A Time of Torment (30 page)

L
eaves falling; the coming and going of students. Across Maine Street, Bowdoin College Museum of Art was hosting an exhibition entitled
Night Vision
:
Nocturnes in American Art, 1860–1960
. Parker thought that he might take a look at it later, if there was time.

Williamson fiddled with his Nespresso machine. The act of making a cup of coffee appeared to help him arrange his thoughts, the physical routines echoing his mental processes. Parker had told him something of how he had come to be asking about dead kings, and Williamson had blanched as he made the connection to the man who had been found burned alive in his car over the previous weekend.

‘That – and I’m sure you’ll forgive me if I sound impressed – is a very obscure piece of folklore,’ said Williamson, as the coffee began to pour. ‘What makes you think that this man Griffin wasn’t simply referring to an individual, someone with an ear for striking nomenclature?’

‘As far as I can tell, there isn’t even a rapper called Dead King, and those guys pick up on all the good names,’ said Parker. ‘But I admit I believed I’d exhausted every avenue of inquiry, and was thinking along those same lines – that Griffin was using someone’s nickname – until I found one reference to a “dead king” in a book called
Violence and Devotion in Medieval Society
, published back in 1945.’

‘Which brought you to me.’

‘That’s why I get to put the word “investigator” on my business cards, helped by the fact that the book was written by an English academic named Norman Williamson, which led me to wonder if you might not have entered the family business.’

‘My grandfather,’ said Williamson. He searched his shelves, found his copy of the book, and handed it to Parker. ‘I wasn’t even aware that the book could be found on the Internet.’

‘Someone scanned and posted it. I’d say that you were being hurt for royalties, except I suspect it’s out of copyright by now.’

‘Not quite,’ said Williamson. ‘Nevertheless, I don’t believe that I’d have been buying a yacht with the proceeds in any case.’

The book was in plain brown boards, with the gold lettering of the author’s name and the title almost entirely rubbed away. Parker flicked to the title page and saw that it had been inscribed ‘with paternal affection and admiration’ to someone named Alice.

‘Your mother?’ asked Parker.

‘My aunt. I’m sure my mother must have had a copy too, at one point, but it went missing somewhere along the way. My mother preferred romantic fiction, which is no judgment upon the woman herself, of whom I remain very fond.’

He added milk to his coffee, and resumed his seat. Parker, meanwhile, found the page that he had printed from the Internet and brought with him, just in case Williamson, Ian, wasn’t related to Williamson, Norman, or didn’t possess a copy of the book in question.

‘The study makes only a passing reference to a dead king in the section on totems,’ said Parker. ‘Would you have anything more detailed, or more recent?’

‘I don’t think very much has been done on it,’ said Williamson. ‘Entire dictionaries and encyclopedias have been devoted to superstitions and folklore; even the best can barely find space for all of them, and that’s before you get down to the micro level. Blakeborough’s
Wit, Character, Folklore & Customs of the North Riding of Yorkshire
, published in 1898, runs to five hundred pages and includes more than four thousand idioms, and that’s just one third of the county. Or take a look at this—’

He opened a door under the shelves, and Parker saw layers of bound documents. Williamson ran a finger along the spines until he came to the one that he wanted, and gave it to Parker, who glanced at the title page.

‘
Examples of Printed Folk-Lore Concerning the East Riding of Yorkshire, Collected and Edited by Mrs Gutch
,’ Parker read aloud. ‘Who’s Mrs Gutch?’

‘Eliza Gutch. It was she who suggested the foundation of the Folklore Society in England in the nineteenth century. Take a look at the contents page.’

Parker did. It covered Natural and Inorganic Objects; Respect Paid to Trees and Plants in Alphabetical Order; and Beasts, Birds, Insects, but all of this represented only Mrs Gutch’s efforts to soften the reader up for the good stuff, including Goblindom; Leechcraft; Witchcraft; Wife-Selling; Death Portent; Dog-Whipping Day; Finding of Drowned Body; and Creaking Boots.

‘It looks like Mrs Gutch embraced a wide range of interests,’ he said.

‘Disturbingly so,’ said Williamson. ‘Useful woman, though. Without her efforts, a great deal of valuable material might have been lost. That study of the East Riding is especially meticulous, which makes what it leaves out even more fascinating.’

‘Dead kings?’

‘Very good.’

‘Maybe she just hadn’t heard of them.’

‘If she hadn’t heard of something, then it didn’t exist. That’s just it, though: she
had
heard of dead kings, but she chose not to include them in her collection.’

‘How do you know?’

‘Because my grandfather interviewed her for his book, and she confirmed it in private to him.’

‘So why exclude them?’

‘Because someone told her to.’

‘She said that?’

‘More or less. My grandfather’s notes indicate that it was the only time he detected signs of avoidance in Mrs Gutch. This was a woman perfectly at home with mythology and folklore: I can’t say how much of it she believed was real, but she clearly wasn’t easily disturbed.’

‘Did your grandfather draw any conclusions from this?’

‘He suspected, but could never prove, that somewhere in the East Riding of Yorkshire was a dead king.’

‘Which brings us to the core question,’ said Parker. ‘Namely, what exactly is a dead king?’

Outside Ashby House, a group of students tossed a miniature football around the parking lot. Across the street, a small line had formed to enter the art museum. Most of the buildings along Maine Street were owned by, or connected to, Bowdoin, even if Massachusetts Hall, the oldest college building in the state, was some distance away, on the north side of the original quadrangle. It gave the individual departments the feeling of outposts, of being their own self-contained universes, and Williamson’s office, with its crosses and mandalas, its shofars, its murtis of the Hindu deities, seemed particularly like a world of its own, especially when the pagan artifacts were included: images of fertility goddesses or massively phallic males, and half-glimpsed demons carved in stone so worn by time that, from a certain angle, they might be viewed as retreating into the material as belief in them faded or, alternatively, emerging slowly from the rocks in which they had hidden themselves, believing that their time had come again.

‘What do you know of hands of glory?’ asked Williamson.

‘Nothing that wouldn’t be considered rude.’

Williamson raised his eyes to whatever god he happened to be researching at that particular time. ‘I already have hundreds of teenagers to try my patience,’ he said, ‘but you just had to add yourself to their number.’

‘Sorry.’

‘Never mind, I’m used to it. A hand of glory is the dried, preserved hand of a hanged man: it’s usually the left although, in the case of a murderer, a preference might be expressed for the hand that committed the crime. Numerous preparations were suggested for its preservation, including soaking it in varieties of urine, but the ultimate end was to ensure what remained was a talisman that could be used to cure illness or, if fitted with a candle, to take away the power of motion and speech. It wasn’t just hands, either. People fought under the scaffold for teeth, ears, bits of hair, anything that might retain the essence of the deceased.

‘Maybe even severed heads.’

Here he gave a tug at his chin, as though to ensure that his own head remained intact and in place.

‘Heads, heads, heads …’

Williamson went to a shelf and found a small silver coin, which he handed to Parker. The coin had a hole cut close to the edge, perhaps through which to pass a chain.

‘What is it?’ asked Parker.

‘An Aethelred penny, minted in Cambridge, England. It’s over a millennium old. What you’re holding may once have been in contact with a dead king.’

Parker stopped gently rubbing the coin and put it on the table between them. He still wasn’t sure what a dead king was, and until he was he wanted to limit his exposure.

‘Dead kings may have originated in England – certainly, the oldest of them was found there – but it’s possible the tradition may also have been influenced by Viking mercenaries. In 2009, a burial pit was revealed at Ridgeway Hill, Dorset, in the southwest of England, which is where that coin was discovered. The pit contained the remains of over fifty young Viking men – fifty-four, to be exact, for reasons that will become clear in a moment – all of whom had been murdered and then decapitated. While it’s not entirely certain who they were, a Cambridge researcher named Dr Britt Baillie has concluded that they were Jomsvikings: elite killers, mercenaries who operated from a base in Jomsborg on the Baltic coast. The order to kill them may have come from the Anglo-Saxon ruler Aethelred II, known as Aethelred the Unready because of his reluctance to listen to counsel, who decided to have all the Vikings in England slaughtered on St Brice’s Day, November 13, 1002. Aethelred employed bands of Viking mercenaries to do his dirty work, but he was growing tired of Viking raids on his coast, and feared for his life, so he seems to have decided to get rid of the lot of them, and have done with it. At Ridgeway Hill, the Jomsvikings, if that is indeed who they were, were systematically executed from the front. In other words, they were looking their executioners in the eye when they were beheaded, which bespeaks no small amount of bravery.

‘So fifty-four bodies were found in the grave, which would lead one to suspect that there should also be fifty-four skulls, as the heads were all piled together at the far side of the pit. Yet there were not fifty-four heads at Ridgeway, but fifty-five.’

‘A lost body?’ Parker suggested. ‘Someone executed elsewhere, with only the head transported because it was too much trouble to haul along the corpse?’

‘It would make sense if the fifty-fifth head was also that of a Norseman, but it wasn’t. Isotope testing on the teeth revealed that the head originated in southern Europe, probably from what was then the Caliphate of Cordoba. It was also at least a century and a half older than the other remains, and holes in the skull suggested that it had once been adorned in some way, probably with gold or precious stones, or coins’ – he gestured at the silver penny on the table – ‘all of which had been removed by the killers of the Vikings.’

‘What’s the explanation?’

‘The skull was a totem, a talisman. One of the first – maybe even
the
first – of the dead kings. The Vikings roamed as far east as the Khazar Khanate, between the Black and Caspian Seas. Cordoba was on that route, and had been raided as early as the ninth century.

‘My grandfather, it’s safe to say, would have been fascinated by the Ridgeway find. In his absence, I took the time to visit the site when I was home for a few weeks. It seemed the least I could do to honor the first Professor Williamson. A dead king, then, is a kind of effigy, typically centered on the skull of a victim, but very rare, even in its most basic form, and the creation of one, as far as we can tell, is entirely the preserve of the most extreme of criminal groups or gangs. By its nature, it requires a certain specialization in killing, because the potency, and therefore the efficacy, of the totem is enhanced by the addition of further body parts from new victims. It doesn’t really matter how big or small the remains are; what’s important is that they represent something of the life force of the dead.

‘Think of it like the natives of certain tribes who consumed the flesh of those whom they had killed in battle. The braver the dead warrior, the more potent the meat. Potency is linked to belief. In a way, you have one of the greatest dead kings of them all visible in almost every Christian church: the crucified Christ. He may not be constructed from actual body parts, but the Christian church makes up for it by having enough relics of saints to fill a good-sized cemetery. And in the Catholic faith transubstantiation turns the bread and wine in the sacrament of the Eucharist into not merely the figurative or symbolic, but the actual body and blood of Christ – if that’s what you’re prepared to believe.

‘Anyway, when those natives eat their enemies, the vitality of the fallen warrior passes to them. A dead king is trickier: it’s not just a symbol, and it’s not lightly named. You
serve
a dead king. You’re its subject. As it is added to, and its potency grows, so too does its hold on those who created it increase.’

Parker watched Williamson as he spoke, his hands moving rapidly to emphasize his pronouncements. Beside the silver coin on the table lay the copy of his grandfather’s book. All this, Parker thought, from a single reference in an old book, happened across after hours of searching on the Internet. He should have thought it odd that a link to what he might be seeking had come in the form of a man who lived only thirty minutes up the highway from Portland, an academic from whom he had sought help in the past, and whose grandfather happened to have been the one to make a passing reference to dead kings in his work.

But he did not find it strange at all.

There was a time when the detective had almost lost his faith, in the weeks and months after the loss of his wife and first daughter. He wondered what kind of god would allow that level of suffering and violence to be inflicted on two innocents, and had been tempted to conclude that the only answer was no god at all. But he had seen too much since then to believe that what lay beyond death was nothingness, for Jennifer had returned, and others too, and he himself had sat by the shores of a still lake, waiting for a car to take him on the last journey, the Long Ride.

Whatever entity ruled in the next world – benevolent, uncaring, or simply wanton in its cruelty – had not burned every clue. It had left traces of itself, and if one glanced over them, not heeding, not noticing, they could be passed off as coincidence, or luck. And sometimes that was all it was, but the trick was to be able to tell the difference between accident and intent.