Tom Weaver - The Dead Tracks

I remembered the man at Markham's flat. The weirdness of his face: how his mouth and eyes had moved, but the rest of him had remained perfectly still.

Now I could see why.

We searched the living room. No clay. No sculpting tools. No liquid latex. No paints. No reference materials or pictures of Sykes. There was nothing to suggest the mask had been created inside the house. With something as complex and time-consuming as moulding and styling a latex mask, there would be evidence. Instead, the house was half empty. So it must have been brought here.

Healy walked across the room and looked up into the darkness of the staircase. He flicked on the torch, waving it up and down the steps to check they weren't in the same state of disrepair as the ones next door. Then he tried the light switches next to him on the wall. None of them did anything. He glanced at me and nodded that he was going to have a look around upstairs. I nodded back. As he disappeared into the shadows, just a cone of light as his guide, I headed to the rear of the house.

Clackclackclack .

Something moved in the darkness of the kitchen. Left to right. I side-stepped and leaned left, trying to get a better view around the counter. But there was nothing now. No movement. No sound other than Healy moving around upstairs, the floorboards creaking under his weight.

I took a step forward.

Clackclackclack .

Then there was a faint squeak, like a rusty hinge moving.

I took out my phone, flipped it open and directed the light from the display into the space on the other side of the worktop. A rat scurried away, its claws making a clack- clackclack noise on the linoleum. It headed through a hole between one of the cupboards and the cooker.

As I went around the worktop I saw a second rat, its fat pink tail visible, the rest of its body hidden by one of the units. It wasn't squeaking and it definitely wasn't moving, but there was still a noise. A different one: moist, wet, like it was chewing on something. To my left I spotted Healy coming down the stairs, the torch in front of him. He looked at me and shook his head. Nothing upstairs. Then a fly buzzed past my face. As I went to swat it away I felt another, dozy and unresponsive. A second later, I could hear more.

They were everywhere.

And then my senses opened up: animals, blood — and decay.

I flipped open my phone again, swinging the blue light around to the space behind the counter. The rat moved this time, following the path of the other one.

Clackclackclack.

Except this one left a trail: a series of tiny red marks.

Footprints.

Lying on the floor, half slumped against the kitchen units, was the body of a man. His arms were at his sides, palms up, fingers curled into claws. His eyes stared off into the night, wide and pale, and his clothes, and the lino around him, were covered in blood. His T-shirt had been torn open about halfway down, and on the skin of his chest I could see a series of knife wounds, probably made with a serrated blade: long and thin, thrust in so deep and pulled out so quickly that flesh, muscle and fat had come with it. His trousers were riding up either leg, and one sock was on the other side of the kitchen, among blood spatters that looked like arterial spray.

'So what the fuck are we supposed to do now?' Healy said from behind me, shining the torch into the face of the man on the floor.

We'd found Daniel Markham.

Chapter Fifty-six

Healy traced Markham's dead body with the torch, careful not to disturb the crime scene. Eventually we'd have to call it in, but first we had to clear our heads. Press Reset. Our best lead was lying in a pool of his own blood on the floor of a derelict house.

'Difficult to tell how long,' Healy said, 'unless you want to shove a thermometer up his arse and take his temperature.'

He moved the torch beam down Markham's arm, blue veins prominent below the skin. The blood that hadn't left his body through his chest had pooled in his legs, his feet and the small of his back. Healy used the torch to signal one of his calves. The area directly in contact with the lino hadn't filled with blood. The area just above it had.

'That's hypostasis,' he said.

Once gravity kicks in, your red blood cells head south and settle; but the skin that's in direct contact with a surface won't fill up because the capillaries are compressed.

He swung the torch around the kitchen.

'The body hasn't been moved,' he continued. 'Once the red blood cells drop, they stay dropped. If he'd been turned over from his front, the blood would be in his shins, knees, top of his thighs and the front of his chest - not where it is now.'

'Looks like he's got rigor mortis too,' I said.

Healy stopped, turned to me, eyes narrowing. 'So what else am I telling you that you already know?' He was angry that we'd hit another dead end, and he needed someone to offload on. 'You going to tell me how it is you're a part- time pathologist as well as a part-time policeman?'

I let the insult slide.

' Huh ?'

'What are we arguing about, Healy?'

'I just like to know who I'm dealing with.'

I rubbed my fingers across my forehead. I'd only known him for a short space of time, but Healy was nothing if not predictable.

'I wanna know who I've got along for the ride,' he said. 'I don't want surprises. I don't want a knife in my back.'

I stared at him. 'What's that supposed to mean?'

'You know what it means.'

'I don't even know what you're getting your knickers in a twist about. So I know what rigor mortis looks like. So what?'

'So, I don't trust you.'

You don't have to trust me. You just have to work with me. When this is all over, I'm sure there'll be plenty of time for us to find a cosy corner somewhere and discuss what we do and do not know about the human body after it dies.'

His eyes narrowed again. 'What the fuck do you know about death?'

He realized what he'd said within about a second of it coming out of his mouth, but Healy wasn't the type to apologize. The best he could do was a vague flattening of his mouth. It was a typical Healy moment; a pointless argument borne out of him realizing he wasn't in complete control.

He fixed the torchlight on Markham's face.

'Yeah, he's stiffened up,' he said quietly.

Rigor always starts in the facial muscles, before crawling its way through the jaw and the throat and then out into the rest of the body. It can give you an approximate time of death, but even a pathologist would have struggled to pinpoint it exactly based on the kind of conditions we were dealing with. The fact that rigor mortis had set in certainly put him at under thirty-six hours, and the hypostasis in the lower parts of his body was a dark purple. I'd shadowed the Forensic Science Laboratory in Pretoria for two months as part of a feature I was writing about post- apartheid South Africa in the late nineties, and had been to a few crime scenes. Maximum lividity occurred about six to twelve hours after hypostasis set in. Which meant Markham was alive when he woke up this morning.

'If we call this in, it's over,' Healy said, the torch back on Markham's body, running the length of one of the knife wounds. This whole thing goes down the toilet.'

I nodded. He was right. At the moment, we were ahead of the curve and the police were playing catch-up.

I started pulling the room apart, pushing furniture aside, dragging the sofa out from the wall, trying to zero in on anything that would give us a lead. Healy started as well, stepping around Markham in the kitchen, and opening and shutting drawers.

Moving to the TV cabinet and the stack of videotapes, I knelt down and started pulling them out of their sleeves, tossing them away one after the other.