The Grotesques (16 page)

“I must ask you not to touch it. You can imagine what it means to us.” He opened the door on the kneeling group.

Ella hopped between legs as bodies swayed to a traditional monastic chant. She started at the crown, examining the head inch by inch, feeling a mild flutter of nerves when she bent in for a closer look at the dusty groove because she hoped a covert scrape might reveal a hidden clue. Something like the bracelet on the grotesque. Only the dark line was not dirt but a brittle piece of wood, wedged tight between ear and hair. Just her luck no one seemed inclined to dance just now. In fact, her glance showed the entire kneeling congregation was looking at her like she was in the way. Just as well she was embarrassed into turning to face them. Quite natural for her to shift. Which did provide the opportunity to position her body to one side and reach an obscured hand to the statue to flick at the wood. Which refused to budge.

“Ms Jerome,” Bill Travellian said.

“Of course.” She flicked harder. The head wobbled. Her nervous hand jerked, upsetting it further. She turned around and grabbed it before it fell, forced her thumbnail between wood and stone and dislodged it.

“Let me show you to the door.” Mr Travellian had moved very close. He tried to take the statue from her, but she was holding fast because right in the middle of the jagged underside was a tiny, fleshy piece of foreign matter.

“Have the police seen this?”

“Ms Jerome, if you do not leave I will be forced to call the police.”

Everyone in the room was silent. Someone had turned off the CD. Ella was sure Mr Travellian wouldn’t need the police to remove her. “You’re a nurse. What is that?” she asked. He looked at the sickening piece of matter and blanched. “You may not be aware all the missing girls have been placed in the vicinity of the church. The police need to examine this.”

“No.” A woman with a resemblance to Jo around her sunken violet eyes and delicate chin strode down a row of kneeling chanters and added her hands to the stone head. “This was a thoughtful, selfless gift. This has nothing to do with the murders.”

“You must want to see justice done. You must want to catch her abductor. If this could help in any way, couldn’t you let it go for a few days?”

“I will not have the police harass Romain for an act of kindness. He is persecuted enough as it is,” Mr Travellian said.

With good reason
, she thought, thinking of the screams coming from his workshop. “Perhaps in his own way he’s trying to tell us something.”
Like he’s involved
. The more she looked at those conical grooves on the neck, the more they looked like the wounds she had seen at the autopsy. If the medical examiner could match them to one of the mason’s tools, this case could be solved.

“They will misunderstand anything he tries to say,” Mrs Travellian said. Ella tried to overlook the tears in her eyes. “He is not a violent man.”

“He smashed the carving.” The teenager who had admitted Ella stood.

“Tina!” Mrs Travellian exclaimed.

“What carving?”

Tina’s pink little mouth parted in hesitation.

“We presented him with a carving of a horse as a thank you,” Mr Travellian said. “We gave it to Joanne last Christmas. We wanted him to have something of her to repay him for his kindness.”

“A stone carving?” Ella asked.

“Wood,” Tina volunteered, ignoring the Travellians’ cautionary look.

So it turned out the mason was violent, though she was lost as to why he might want to destroy a gift from friends. “Perhaps the workmanship was not up to his standards?”

“It was expensive,” Tina said.

“A limited edition,” Mr Travellian sighed, as though resigned to having the mason’s vices outed.

“Mr Travellian.” They needed to get back to the line of questioning most likely to produce results. “Don’t you want to do everything in your power to find Joanne?”

Mr Travellian swayed. “Jean, if there’s any chance . . .”

“No. Mr Genord has been nothing but kind, and Romain . . .” She made a helpless gesture at the stone head. Her husband put his arm around her.

“Would you consider levelling it off and letting me take the unfinished section to the police?”

“If it can done without causing any damage to the statue itself . . . Now, Jean.” At his wife’s squeak of protest, he placed a hand on each of her shoulders.

Ella swept the splinter of wood into her tote, wriggled through the stunned group into the hall, and bolted out the front door. The gardener looked up as she ran across the road.

“You need help? They try and brainwash you?”

“Look, the Travellians are grieving in their own way. Give them another couple of months, and it will all be back to normal. I was wondering if I could borrow your saw.”

He looked at her with more suspicion than when she arrived. “There isn’t a body in there that needs cutting up? This doesn’t cut skin. Only brick and the like.”

“No body, but there is a clue as to who might be murdering those poor innocent girls. Your grandchildren aren’t girls, are they?”

“Oooh.” He waggled his head with a grimace that told her she had pressed the right buttons. “It cost me ten bucks. Am I going to get it back? Without blood on it. Don’t need no police coming round and accusing me of murder when I already put up with the likes of them.”

She fished into her purse and pressed a twenty into his hand.

HAVING DELIVERED THE
piece of bust to the police, Ella put the Chinese takeaway on the kitchen table. She found Tilly curled up on the sofa, and rubbed a finger under her chin. Apart from her cat’s blissful purrs, the house was silent. She changed into the jeans and polo neck she had bought that morning, inexplicably disappointed that Adam wasn’t home. She had hoped for a second take on last night when they had cuddled in front of the television during the unseasonable showers and talked about the case. She dialled his mobile, but it went to voice mail. She left a quick message then found he had left her one. It sounded like his efforts to track down genetic engineers nationwide had left him in no doubt that, as much as certain scientists would revel in creating a new species, the facilities, technology, and funding to produce a mutant hybrid just did not exist. Two hours after the message said he would be home, Ella picked up the landline and pressed redial.

Adam’s mother had not seen him since lunch, but Adam had practically torn the guest room apart searching for the bracelet, and no, it was not in the house. His supervisor at the university, when Ella had located the number among the disorganised pile of papers on the kitchen table, said he had enjoyed a detailed discussion with Adam about genetic engineering around mid-afternoon, but Adam had given no indication of where he might be headed next. When he suggested some of Adam’s favourite bat watching haunts with unbridled enthusiasm and no concern, Ella thanked him, scribbled a note, grabbed the car keys, and sped down to the Port, amazed that she had been presentable enough to head straight out the front door.

The car park in front of the church was deserted. She swallowed as a black cloud drifted past the moon, throwing the grotesque perched above the dragon head gargoyle into silvery light. The statue sporting a lion head, not a beak. She blinked. Twice. The mason had better decide where he wanted those statues because “Gargoyles Alive!” was just the sort of headline the
Informer
would relish printing. She reversed, watching it rather than the road on the off chance it decided to metamorphose into the creature that had attacked her. Berating herself for an out-and-out coward did nothing to help her gain courage, but opening the door and checking the copse and church was out of the question. Her excuse, she told herself, was that Adam’s car was not here. Just to be on the safe side, she drove round and into the shopping centre car park. The supermarkets were long past closed, but she didn’t need to check the licence plate to know the battered station wagon at the western end was Adam’s.

It was empty. She wasn’t sure whether to be relieved about that. She dialled the police, reported a missing person, and waited for them to arrive.

“Aren’t bats active at night?” the middle-aged cop asked when she gave Adam’s occupation. “How long have you known each other?”

Her protests that he wouldn’t leave her ten increasingly desperate messages unanswered had to have shattered her credibility, but they were kind enough to check the copse while she waited. The church, they said, was locked. His job, they reiterated, was a nocturnal one and there was no evidence of foul play. In other words, she was better off at the house in case he showed up because it was women going missing.

Except the house was as dark and empty as when she had left it save for the warning flash on the answer-phone. She hit the play button and listened to Mrs Lowell’s concerned voice. A few seconds later she held the handset to her chest as she considered what to tell Adam’s mother.

A BELL TINKLED
as Ella pushed open the glass door to the Gumnut Woodcarving Academy. Since the battered front desk was unattended, she turned to admire the unpainted rocking horse in the front window. Various corbels lay in sweet-smelling sawdust beside it, but it was the foot high carving of a knight in armour that imbued the place with an old world charm. And made her hope woodcarving school number five would yield results because, with three more listed in the Yellow Pages, it was unlikely she was going to get to them all today.

As for the holographic companies, she hadn’t even started poking around those. A quick Google search this morning had turned up a couple of the businesses around the city. From what she had seen on the web they would be more than capable of projecting a dragon, but the wooden fragment she had found at the church had seemed a more concrete lead. Wood left evidence. Light didn’t.

She was thinking of stealing out back when a trim, white-haired man in dusty clothes walked through.

“Can I help you?”

“Um . . . ,” she said, blinking at his bent nose. It reminded her of the beaked grotesque, though his gentle manner defied any notion of violence. “I’m thinking of gifting my partner a woodcarving course. I was wondering if you could show me around?”

“Come through to the workroom. We’ll be starting a session soon.”

She forced a smile at the young woman working a lathe behind a battered bench. When the strawberry blonde took a second glance, Ella turned away. Adam was still missing, the police had found nothing, she was meeting with insurance auditors at odd hours, Tilly had broken a vase in protest of being cooped up inside, and Phil kept ringing for some sort of copy. She didn’t think she could pull off this everything’s-okay act much longer because the only positive note in all this was that the police hadn’t recovered a petrified male body from the river. Thankfully, George prattled on as enthusiastically as the other proprietors had as he showed her bench, gouge, and mallet, and didn’t seem to notice her hair was falling out. She brushed the strand from her nose, tried not to freak out that on top of everything else it had a grey root, took a deep breath, and plunged in.

“Adam’s fascinated by medieval lore. I saw your knight out there, an incredible piece of work. He’d love to make something like that.” She paused. When he gave no noticeable reaction, she looked at him askance. “Or a dragon maybe?”

George looked down his crooked nose as if she had just handed him the hook. “If it’s dragons you’re after, you should speak to one of our students. He’s become obsessed with them. A younger fellow, comes in of a night. The knight’s his work.” He led her to a ledge with an assortment of wooden items in various stages of the carving process and nodded at a small walnut dragon.

“May I?” She picked it up.

“I’m sure he’s got a few good tips to pass on. Most people want to try their hand at furniture parts, toys, and the like, but each to his own, I suppose.” George nodded at a pimply boy of about thirteen who came to pluck another dragon from the ledge.

“He’s got the young ones wanting to copy his work,” George said. The boy chuckled as he carried his project to a stool.

The dragon Ella was holding measured about the length of her forearm. Its serpentine undulations made it look more like the Loch Ness Monster than the traditional fairy tale creature. She said as much.

“Matt called it a water dragon.”

“I see.” She didn’t, but a chat with Debbie would sort her out if she could stand the earache. She squinted at the scales. They tapered at one end, the same as the wooden fragment she had picked up from the church. She was convinced it was a scale now, and it seemed a size with the scales on the dragon head that had burned down her home.

“I don’t suppose I could have Matt’s number? I’d really like to talk to him, find out how long Adam might need . . .”

“I’m afraid I can’t give you personal information.” He looked at his watch. “I’d tell you to wait half an hour or so but he’s missed the last couple of sessions.”

A hunk in his early twenties with olive skin and gorgeous velvet brown eyes sauntered in, nodded to George, greeted the strawberry blonde, and picked up a block of pine that didn’t look like anything much from one of the benches.