The Body of a Woman

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Authors: Clare Curzon

BOOK: The Body of a Woman
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Friday, 2 July
 
‘Beautiful,' he whispered, watching himself slit-eyed in the tilted cheval glass. With one long forefinger he traced the wingspan of an eyebrow, then followed down the line of his nose from bridge to chiselled nostril. He knew whose features his own copied. She had been beautiful too. Before the accident.
He moaned and his image lurched at a surrealist angle, foreshortened, kneecaps enormous, chalky face elongated and planed like a Lucian Freud nude's.
The woman, face uppermost, curved limply over his splayed thighs. The pair of them made a pietà in white marble. Her eyes were shut now. He must have overdone it, but he couldn't remember how. Or quite when.
He'd left her for only a moment, bound. Bound to be bound - he smiled - because she was a wild thing, spitting like a llama at the zoo. So he'd taped her mouth, like her wrists, with the sticky-backed plastic used for sealing parcels.
When he got back, so few minutes later, the gag was torn off. She was different, older somehow. He wasn't even sure it was the same doll. Her unpinned hair seemed longer. He saw now it was tinted with henna. How could she have changed so much while he was gone for the stuff; more for himself and something for her. But she'd no longer need it; not like this.
He passed one hand over his eyes. Time was treacherous. Days passed in a moment, or were lost entirely. Things could happen twice over, making you think time had stopped and you were in a forever-now. Or in a dream dreaming you were waking from a dream, but instead you went on asleep dreaming you were waking, over and over again.
He leaned across, shifting his feet so that one thigh was accommodated by the hollow above her buttocks; the other nudging in between her scapulae. Admiring in the mirror his fine, long-fingered hands, he touched one pointed breast. There was no response.
She was no use this way, beautiful but spoiled. He frowned, peering closer. Her face - it seemed there were two faces, one (from memory) hovering like a transparency over this other which he did not care to stare at long. The wide rictus was an animal snarl, the purple tongue extruded. Her eyes - dear God! He closed them with his hand.
Anger roared through him like a fireball. That she should make herself so hideous! It was indecent. Cover her, cover her quickly. He groped about his feet for the dress, forced it over her head, laid her on the carpet to pull her arms through the fine shoulder straps.
He peered at her again. Suspicion hardened in him that there had been two dolls, one now and another some time ago. This was the false one. He was flooded with fury.
She did not deserve that lovely hair. It was wasted on her. He wound its ends around his left wrist. The kitchen knife he'd used to free her ankles slashed close against the scalp as he sheared. Bright blood like little scarlet beads sprang from her flesh but she made no protest. He did not want her.
If she comes again, he told himself, I shall know her that way. She cannot pretend then to be the other one. Chloë's hair will be loose about her shoulders. This one's, the imposter's, I shall keep. She must come begging for it back.
He had to conceal that face. Her party mask had fallen between the legs of the mirror stand. He crouched to reach through and met his own face aggressively thrust at him. Retrieving the mask, he bunched his other fist and beat at the glass. Shards fell tinkling from the frame and were silenced in the thick carpet.
It didn't hurt at first. He had fitted the bird-mask over her shaggy skull before he was aware of the ripped flesh on his
knuckles. From its black frame of cock's tail-feathers the cruel beak curved towards him as his own blood spurted. He whimpered.
‘Plus becquetez d'oiseaulx que dez a couldre!'
The words sang in his ears. That was François Villon's ‘Ballade for the Hanged.' He closed his eyes to savour the sweet decadence and saw a body suspended from a gibbet. The birds' tearing beaks were pecking and pocking the dead flesh like any half-coconut hanging from a string in the garden.
First-year Uni French Lit returning to give him the shakes. But this black raven here was incapable of pecking. And people weren't hanged any more, whatever their crimes.
A burst of loud voices and party music signalled a door opening somewhere deep inside the house. There was a shout of wild laughter. A girl squealed with glee. People coming this way. He heard steps in the passage outside.
He couldn't be found like this. Nursing the hurt hand against his chest, he nudged the body aside with one foot, thrust the curtains apart and swung himself over the windowsill, dropping sixteen feet to the shrubbery below. A twiggy bush rasped painfully against his quivering flesh.
Cowering, he recalled that he was naked.
Nan Yeadings stood back by the theatre's closed entrance, distancing herself from the boisterous hallooing at taxis. The crowd began to disperse with a slamming of car doors. Couples broke away, walking off into the scented summer night, silently linked or babbling enthusiasm. One of the older men she'd glimpsed in the crush bar wobbled across and peered into her face. ‘Coma longa us,' he invited. ‘Cram in together, eh? Much more fun.'
‘Thank you,' she said, ‘but my husband's fetching the car.'
Owlishly the man considered this, slowly shook his head and staggered off as Mike drew up at the kerbside and leaned across to open her door.
‘I think I was just propositioned,' she claimed happily, belting herself in.
‘M'm. The streetlighting's not too good just here.'
‘Thanks, but I refuse to be deflated. It was a great play and it's a lovely night. Just see that wonderful velvet sky.'
He looked admiringly across at her still sparkling with excitement from the final curtain, at the uplifted chin, the bright eyes and hint of a smile. ‘You're lovely too. That was a cheap crack of mine.' He leaned across and kissed her lightly on the cheek.
They stayed silent as he steered free of the dispersing crowd, threading through Windsor's narrow streets under the Castle's humped shadow. She had lowered her window and was drinking in the night air as they headed for the motorway.
‘I love being out in the dark,' she said suddenly. ‘Everything comes so vibrantly alive. I feel a kid again. There's a thrill in all those lighted windows reaching out from the blackness. I can imagine the hundreds and thousands of unknown people behind them, all busy with their secret lives.'
Well, she was right there, about secret lives. Not that he was so enchanted himself by those unknown thousands. It was part of his ever-present problem: penetrating too many of those same secrets, worming out the truth about unpalatable activities. In the best of all possible worlds, which Nan would dearly love to believe in, there would be no need for his job.
Not that his steady, pragmatic Nan permanently wore rose-coloured spectacles. No one who'd been a casualty nurse and theatre sister at the old Westminster Hospital kept her illusions long. He remembered from his years as a young copper in the Met the sort of scenes she'd faced in A&E on a Friday night, threatened with flick knives and broken bottles by crazed junkies desperate for a fix. Nor had dealing with the shattered bodies of IRA bomb victims been a petalled path.
At present her life provided what she claimed she most wanted, with a husband, children and a home to run. Yet he doubted it could really be enough for anyone so vital - the restraints of dull domesticity plus the demands of a riotous toddler and an older Downs' Syndrome daughter. His Nan fitted the role so well that he was accustomed to seeing her that way. It took an evening such as this to remind him she was so much more than an efficient home-maker.
Nan didn't often expose her inner emotions. It was perhaps the play that made her put so much into words, having agonised for almost three hours over the intimate problems of invented characters, taking them on as her own, as was the way with women.
The Rover took the next motorway exit and almost instantly they were in real country, their headlights slicing through avenues of arching trees, picking out a single golden group of beeches leaning to the road, and the tiny rounded shapes of rabbits bunking off to the safety of long grass. Nan was sitting forward, drinking it all in like a child.
‘We must do this more often,' he offered. He reached
forward to the radio and smooch music filled the car, good old fifties stuff from before the world got so cynical; a remake of Nat King Cole.
‘We really were kids then,' he allowed.
‘Mike, we were barely born!' A gurgling laugh escaped her.
‘They try to tell me I'm too young,' he crooned. Then the song changed to ‘Some Enchanted Evening' which he'd nostalgically hoarded in vinyl. It recalled sad memories finally chased away by their finding one another. For a brief moment they were separate again, each knowing the other vulnerable.
Home soon, Yeadings thought. Drive the child-minder back; a drop of The Macallan for nightcap, a look-in on Sally and Luke, then bed, with Nan warmly yielding in his arms. Not perhaps a showbiz Enchanted Evening, but certainly the satisfactory end of a tender and comfortable one. He was a very lucky man.
Then, just short of Shotters Wood, blue lights flickered ahead. ‘An accident?' Nan queried as they cruised close.
‘That's Mott's Saab.' Yeadings passed to draw up beside a marked police car. A constable shone a flashlight towards them.
‘I must ask you to move on, sir. There's been - oh sorry, Mr Yeadings. I didn't see you. DI Mott's attending, sir. There's room to park further down.'
‘I'd better show my face,' Mike told Nan, pulling in on the opposite verge. ‘The constable's a chatty sort and Angus might wonder if we breezed past. I'll take a quick look and be straight back. Do you mind waiting?'
So much for his aroused romantic feelings, he thought wryly, fetching his wellies from the car boot and stuffing in his trouser legs. There was starlight enough to follow the blue and white plastic tape that marked out a path to the incident.
It was, as he'd guessed, a body.
No more than fifty yards in among the trees he came upon it. Little effort had been made to conceal it under the edge of a scratchy hawthorn. The dry earth had been roughly hollowed out by hand and a thin layer of leaf mould scattered around.
‘Just passing by,' Yeadings greeted his DI who looked at him curiously, standing up to make room.
He took Mott's proffered flashlight and hunkered alongside. At first sight his breath escaped in an audible whoosh. He had half expected an old vagrant worn out from a hard life on the road and gut rot from meths. But this was bizarre; at the other extreme.
The body lay curled on one side in the shallow dip, knees to chin, with the neck twisted to make it seem to gaze skyward. Except that there was no face.
Instead he met the head of a huge bird of prey. Behind the cruelly curved beak eagle features glittered with black sequins, surrounded by a sable burst of cock's tail-feathers.
From its clothes the body appeared to be female, but Yeadings wouldn't assume as much. The extravagantly exotic outfit posed a question, and at one point where the long feathers were crushed he glimpsed dark hair razored close, almost non-existent, with skin showing through bone-white in patches.
He lifted aside a thorny branch to get a clearer view and observed dried blood beading the scalp where the blade used had left savage gashes. Never a haircut of the victim's choosing.
This mutilation reminded him of ritual punishment to women traitors after World War II. Such hair as showed seemed almost black, but with the metallic red glint of henna.
The bloody gouging suggested the victim had struggled against being sheared. Had this resistance pushed the attacker further, into killing? Or was death intended in any case to follow the mutilation? Murder in a frenzy of retaliation, or cold-blooded sadism? And was there a sex angle here?
‘What have we got?' Yeadings asked his DI.
Mott straightened. ‘No ID. No handbag found so far, and I haven't uncovered the face because I know Littlejohn would want to see her untouched in situ. He's on his way.
‘Duty police surgeon has come and gone. He just confirmed death and took preliminary readings of rectal and air temperatures. Minimal interference with limbs or clothing. Got instantly called off to an RTA on the M4. Gave no hint of cause or time of death, but he did admit she hadn't started to stiffen.'
She, Yeadings noted: something the medic wouldn't have missed. It eliminated his most dreaded kind of case. All violence affected him despite the many years he'd had to view its outcome, but self-destruction through sexual experiment plagued him with an extra sense of tragic futility. Seekers after the ultimate in sensation were the sorriest of human kind, creating a terrible legacy for those surviving.
But this was no cross-dresser who'd chased orgasm too far and been dumped in panic by his fellows. It was a woman able to enrage another human being into taking her life. Or else, in the classic phrase, one who was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. In this case he felt there must surely be more to it than that.
He looked for the marks of ligatures. They were present in abrasions on the crossed, bare ankles. Her wrists, hidden by the way she lay tucked half under the bush, were pulled back behind her, possibly still bound.
He rose to his feet, returned the flashlight to Mott and thrust his hands back in his jacket pockets. He had no wish to uncover the face obscured by the feathers and spangles. He had already seen too much, risking his own traces being left on the murder scene. Best leave the body to Mott and the sterile-suited SOCO team in their white paper overalls.
Yeadings moved back beside his DI. ‘Who found the body?'
‘Two boys cycling through the wood. Larking about after
escaping from their bedroom windows. It scared them stiff and they shot off home. One was caught climbing back in and he spilled the beans. His father came out to check and then rang in. He claims they're both in shock.
‘Two patrolmen from Area took a look. Fifteen minutes later Dr Lamont and myself; so the ground's already trodden.'
This was nothing new. Yeadings nodded. ‘I want a lid kept on all description of the scene. Warn everyone concerned. Simply “the body of a woman has been found in Shotters Wood. The death is thought to be recent.” See to it yourself that the boys and their contacts stay stumm about the rest. Also warn whoever they've already talked to. I've a gut feeling this one is going to prove a stinker.'
He stared back towards the hidden face, again resisting the impulse to uncover it, then nodded to his DI. ‘You don't need me here. My regards to Littlejohn when he turns up. He'll be ringing me with time of the post mortem. I know tomorrow's Saturday, but my guess is he'll want to get on to it straight away.
‘Meanwhile see that SOCO get all they can from approach routes before they start in on the close stuff. The soil's very dried out round here, but they might get something from it.'
Keeping again to the route which Mott had had marked out with police tapes, he returned to where the strobing blue lights had attracted a little knot of residents dog-walking or out for a late-night stroll.
He let himself out under the plastic tape and nodded to the uniformed sergeant on guard there. ‘Is the site secured from the far end?'
‘Yessir. I sent two constables round there with flashlights. They're setting up bollards.'
‘And the children who found the body?'
‘At home, sir. Your DI's got their addresses.'
‘Right. We can leave them to him and a WPC. Goodnight then.'
He stood a moment in the dark before approaching his own car, intent on fixing the murder scene in his mind.
There had been three known visits to the site before the police presence: a pity, but some trace of who placed the body there might yet remain. He considered the body itself, extravagantly clothed and lying barely hidden, as though asleep except that the arms were restrained behind and the neck unnaturally twisted to make her seem gazing up through the feathered eye-slits.
Despite evidence of duress the precise cause of death wasn' t immediately obvious. That was often par for the course in the initial stage of a murder investigation, but the rest was unreal - fantastically theatrical, with a Gothic, Hammer Horror mark of evil.
The woman's long evening gown had been of clinging chiffon printed with lurid swirls of purple and poison green overshot with a sort of spider's web design in silver thread. Surely no ordinary, off-the-peg label.
Returning now in even more vivid detail as he concentrated with closed eyes, was the bizarre bird-face covering the human one: an elaborate sequin-spangled confection of black papier maché with cut-out eyeholes and wide-swept wings fashioned from the shiny, black tail-feathers of a cockerel.
The mask was uniquely striking. And he recognised it. He heard again a whisper of bamboo chimes as the door opened and he stepped into the little gift shop in Mardham village about three weeks back. He saw the black, sharp-beaked, feathered mask displayed with others strung against the bull's-eye glass of the door. The shop was called PARTY
FUN.
Tonight the carnival bird-face had been worn by a woman going out exquisitely dressed for a very sophisticated occasion. Of all the party junk in that little village shop she had selected the most eye-catching. If she'd intended making an impact, he'd accept she'd done that.
Now she was grotesque, her hair savagely shorn like a traitor's. Then her killer had replaced the bird-mask over the dead human face and dumped her contemptuously in a public place, to be discovered by children or any sniffing dog let loose in the woodland.

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