applied for medical college. Then things went sour. Around the time he was seventeen school records show he suddenly seemed to lose interest. He didn’t make the grades he needed and wound up working for the family business until it went broke when his uncle died.’