The Shroud Maker (34 page)

‘Nobody’s lived here for years,’ Gerry observed. ‘Let’s go and see what the uniforms have come up with.’

He was about to make for the door but Wesley stood blocking his way. ‘It might be my imagination but is this attic much smaller than the floors downstairs, even allowing for the pitch of the roof?’

‘Maybe next door has the space.’

‘This house is detached.’

Gerry rolled his eyes. ‘Just shows how observant I am.’

‘Easy mistake to make.’ Although North Lodge was detached, the closeness of the old houses on the narrow street gave the illusion of them being joined together.

Gerry stood and watched as Wesley circled the room, opening the cupboard by the side of the fireplace and closing it again. When he returned to the other room Gerry followed.

Wesley had noticed the door in the corner which he’d assumed was a closet, the sort found in thousands of Victorian bedrooms. But now he saw that the door had a modern lock.

‘Seen that?’ He pointed at the door.

Gerry stared at it for a few seconds. Then he jangled the skeleton keys and went to work again, concentrating on his task.

Once the lock clicked, Gerry stood back and left it to Wesley to turn the handle and push the door open.

It was the smell that hit him first. Excrement and urine. And something else. Death maybe.

In the pale light seeping in through a small barred sash window, he could see that the room was cluttered with dark, heavy furniture. A dressing table, worn plush armchairs clustered around a small iron fireplace. Piles of artist’s canvases leaned against the walls and a threadbare Turkish rug covered the floor. A large iron-framed bed stood at one end of the room, so deep in shadow that he couldn’t make out what was beneath the undulations of the blood-dark eiderdown. He could see that the source of the foul smell was an unemptied chamber pot near the bed.

An easel had been set up near the bed but in the dim light Wesley couldn’t make out what was painted on the canvas it held. If it wasn’t for the smell and the gloom the room might have been almost cosy, until he noticed the chains attached to the wall to the far side of the fireplace.

He focused his eyes on the bed. Something shifted beneath the covers and he stood frozen in horrified fascination as a skeletal arm slowly emerged, the thin grey hand clutching weakly at the air like some starving animal in its death throes. He caught his breath for a moment, his heart hammering. Then, without taking his eyes off the bed, he took a step forward, dreading what he might see.

Her face was parchment-pale, the lips as light as the thin flesh stretched tight across the skull. Unbrushed, filthy hair, the colour of rope, drooped limply around the face. She looked like a corpse.

Then he heard a whisper, frail and shaky like the rustle of dead leaves. He could just make out the words. ‘Help me.’

‘What happened up there? Nobody’ll tell me.’

Albany Street was too narrow for vehicles so the paramedics had been forced to take the stretcher over the cobbles down to the ambulance parked on the wider part of the old street. Wesley stood at the door to North Lodge and watched them, so preoccupied that he’d almost forgotten Neil was waiting downstairs. Neil repeated the question and this time Wesley answered.

‘We found a girl. Her name’s Jenny Bercival. She went missing at last year’s Palkin Festival.’

‘She’s been up there all this time?’

‘That’s what we need to find out.’

‘She is still alive?’

‘Yes, but she’s in a bad way.

‘Any idea where the guy’s got to?’

‘Not yet.’ Wesley had already put out the call so all patrols were on the lookout for Carthage. He was impatient to interview him, to discover why Jenny had been kept up there, a terrified prisoner in that stinking hidden room. It was certain that Carthage was responsible, which meant he had probably killed Kassia too. Gerry had returned to the station to co-ordinate things from there. When the press found out about Jenny, all hell would break loose.

‘Sir.’

Wesley looked round and saw Paul Johnson standing in the doorway of North Lodge. He was supervising the detailed search of the premises and there was an anxious look on his thin face.

‘You should see this,’ Paul said, the words loaded with meaning.

Neil tapped Wesley on the shoulder and said he’d be off and if they found any documents, would Wesley let him know. Wesley said an absent-minded goodbye, amazed that his friend’s mind was still on his work after everything that had happened in that house.

CSIs in crime-scene suits were trudging up and down the stairs to the attic and Wesley expected Paul to go there. But instead he made for an open door beneath the stairs, presumably the door to the cellar, a part of the house he hadn’t yet seen. As he stood at the top of the stone steps he could see a group of CSIs down there, the lights they’d set up illuminating the gloomy basement like a stage set. They were clustered in the far corner around what looked like rolls of rotting cloth lying on the cold flagstone floor.

He followed Paul down and when he reached the bottom of the steps one of the CSIs turned to him.

‘We’ve got human remains. They were in front of an air vent so there’s quite a good state of preservation. Come and have a look.’

Wesley hesitated for a moment, preparing himself for yet more horrors. When he approached, he saw a body lying on a roll of faded cloth, probably some kind of curtain material with a large floral pattern. Scraps of clothing clung to the desiccated flesh and the long hair on the skull had turned grey with dust and decay. But Wesley’s eyes were drawn to the mouth, to the decayed lips which were drawn back over the teeth to form an eternal, silent scream.

‘There’s two more over there but we haven’t examined them yet.’

‘Has Dr Bowman been called?’

Before Paul could answer, Wesley heard Colin calling a greeting. He wondered whether he’d sound so cheerful once he saw what they’d found.

The pathologist began to examine the first body. Then, at his request, the other two rolls of cloth were unwrapped carefully. Two more bodies, women in the same state of decomposition, their long clothing rotted into strips of uncertain colour.

It didn’t take long for Colin to admit that he couldn’t really give any accurate verdict without tests and a thorough examination. Wesley knew that if they were old, they were none of his concern. If they were recent, there was only one person who could be responsible. He left Colin to his work; he had to get down to the hospital to see how Jenny Bercival was and if she was able to throw light on the ordeal she’d undergone for the past year.

And they needed to find Miles Carthage. He was the key to everything.

Jenny Bercival had been taken straight to Tradmouth Hospital and when Wesley called he was told that she was comfortable. At least she was alive. A mother had got her child back and that was a cause for rejoicing, although he couldn’t begin to imagine how damaged that child would be by what she’d had to endure.

When he’d called Gerry to tell him about the mummified bodies in the cellar, the DCI had ordered more back-up and all patrols were on the lookout for Miles Carthage.

Wesley had thought Carthage strange and obsessive. Now all the evidence pointed to him being a prolific killer who’d probably ended the lives of Kassia Graylem, Andre Gorst, Eric Darwell and possibly those three unknown women in the cellar of North Lodge. Jenny would have died too if they hadn’t found her in time. Wesley hadn’t considered him seriously as a murderer when they’d met, so it disturbed him to think that he’d been in that house, quite unaware that Jenny was imprisoned in the attic above his head. There were times when he doubted his own judgement.

He was heading for the hospital, walking down the embankment near where the
Maudelayne
was moored, when the insistent ringing of his phone interrupted his negative thoughts. Someone answering Miles Carthage’s description had been spotted by a patrol up near the castle. He gave the order to seal off the area and get the team up there, although they weren’t to approach Carthage without his say-so. He called Gerry to tell him what was going on and asked for one of the patrol cars to pick him up. His visit to Jenny would have to wait. Besides, Rachel was keeping vigil at her bedside and she would call if there was any news.

As he waited for the car, staring out at the river, his mind kept returning to that cellar. Even now when he closed his eyes he could see those grey, dead faces, those crumbling masks of horror. That and the discovery of Jenny would probably be the subject of his nightmares for months to come. Miles Carthage, who’d used his talent to produce images of such beauty and sensitivity, had also been capable of horrific cruelty. He found the notion disturbing.

He’d already asked Trish to check on all the people who’d ever lived at North Lodge and the answer confirmed what he’d already been told. It had been in the same family for a century or more, kept by them as a holiday home for a while and never rented out to strangers. He wondered how he could have got it so wrong. He should have dug more deeply when he’d discovered that Kassia had posed for Carthage. Now it appeared as if the manner of Kassia’s death had been part of Carthage’s twisted quest for the ultimate inspiration. Perhaps he planned to paint Jenny in extremis as an accompaniment to a Shipworld storyline about a fair maiden imprisoned in the Shroud Maker’s attic, a maiden who is punished by suffering a slow and unpleasant death. If this was his intention, Wesley thought, Carthage was an exceptionally sick individual.

The patrol car drew up beside him and as he climbed into the passenger seat his phone rang again. It was one of the team telling him that the area around the castle had been cleared. Carthage was sitting on a flat outcrop of rock below the cliff path, a place once popular with sunbathers which had been closed a while ago for health and safety reasons because of rock falls. There were signs up there telling the public to keep out but it seemed that Carthage had ignored them as so many people did. This meant that Wesley had to take the safety of his team into account. Or maybe they could sit it out and wait for Carthage to come to them. He couldn’t stay there forever.

The car drove through the barrier of police tape where curious onlookers had gathered, craning their necks to see what was going on, and screeched to a halt outside the castle entrance. The cliff path lay to his right, just below the ruined walls of the castle John Palkin had built to defend the port back in the late fourteenth century. Now a man who claimed to be his descendant was there in the shadow of those walls and Wesley wondered how it was all going to end.

He was given a stab vest and once he’d put it on he followed a uniformed sergeant on to the path. The team had obeyed his initial instruction and kept back out of sight. The element of surprise was crucial.

The sergeant stopped and pointed. Standing on tiptoe, peering over the hedge that lay between the path and the sea, Wesley could see the artist on a flat plateau of rock fifty feet below. Once a wooden walkway had led from the footpath to the plateau but that had been washed away and now the only way to reach it was to go down to the beach and clamber over the rocks. Wesley wished he was wearing different shoes, but he had no choice. He needed to talk to Miles Carthage. He had to discover the truth.

He made his way down to the beach, going carefully down the steps and steadying himself by holding on to the rough cliff wall. When he reached the sand he signalled the sergeant to stay where he was. The man looked concerned but Wesley knew that going in mob-handed would only make their quarry jumpy. And a jumpy man might do anything.

Wesley began to climb. He could see Carthage gazing out to sea, sketching frantically, oblivious to anything but the seascape before him. He had no idea what had happened at North Lodge in his absence, and this was to Wesley’s advantage.

Although it was a relatively easy ascent his unsuitable shoes kept slipping on the rocks and, after a couple of near misses that set his heart thumping, he decided to take them off, tucking his discarded socks neatly into each shoe before leaving them on a ledge of rock to collect later. Once barefoot, it was easier to grip although the pain of jagged rock against flesh made him wince.

Carthage was engrossed in his work and his face was a mask of concentration bordering on obsession. From where he was standing Wesley could see what he was drawing, an elaborate seascape encompassing the surrounding beach, cliffs and trees. But it was time to break the spell.

‘Mr Carthage.’

Carthage started at the sound of Wesley’s voice and twisted round to face him, a flash of alarm in his eyes.

‘I need to talk to you.’

‘You’re talking to me now.’

Wesley forced himself to smile. ‘It’s not very comfortable here. Can we go somewhere else?’

‘No. I have to finish this.’

Wesley had no choice. He sat down beside Carthage on the rock, the damp seeping through his trousers. Carthage began to sketch frantically. Wesley wondered whether the shock of what he was about to reveal would still his busy fingers.

‘We’ve found Jenny.’

Carthage stopped sketching for a second, his hand hovering above the paper. Then he continued shading in cliffs with heavy strokes of his pencil.

‘What was she doing up there?’

Carthage stopped drawing again and stared out to sea. Then he shook his head. ‘Her name’s not Jenny. She’s the Lady Morwenna. I can’t allow her to leave the Cave of Adron. She belongs with me.’