William Boyd - The Blue Afternoon

Annaliese woke him, shaking his shoulder gently, and calling his name. ' Salvador… Salvador, there's a man here to see you.'

Cariscant sat up abruptly, oddly embarrassed to find his wife in his study. She wore a woollen robe pulled tightly around her and her hair was uncombed and tousled. She let the mosquito net drop and stepped back uncertainly from the divan bed as if she too suddenly felt the shame of being confronted by their unorthodox sleeping arrangements.

'What man?' Carriscant said, peering at her through the gauzy muslin. 'Pantaleon?'

'An American. He says it's very urgent.'

Carriscant dressed quickly and went through to the living room. Paton Bobby stood in the middle of the carpet, dressed in uniform, wearing a full-length cloak. Nervous servants peered, big-eyed, from doorways.

'I'm sorry, Carriscant,' Bobby said. 'Wieland can't be found. There's been another killing.'

Just beyond Santa Mesa, a poor, mean hamlet two miles east of Manila, a stone bridge crossed the San Juan river. The carriage – Bobby driving, Carriscant beside him-rumbled across its cobblestones and stopped with a gentle lurch. It was 3 o'clock in the morning. Down below them, by the water's edge, Carriscant could see half a dozen American soldiers, some holding lanterns.

Carriscant slithered down the grassy bank behind Bobby who was handed a hooded lantern by one of the soldiers. 'It's under the bridge,' Bobby said flatly, swinging the beam in that direction. Carriscant followed its unwavering path cautiously, the ground damp and marshy beneath his feet, a reek of decay and human excrement filling his nostrils.

The body of the man had been propped against the stone supports of the bridge's first arch, almost as if it had sat down there for a rest and had fallen into a doze. It still had trousers and boots but there was no trace of the rest of the uniform. This time cause of death was immediately apparent: a single blow from a bolo delivered to the top of the head, splitting it like a melon. The entire torso was soaked in treacly, dried blood, which had flowed from the head wound and, Carriscant saw, with a lurch of shock in his chest, as he crouched down to examine it, from a more torn and unstitched version of the inverted L-shaped wound that had disfigured Ephraim Ward's corpse. About two feet of intestine, ragged and frayed, had been dragged from the belly, probably by river rats. The right hand and forearm were missing, severed neatly at the elbow.

'Found at midnight,' Bobby said, his voice reverberating beneath the vault of the bridge. 'He was on furlough. Last seen last night at 10.30 p.m. in a Sampaloc bar.'

'Just over twenty-four hours… Sampaloc's only a mile or so from here. He's a soldier?'

'Corporal Maximilian Braun. German spelling.'

'I can't examine him here. Let's get him back to the hospital.'

There was the sound of wheels echoing on the roadway above their heads and soon they were joined, to Carriscant's vague surprise, by the young colonel, Sieverance, who greeted them both with due solemnity.

'Christ's blood, what a stench there is down here! What do they dump in these rivers?' He leant forward carefully, like a man peering over a parapet on a high building and spat fastidiously on the ground. He held his handkerchief to his nose as he talked. 'Governor Taft wants a full report,' Sieverance said, explaining his presence. He took off his hat and scratched his head vigorously, nervously. He was bleary-eyed and the tuft of hair he inadvertently left standing made him look absurdly young and vulnerable, Carriscant thought.

'I'm most grateful to you again, Dr Carriscant,' he said. 'We did eventually locate Dr Wieland but he's incapable of conducting any sort of investigation. He couldn't even investigate the whereabouts of his boots when I tracked him down.'

A stretcher was called for and Corporal Braun's body was carried carefully up the river bank and loaded on to Bobby's carriage. A tarpaulin was thrown over it and Bobby and Carriscant, with Sieverance close behind, made their way back through the darkened, silent city to the San Jeronimo. Porters unloaded the body, placed it on a wooden gurney, and the three men followed its monotone rumble along gloomy corridors to the morgue. The door was locked; the porter's key did not fit, neither did Carriscant's. The sister on duty was summoned and she explained that Dr Cruz had had the lock changed and the only key was in his care.

Carriscant managed to control his anger somehow and instructed the porters to take the body into his operating theatre and strip and wash it. In the meantime he, Bobby and Sieverance drank a cup of hot tea laced with rum in his consulting rooms.

Bobby seemed moved and upset. 'This is crazy,' he kept repeating. 'One, yes, you can explain. Some thug with a grievance decides to cut up his victim. Two, and it's a whole different thing. Major problem.'

'Who did you say he was?' Sieverance asked.

'A Corporal Braun.'

'Two soldiers. Got to be insurgents, surely?'

'Except the only insurgents left are three hundred miles away on another island being chased by thousands of American troops.'

'I suppose so,' Sieverance frowned. 'Yes. Fair point.'

'A major problem.'

In the theatre Braun's washed and naked body lay in a pool of brilliant light on the operating table. Both Sieverance and Bobby seemed more impressed by the gleaming chrome and general cleanliness of the room than anything else as they moved around investigating the equipment.

'This is quite an establishment, Doctor,' Sieverance said. 'No disrespect, I mean, I feel I could be in the US.'

'Well, you'd have to be somewhere very special,' Carriscant said. 'Not all of this equipment is commonly available.'

'I'm not surprised,' Sieverance nodded appreciatively. 'When I think of Wieland's surgery. The filth, the primitiveness – '

'We got co talk about Wieland, Colonel,' Bobby said. 'Seriously.'

Carriscant approached the body while they conversed briefly in low voices. Braun had been a stocky man, in his late thirties, with a sizeable paunch. His chest and belly were covered in a thick growth of springy grey hair. Carriscant selected a thin probe from his tray of instruments and inserted it into the wide wound in the chest.

'The heart has gone,' he said.

'What?' both men answered simultaneously and strode co the table.

'The heart – and the right hand, obviously. Removed competently but with no great skill.'

Sieverance turned away, paling, his fingerbacks to his lips. 'That make any sense? Is there some sort of native cult out here? Sacrificial cult or something?'

'Not that I know of,' Carriscant said.

'And what about this L-shape?' Bobby said. 'Are the other organs there?'

Carriscant duly opened up the wound. There was some displacement of the intestines, as he had expected, but otherwise everything else seemed to be as normal as possible.

'And the last one was stitched up,' he said, 'but the heart was there. This time the heart is removed and the wound left open. It makes no sense to me – I can't see any reason behind it.'

'But it can't be a coincidence,' Bobby said. 'We know that it must be the same murderer. Or murderers.'

'Where was he last seen?'

'He went out the back of a Sampaloc cathouse to take a leak. Nobody noticed he never returned. Figured he was upstairs.'

'What's in the back of these places?' Sieverance asked.

Carriscant coughed and cleared his throat, they both looked at him expectantly but he raised his spread palms in apology. Bobby shrugged.

'Some yards, few shacks, vegetable plots, open country,' he said. 'Anyone can get in or out.'

Carriscant and Bobby left Governor Taft's office in the Malacanan Palace and walked down the wide corridor in silence to the central stairway. Taft, a vast genial man, sweating copiously in a white suit, had been suitably grateful for Carriscant's help and, in confidence, had asked him for his professional opinion of Dr Wieland. 'An incompetent and diehard quack,' was Carriscant's candid verdict. On their leaving Taft had asked for his compliments to be presented to Mrs Carriscant, a request that had taken Carriscant somewhat by surprise until he remembered Annaliese's social connections with the Governor's wife.