Those Who Feel Nothing (8 page)

She was mulling over the fact that two minds thousands of miles apart had been having the same sick thoughts when her phone rang. Tracey, the chief constable's secretary.

Within the limits of her Botox, Hewitt was looking fraught.

‘Sit down, Gilchrist. Bernard Rafferty is no friend of mine but he's a big cheese in our town. What is he doing in our cells without a lawyer in attendance?'

‘Bernard Rafferty was interrupted digging up a body in Keymer graveyard,' Gilchrist said.

‘Which is not a sentence I thought I'd ever hear,' Hewitt said.

‘Indeed, ma'am,' Gilchrist said. ‘His lawyer is on his way.'

Hewitt looked up at the ceiling. ‘Maybe he was doing research for a new book.'

‘With respect, ma'am: at four in the morning, by torchlight?'

‘Don't ask me – academics are a law unto themselves.' Hewitt sighed. ‘An actual body? Recently buried?'

‘Not a body,' Gilchrist said. ‘Bones – a skeleton, as far as we can tell.'

‘Isn't that more grave robbing than bodysnatching?'

‘I don't know, ma'am – I'm afraid I'm not up on this aspect of the law. Burke and Hare were a bit before both our times.'

Hewitt sniffed. ‘I'm glad you included me in that comment. Had he actually dug up the skeleton or bones or whatever it was?'

‘No, ma'am. Our officers stopped him before he had got that far.'

Hewitt clasped her hands. ‘So in fact he's only guilty of something like disturbing or maybe desecrating a grave.'

Gilchrist tried not to stare at Hewitt's smooth forehead. ‘Probably.'

‘How old was this grave?'

‘One hundred and fifty years or so.'

Hewitt slapped the palm of her hand lightly on the desk.

Gilchrist looked at the desk. She was bemused by the fact there was never anything on Hewitt's desk. Anything. The chief constable's computer was at a station behind Hewitt's chair and Hewitt would take her tablet out of her drawer at the start of any meeting.

Gilchrist assumed that at some stage Hewitt had been on the same in-house course that she had done a few weeks ago about an uncluttered desk equalling an uncluttered mind. She wondered impishly if Hewitt's implementation of the course's recommendations was the same as hers. Gilchrist's desk was also bare. But that was because she'd crammed everything into her drawers and now couldn't find anything.

‘Oh Christ,' Hewitt said. ‘Then he
was
doing a bit of amateur archaeology.'

‘In the middle of the night?'

‘But cemeteries are his thing, aren't they? He could argue he didn't want to upset the locals.'

‘There's more, ma'am. I've just come from his house.'

‘And you found?'

‘He was living with the mummified bodies or skeletons of possibly twenty-five other women. He dressed them like dolls and kept them round his house.'

Hewitt looked intently at her bare desk. ‘Run that by me again?'

‘The women's skeletal or mummified remains have been dressed in knee and ankle socks, dresses, aprons, ribbons. Some have Little Bo-Peep hats on. In the basement one group of dolls were sitting at a dinner table set for afternoon tea. One chair was empty at the end. Presumably his. On closer examination of the house we found other remains stuffed under beds and in cupboards. There were two up a chimney.'

‘Jesus.'

‘I don't think Jesus had anything to do with it.'

‘But none recently dead?'

Gilchrist shook her head. ‘All look like they've been in the ground decades before he got at them.'

Hewitt made a quick sign of the cross. Gilchrist was surprised. She'd never thought of her boss as religious. She'd given no indication a few months earlier when fundamentalist Christianity and the occult collided in Brighton.

‘What are people like?' Hewitt said. She looked as sour as her new face would allow. ‘You never really know, do you? Rafferty? The man is insufferable but he is also very bright. He's on TV. He writes newspaper columns from time to time. He's a historian and a journalist. He speaks four languages.'

Gilchrist was surprised at Hewitt's naïvety. ‘All except human, ma'am?'

Hewitt looked at the ceiling. ‘So what are we going to charge him with?'

‘I have no idea. Grave robbing?'

Hewitt leaned towards Gilchrist. ‘Is this more of that black magic nonsense you dealt with a few months ago? Is he a black magician?'

Gilchrist grimaced. ‘There are no black magicians, ma'am. Just people who think they are. But, no, on the surface this doesn't seem to have anything to do with black magic.'

Hewitt stood and leaned forward, pressing her palms into her desk. ‘OK then, Sarah. I want to be sure this doesn't get into the papers. So long as it doesn't we can handle it discreetly. If it does it will be massive.'

‘Yes, ma'am,' Gilchrist said, remembering Constable Stanford's parting expression. Thinking: that bird has probably already flown.

You take the coach from Phnom Penh north-east to Siem Reap. The journey takes all day but is not unpleasant. You have a bench seat to yourself. You sleep in the morning and at a stop in a village around lunchtime try a plate of fried locusts from a street vendor. You've had them before as a delicacy. They taste of nothing much but the salt on the crunchy carapace and evoke for you not Cambodia but the first occasion you had them on the other side of the world.

It was in Oaxaca, Mexico, in a restaurant on a balcony overlooking a square that was occupied by government tanks recently involved in putting down an insurrection. A teacher's strike that had got out of hand. Judging from reports a few months ago it happened all the time in Mexico. Who knew teachers could be so vicious? Actually, you did. Catholic upbringing.

Calm had now been restored but people were staying off the streets. The fish and meat market housed in an old Spanish colonial building behind the square was bare of food, the mongers slouched behind their counters, listening to dance music on tinny radios, waiting for the latest official statement.

You came up from Colombia where you were employed as a mercenary on a special op in Bogota – another city with tanks on the street. Not against the drug cartels, unusually, but against a communist cell operating covertly there, giving tactical support and advice to FARC and other communist guerrillas.

‘First thing you've got to recognize is that these fucking FARC bastards aren't propelled by ideology,' your friend ‘Will' Rogers was saying. Big man, good looking, bit of a swagger. ‘They're criminals, plain and simple. Kidnappers, human traffickers, dabblers in the drug business. They cloak their criminal activities in rhetoric but they are no better than some street-corner hustler with a switchblade or a flashy handgun.'

He drew the long antenna of a locust from his mouth and laid it on the side of his plate. ‘That's why I fucking despise them. They're hypocrites. At least your everyday scumbag doesn't pretend to be anything else.' He reached for a toothpick. ‘Still, who are we to judge, eh? We're not exactly untarnished.'

He pointed at you with the toothpick.

‘Well, except for Captain America here. Cryogenically frozen in a time when you could tell good from bad, black from white. Brought back to life in the here and now, shield unblemished, outmoded morality intact.'

Cartwright, Howe and Bartram laughed wolfishly at your discomfort. All moustached, all brawnier than you. These four had known each other a long time and sometimes you felt excluded. They seemed to have something else going on outside of each operation but you turned a blind eye to that. In consequence, you five were a team, knitting well. This was your third operation with them.

‘I don't have a shield,' was all you could think of to say. Quietly.

Rogers prodded at the carapace of one of the locusts. ‘You've got a shell, though, laddie. That's for sure.'

Now you buy a big bottle of cola as you can't find a bottle of water with an unbroken seal. You hate cola but it does seem to work as a stomach-settler and you need that. You have a flask of vodka in your hip pocket and the rest of the bottle in your duffel. You leave that alone: you're trying to stay focused.

Your bruised ribs are constricting your breathing so you've been trying to stay still in the coach. You adjust the strap on the satchel on your lap. Paradise's men looted your safe but the stuff in there was all decoy. You know how easy it is to break into a battery-operated safe simply by removing the batteries so you'd factored that in. Most of your money and your real passport were in a waterproof bag buried in the little bamboo plantation in the corner of your yard.

You look out of the window at the passing landscape and think back to the first time you were here.

When Heap returned to the station Gilchrist took him down to the cells. Gilchrist looked through the window. Bernard Rafferty was sitting upright and perfectly composed on the edge of the concrete bunk. He saw her and mouthed the word ‘lawyer' then mimed a zip closing over his mouth.

‘He's here,' she mouthed back. Not mouthing what she was thinking: asshole.

Gilchrist and Heap went to the interview room.

‘Time for me to fess up, I suppose,' Rafferty said cheerfully, when he entered the room.

‘It's usually best,' Gilchrist said, struggling to keep the distaste off her face.

The Royal Pavilion director pointed at Gilchrist. ‘Don't patronize me, young lady – I know exactly who you are and what you get up to with your chief constables.'

‘Bernard,' his lawyer said quickly.

Rafferty sat beside his lawyer and shook his hand heartily. Rafferty's lawyer tried for expressionless but Gilchrist could see he was having trouble concealing his discomfort. Gilchrist gave the lawyer a look. He held it for a moment then looked down.

‘Tell me about you and graveyards,' Gilchrist said to Rafferty.

‘Graveyards fascinate me,' Rafferty said. ‘I know more about them than almost any living person. I should – I've been studying them for around twenty-five years.'

‘Studying them?' Gilchrist said.

‘For years now I've been visiting cemeteries around Brighton and churchyards on the Downs to dig up women. I like them to be aged between fifteen and twenty-five.'

Gilchrist looked at Heap.

‘How did you get the remains home?' Heap said.

‘Bin bags. Those thick ones for the garden? Sometimes I'd dig up two in a night.'

‘And put them in separate bags?'

‘Not necessarily. It didn't matter anyway. Part of the fun was taking the skeletons apart and putting all the different bones of the women back together in new combinations.'

‘So the skeletons we found in your basement—'

‘That's right. Not all the bones in one skeleton are from one person.'

Gilchrist found herself gripping the edges of the table. ‘Did you keep track of whose bones went where?'

He laughed. ‘Heavens, no! Why would I do that? What mattered was the end result.'

‘Why did you dress them up?'

‘So they'd look nice at teatime.'

Gilchrist looked down at her hands. She was a big-boned woman but her hands, whilst long-fingered, were relatively neat and tapered. She lifted them off the table. Her knuckles were white. She wondered idly if they were too narrow to knock Rafferty out with one punch. She wouldn't mind trying one day. She had long despised Rafferty for the oleaginous creep he was but add this sick activity …

‘You say you've been doing this for years,' she said, keeping her voice level. ‘How many women have you dug up?'

Rafferty raised his scrawny shoulders. ‘I didn't bother counting. And they are hardly women, are they, Detective Inspector? They're bags of bones. Corporeal life has left them – as has their spirit, if you think in those superstitious terms. Do
you
need to think in those superstitious terms?'

‘How many?' Heap repeated.

The lawyer put his hand lightly on Rafferty's arm.

‘Let me think,' Rafferty said. ‘I've probably spent around seven hundred and fifty nights in cemeteries.'

‘Seven hundred and fifty?' Gilchrist tried to make her voice expressionless.

‘Over many years, that's probably about right.' Rafferty tried for a confiding expression. It came off as a leer. ‘I like to sleep in them sometimes. Often in a coffin.'

She almost didn't notice that last remark as she was doing the maths on the first.

‘You've dug up seven hundred and fifty women?'

Although she tried, Gilchrist failed to keep the high pitch of shock out of her voice.

‘Calm down, dear,' Rafferty said. ‘No, no, no – though that would be quite something, wouldn't it? But where would I put so many house guests? No – I didn't dig them up every time I was in a cemetery.'

‘How often?'

‘Maybe one in three visits.'

‘Two hundred and fifty women,' Gilchrist stated, her voice only a little lower down the register.

‘Is it? Goodness, that's quite a lot of digging. No wonder I have trouble with my back.'

‘So where are they all?' Heap said, all business-like.

Rafferty yawned. He actually yawned. Gilchrist had the urge to reach over and slap it off his face. ‘Oh, they're stashed away here and there. Some are still in bin bags. You know what it's like – sometimes if you don't do something straight away the moment has gone.'

‘You desecrated two hundred fifty graves to satisfy your, your …'

‘My what? There's nothing improper about the fact they are all women. Far from it – my interests lie elsewhere. Always have.' He looked peevish. ‘Anyone would think I'd murdered them or something. Nobody cared about them after all this time.'

He leaned towards them over the table and it was all Gilchrist could do not to shrink back.