The Love of the Dead (3 page)

Dead bodies. That’s all they had. The night after he spoke to the medium there’d been another. Same as all the others. Plenty of blood. A body. A ravaged chest missing a heart. A neck missing a head.

Who the fuck wanted to take hearts and heads?

Coleridge shook his head and watched the road. His mind ticked while he drove. Half his attention was on the road, a quarter on the case. The rest was thinking where he was going to get something to eat. His stomach moaned at him, rumbling and burbling in protest. He couldn’t concentrate without a decent breakfast.

Ten miles out of Norwich he spotted a burger van at the side of the road. He pulled into the breakdown lane. Wendy’s Buns.

Nice.

Wendy was a tired looking guy, about fifty. He wore a hair net over thinning gray hair and smoked a thin hand-rolled cigarette.

“Morning. What can I get you?”

“Two half-pounders. Cheese. Bacon. Onions.”

“Tea?”

“Can of Coke and a coffee, please.”

The guy kept his coffin nail going with an occasional puff. He didn’t take it out the whole time he cooked. He scraped some grease off the hot plate, put some more on, stuck the patties and the bacon on the heat.

Coleridge could’ve talked to him, but now that he could smell food his brain kicked into gear.

He made an inventory in his head of things out of place at the murder scene. Walked through it again, start to finish.

The neighbor had called it in.

The autopsy was due this afternoon, but the coroner on the scene had estimated the time of death at between seven and eight in the evening.

The blood had probably still been warm when Henry Meakings’ son discovered the body.

Discovered Henry’s penchant for lesbian porn, too.

Bad night for Henry. Bad night for his son, too.

Porn on the PC. Online movie running in the background.

Coleridge had discounted the porn already. It wasn’t relevant. He knew it. Intuition, maybe, a hunch, maybe, but mostly just common sense. The other victims were clean. No dirty little secrets that they could find. Besides, Meakings was a medium, not a priest. He didn’t know if spiritualists had any rules about watching porn or fornicating or vibrators or anything like that.

He didn’t care.

He ran it again. Henry, sitting in front of the PC. PC in a small study upstairs. Blinds drawn, a house in a tightly packed-together neighborhood. Nobody heard a thing.

Again. Back to the start. Through the front door, straight into a small front room. Cards on the table, TV off, cup of coffee on a coaster. Into the kitchen, no food left out, tidy. Tidy throughout, everything put away, vacuumed. Smell of polish, hint of coffee. Non-smoker.

Short upstairs hall, clean toilet. One spare room, not dusty. Main bedroom, tidy. Sheets made.

Study. PC running. Henry facing the PC. Probably not doing anything other than watching. His clothes were on, his trousers up. Maybe just starting to think about scratching an itch. The killer comes in behind...then...

“Here you go.”

Coleridge blinked, remembered where he was. Cars rushed by. Another car had pulled up while he’d been daydreaming. His burgers, big things that would drip fat all over his shirt and tie, sitting on the metal shelf with napkins underneath.

“Thanks,” he said, and paid.

He got back in the car and ate, uncomfortably squashed against the wheel with his elbows in the most awkward position possible for eating a messy burger.

It hit him after the first burger hit his belly.

The cards.

Why had the cards been on the coffee table?

Chapter Eight

Back at the station in Norwich, Coleridge ignored his desk, his messages, and his co-workers. He headed straight down to the basement and the evidence room.

He signed in and went along the aisles, checking the labels on the boxes. He found the aisle, found the box.

Not much in there. They’d take the computer, check that out, but that’d go off to some nerds who knew what to do with a hard drive. Coleridge could barely type with two fingers. He wasn’t even sure what a hard drive was, unless it was something to do with porn. Crime scene people would be checking stuff over for fingerprints, checking clothes for fibers, anything that might have been touched.

The cards had been dusted. One set of fingerprints that matched Henry Meakings. Nothing from the killer. But that wasn’t what Coleridge was interested in.

He took the evidence bag over to a table with a harsh fluorescent light burning overhead and sat down. The chair groaned but held together beneath his burgeoning mass.

There was a picture of the Queen of Wands on the front. A few examples of other artwork on the back. Universal Tarot printed on the front.

He was slowly becoming an expert on Tarot.

Beth told him the card she’d seen had been Rider-Waite. Same as the Universal Tarot. The most widely used card.

All the murdered mediums had the same pack. Meakings’ pack was the only one out on show. In a scrupulously tidy home. One inconsistency.

Inconsistent because he’d used them and not put them away. Like he’d only just used them. Maybe telling someone’s fortune?

But then, what? Off to watch some porn with the killer?

Not unless the killer had put him there. But then he’d never bothered setting a scene up before.

Coleridge got it. Meakings had been watching porn. Knock at the door. Pause. Down to see who it was. Someone who could call on a moment’s notice, maybe. Finish up, or maybe get the cards out...back upstairs to turn off the PC, killer follows him up...

Could work. Did it matter?

Maybe. Maybe not.

It might be an answer, but it wasn’t
the
answer. Like the porn was a footnote. Something you could skip over when you were reading a book, if you wanted to, and still get the gist of the story.

The cards were part of the story. They weren’t a footnote. The more he thought about it, the surer he became.

Coleridge took the cards from the pack and checked them. It didn’t mean much to him. But the cards might still be in the order they were dealt. Might mean something to someone who knew. Like a medium.

Coleridge didn’t mind not knowing things. That’s what he was good at. But then he asked people who did know things, then he knew, too.

Beth Willis would know things.

He sat back and the chair complained loudly, but he didn’t hear it. He was listening for footsteps, breathing, conversation.

Nothing.

He slipped the pack back in the evidence bag. He rolled the bag tight around the pack, then put it in his pocket. He walked along the quiet aisles full of dead people’s things, people’s stolen things, people’s dirty secrets, past the desk at the front of the evidence room after signing out.

Darkness had fallen while Coleridge was in the basement. He checked his watch as he stepped out into the night. Time yet. He walked across town toward his favorite restaurant, a little Italian eatery off Tombland Street.

An old drunk sat in a doorway, wrapped up tight. Rush hour traffic was dwindling. Drinking time was beginning.

He stopped in at a courier’s he used sometimes, like when he didn’t want things going through the office.

“It’ll be extra, you want it done tonight,” said the guy behind the counter. He had a piercing through his nose, circles of what looked like rubber through his earlobes that left massive holes. He wore a T-shirt with some kind of heavy metal design on the front.

Coleridge could’ve been an asshole. Kicked up a fuss. Shown his badge.

He figured tonight, in the morning, didn’t make much difference.

“Morning’ll be fine,” he said with a shrug. “Got a pen and paper?”

“There’s an office supply store down the road.”

There was a limit to patience, though.

He flashed his badge.

“Just give me a pen and a bit of paper, eh?”

The guy didn’t look happy about it. He shook his head and reached under the counter.

Coleridge wrote a note. Thought about what he was writing, what he was doing. Decided once and for all that it was worth the risk.

He went to the restaurant and ate mussels, calzone, spaghetti with anchovies and capers and some kind of creamy sauce. Washed it down with coffee.

Then he went home and slept under the pink duvet with flowers on it that his ex-wife had chosen and dreamed a black bird watched him from the window, only it wasn’t really a bird. It was something else. Something that frightened him, so he shifted and muttered in his sleep, but when he woke he didn’t remember, and his first thought was how much he hated his quilt cover.

Chapter Nine

Wednesday 12
^th
November

The package came after Beth’s usual post. She ripped it open and took out a Ziploc bag. There was a pack of cards in the bag, and without even touching them she got a bad feeling.

She didn’t often get bad feelings. What was there to be scared of, when you came right down to it? She knew there was life after death. Knew without any doubt whatsoever. Once she might have called it a matter of faith, but now it was just a fact, indisputable. You couldn’t dispute it, not when you saw dead people most days you were awake.

She threw the package and envelope on the small table in the hallway where she kept the phone and the keys. There was a letter in the envelope that she held onto.

Dear Mrs. Willis,

I’ve sent you something found at the scene. You know more about these than me, I guess. Let me know if you get something. I’ll be by to pick them up in person.

D.I. Coleridge.

Below his signature he’d written down his cell phone number. So she figured he wasn’t supposed to be sending out evidence to strange women.

She figured a couple more things from that. He was desperate. That was the first. The second was that he didn’t care. He didn’t care if he got the can. The third was that he’d checked her out, because if he was involved in the investigation into a serial killer, he wasn’t an idiot. Whether he cared or not, he wouldn’t just send evidence out on a whim.

She didn’t know how she felt about that. Just how much he’d found out about her. She was in the phone book. She was on Yell.com, for Christ’s sake. He could find out she was a medium, easy enough, not some crackpot. But just how deep had he dug? She didn’t like it. She’d suddenly gone from being a nobody in a tiny seaside town to being in the middle of a murder case.

That wasn’t her scene at all.

OK, so he probably knew something about her.

What did she know about him?

Plenty, she figured, and the rest she knew about him had nothing to with messages from the dead, not even his partner who was standing right there in the hallway pointing at his fucking wrist.

He was a fat man. He was probably depressed. Fat men aren’t usually fat because they’re happy. His partner had killed himself. Coleridge probably wasn’t that bad that’d you’d want to blow your head off to get away from him. So he’d feel bad about his partner.

Could she trust him? Would he fuck her over?

The long and short of it was, she didn’t know.

She put the letter down with the rest of the things. Made herself some lunch and didn’t look at the pack. She ate her lunch, right there at the table, without so much as a glance at the Tarot deck in the clear plastic bag. She tidied up her dishes, washed them, stacked them upside down on the draining board, and the pack didn’t bother her in the slightest.

“What are you doing, Beth?”

She knew full well what she was doing. She was in way over her head already and she hadn’t even done anything wrong. She was messing with something she didn’t understand, something that couldn’t be.

She needed to get out. Now. While she still could.

But the deck was right there. In the bag.

The killer had touched the deck. She could feel it.

Something was pulling her into this. She could feel that lightning again. A kind of holy bolt, cracking down straight from the spirits and into her head. She could almost imagine her hair standing on end, fillings melted into her mouth, her body ten feet away from smoking shoes.

“Don’t go off half-cocked, Beth.”

The only trouble with giving herself sound advice was that she never listened to it.

Dead people can’t kill people. Fact. Dead people could move things around. Maybe a dead person might throw a plate, or appear in the road and make a car swerve and crash. It could happen. It might have happened, somewhere in the world. Mostly the dead came back because they couldn’t let go. Not because they wanted to kill people.

But then she thought about the one experience she’d had with the angry dead. The only time she’d been afraid of a spirit.

It had been in church. She’d been a guest speaker. She gave an address, then moved on to readings.

There was a man in the middle of the group with a dead man at his shoulder. She had gone to him, expecting to deliver him a message. But the man at his shoulder had taken her over. Like a trance, but not exactly. She knew what she was doing, what she was saying, but she was powerless to stop him. She tried to push the spirit out. To deny it. But she hadn’t been strong enough.

In her own voice, but with the spirit’s words, she told the man in the chair two rows from her that she would kill his daughter, that she would cut her with everything he could find until she bled from a thousand holes and then fuck those holes.

She had talked that way for over a minute, but the whole cutting and fucking thing had probably been the clincher. People had left as she spoke, powerless to stop. The man she addressed turned pallid and the only thing that stopped her and freed her was when he punched her in the face and broke her nose.

She thanked him.

She didn’t have anyone around to punch her in the nose if she got lost when she touched the Tarot deck in the bag. Her son, Miles?