Walkers (23 page)

‘I’m not sure,’ Gil told him. ‘It
just occurred to us to take a walk.’

‘Me, too,’ said Henry. As the
officers dragged the trestle back into place, he stepped forward and shook
Salvador’s hand. ‘Well, Salvador, it seems as if something summoned us here.
Something imperceptible, like a dog-whistle.’

‘Come and take a look over here,’
Salvador invited them, and they followed him over to the small party of police
and researchers, who were digging a large circular hole in the black, damp
sand, and looking tired and bored.

‘You know John Belli, don’t you?’
said Salvador. The medical examiner gave them a tight, unwelcoming smile. ‘And
these three gentlemen are all from the marine biology department at the Scripps
Institute.’

Three faces, one Caucasian, two
black, all three bespectacled, greeted Henry and Gil and Susan with a high
degree of disinterest. Henry came forward and peered down the hole, his hair
rising up on end in the afternoon wind.

‘We’d appreciate it if you didn’t
stand too close to the edge,’ said one of the researchers, nasally. ‘The sides,
you know, have a tendency to slide inwards.’

Henry nodded. ‘Of course. Don’t want
to make your work any more tedious for you than it is already. No sign of
plourdeostus then?’

The three researchers stared at him
with immediate hostility. ‘What do you know about plourdeostus?’

Henry beamed. ‘What I know about
plourdeostus is that it’s a pretty darned silly name. Oh, come on, stop looking
so amazed. My name is Henry Watkins, department of philosophy at UC San Diego.
My wife – or
ex-wife,
rather – is
Andrea Steinway. Yes,
that
Andrea
Steinway. I was talking to her on the telephone only about an hour and a half
ago.’

‘Professor Watkins was here when the
cadaver was discovered on the shore,’ put in Salvador, by way of additional
explanation.

The three researchers appeared to be
slightly reassured, but not particularly happy.

‘We’d appreciate it if non-expert
observers could be kept well out of the way,’ said one of them, haughtily.

‘Oh, come on, we’re
all
non-expert observers, yourselves
included,’ said Henry, with tremendous cheerfulness. ‘Andrea told me that she
had never seen anything like this eel before, anywhere, and she knows more
about the ocean’s more disgusting denizens than anybody alive. We’re all in the
dark together.’

Salvador waited for a moment while
digging resumed, and then came over and took hold of Henry’s arm, leading him
aside. ‘Perhaps you’re right, Henry. Perhaps we are all in the dark together.
But it seems to me that you three who found the cadaver are slightly less in
the dark than the rest of us. Tell me – what made you come down here, just at
this particular moment?’

Henry glanced at Gil and Susan. They
both nodded, so slightly that nobody else would have noticed. ‘Well. . .’ said
Henry, slowly, ‘it was just a feeling, that’s all... It’s difficult to know how
to describe it.’

‘Try,’ Salvador urged him. ‘I’m not
sure whether I can,’ said Henry. ‘It was simply a feeling that I had to be
here.’

Salvador said, quietly, ‘Mr Belli
here is convinced from his examination of the girl’s body that she was already
dead when she entered the water. He thinks the eels were nothing to do with her
death at all. The only problem he has is that he cannot establish any other
cause of death. There is no indication of strangulation, or battering the head
with a blunt instrument, or shooting, or stabbing. Of course, much of the
abdomen was missing, and it is possible that she was killed by a severe trauma
to the abdominal region, but most of the girl’s blood remained in her veins and
arteries, which suggests that her heart stopped beating before any wounds were
inflicted on her.’

Salvador waited for a moment, to see
what impression this information would have on Henry, and then he added, very
quietly, ‘Mr Belli is extremely angry and frustrated.’

At that moment, one of the Scripps
researchers threw down his shovel and said,

‘That’s it. There’s nothing here.
Let’s call it a day.’

Susan stepped forward with one hand
raised. ‘Wait!’ she said, in a clear, high voice – a voice that they could all
hear over the constant grumbling of the surf. ‘Wait – don’t stop yet. Dig a
little deeper.’

The Scripps researcher looked at
Salvador with an expression on his face which could clearly be interpreted as,
‘Get this girl out of here, would you, please?’

But Salvador turned on his heel,
with his hands clasped behind his back, and said,

‘Gil? Henry? What do you think?
Should they carry on digging?’

Gil said, ‘Susan’s right. They
should carry on.’

‘Who are these people?’ the Scripps researcher
wanted to know.

‘They found the body of the girl,’
said Salvador.

‘And that gives them some kind of
expertise?’ the researcher demanded, climbing out of the hole.

Salvador took out his handkerchief
and wiped his nose. ‘Sir,’ he said ‘if you don’t continue to excavate this
hole,then I shall ask my officers to do so. Of course, if there is anything
here my officers will not perhaps be so delicate in their handling of it as you
might be, but that is a risk I shall have to take. I am interested in the
biology of this matter, of course; but I am also investigating a person’s
death, and that to me is the first priority.’

The researcher stared pugnaciously
at Henry and Gil and Susan, and then said,

‘Very well, have it your way. We’ll
dig for another half-hour; then we’re calling it quits.’

They all waited on the beach while
the sun gradually burned its way down towards the western horizon, turning the
ocean into dazzling gold. The Scripps researchers dug slowly and systematically,
stopping every time they struck a stone or a fragment of buried wood. Salvador
came close to Henry, and said, ‘How about you? Do you think there’s something
down there?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Henry, thickly.
He was beginning to feel the tight band of a headache around his forehead, and
the sun’s glaring reflection on the ocean wasn’t helping him at all. He should
have brought a hip-flask, to keep his hangover away, but it was too late now.
The membranes around his brain were beginning to tighten and throb, and his
optic nerves felt as if they were made out of chewed string.

John Belli checked his watch.
There’s nothing down there, Sal, let’s face it. Those eels were totally
incidental to the primary cause of death. I vote we forget this whole digging
operation altogether.’

‘Five more minutes,’ Salvador
insisted.

Three minutes passed, four. Then
without understanding why, Susan found herself stepping nearer to the
excavation; when she looked around, Henry and Gil had followed her, and were
standing close behind. Salvador noticed their move forward, and watched them
closely.

In the black wet sand at the very
bottom of the excavation, something shifted. The researcher touched it with his
shovel, and it shifted again.

‘I’ve found something,’ he said, not
loudly, his voice cracking in the middle .’It’s moving.’ Salvador immediately
came forward, reaching into his waistband for his .38 revolver, and cocking it.
‘Take a whole lot of care,’ he instructed the researcher. ‘The last one of
those things we tried to capture, it took off half of one of my officers’
face.’

‘Thanks for the warning,’ said the
researcher sarcastically. One of his colleagues slid down into the excavation
beside him, and together they began to clear the sand away from the shape at
the very bottom.

‘It’s alive,’ said the second
researcher. ‘There’s no doubt about it. It feels like it’s warm blooded, and I
can feel it moving.’

‘Does it feel like an eel?’ asked
Salvador.

‘No way,’ said the first researcher.
‘This is big, much bigger than that eel you brought in to the Institute. I can
feel a... spine of sorts. Kind of a knobby spine. And ribs.’

‘Just be careful,’ Salvador
repeated.

Henry thought, again and again and
again,
If
they can find a hiding-place, they grow,
and after six months or so, they emerge as fully grown as their parent.
He didn’t have to look at Gil or Susan to know that they were thinking the
same thing. They had already developed that much mental rapport.

Cautiously, the two researchers
exposed the shape they had found in the sand. A spinal column, gristly and
black. A curved ribcage, each rib separated from the one next to it by dark,
semi-transparent cartilage. Then a pelvic girdle, attenuated and narrow, and a
long jointed coccyx that almost formed a tail, and bony legs, drawn up
underneath the body in the position of a developing foetus.

Henry could see the creature’s heart
beating through the thin gristle of its ribcage. He had a feeling of terrible
dread, and found himself praying under his breath. He prayed that the creature
might die when they brought it out of the sand. He prayed that he wouldn’t have
to look at it. He prayed that it was the only one, and that all the others had
suffocated in the sand.’
Our Father,
which art in Heaven; hallo wed be
Thy
name
The two researchers, working side by side, cleared the sand away from
the back of the creature’s head. In all, the creature looked as if it would
measure about three feet from head to toe, if it were stretched out.

One of the researchers ran his hand
along the creature’s spine, and then suddenly said, ‘Look at this.’ An envelope
of papery, scaly skin had fallen away from the coccyx. He gently handed it up
to his colleague, who was kneeling by the brink of the pit. His colleague held
it up, so that the last of the sunlight shone through it. It rustled in the
sea-breeze as faintly as tissue-paper.

‘What is that?’ asked Salvador.

‘It looks like the discarded skin of
an eel to me,’ said the researcher.

‘So this is it? This is what we’re
looking for? And in only two days it’s developed as much as this?’

The researcher reached behind him
for his rucksack. He unbuckled it, and took out a long specimen envelope, into
which he carefully folded the eel skin. ‘It sure looks like it, doesn’t it?’

‘But what kind of a creature can do
that? And what kind of creature can gestate right underneath the sand?’

The researcher gave him a grim
smile. That’s what we’re here to find out, Lieutenant.’

Salvador looked across at John
Belli, but John Belli stood there with his hands folded uncommunicatively
across his chest, his lower lip jutting out, and said nothing.

‘All right,’ said Salvador. ‘You
want to lift the creature out of there? Duncan – go get that stretcher from the
trunk of my car, blankets, too. Keith – there’s some canvas webbing in the
squad car, go get that. We should be able to run it under the creature’s body
and lift it out real gentle.’

Susan whispered, ‘You
can’t
lift it out.’

Salvador said, ‘We sure as hell
can’t leave it where it is.’

‘Now you’ve found it, you must kill
it,’ Susan insisted. ‘You must bring wires, with high voltage, and electrocute
it. It’s the only way. Electrocute it, and then bury it again.’

The Scripps researchers shook their
heads. One of them said, with mock weariness,

‘First of all she insists we go on
digging, so that we locate it. Now she wants us to kill it, and cover it up
again. Are you sure she’s... ?’ He pointed to his head, and spun his finger
around, to suggest that Susan was mentally touched.

‘You’ve got to do what she says,’
Gil insisted, in a harsh, loud voice.

‘Oh, we do?’ retorted the
researcher. ‘Well, you listen here, this is our show, and we run it the way we
want to, and we certainly don’t take orders from every wandering beach-bum who
happens to be passing. Do we have that clear?’

Henry touched Salvador on the
shoulder. ‘They’re quite right, you know. It’s imperative that you destroy this
creature at once.’

‘Now, why is that?’ asked Salvador.
‘I’m not saying that you are wrong, my friend, but before I decide on any course
of action, I want to know
why.’

‘I can’t tell you why. I don’t even
know why myself. But the urgency is great. This creature must not be allowed to
live for one second longer than you can possibly help.’

‘My dear Henry,’ said Salvador,
quietly, ‘I cannot order it to be killed without a sensible reason. It is an
integral part of a full-scale homicide investigation; it is a living creature
of considerable scientific interest, for all that it has devoured the body of a
young girl, and mutilated one of my officers. It may be the only one there is,
or at least the only one we’ll ever find. What will I say to my superiors, if I
electrocute it and bury it again? That I was instructed to do so by a
seventeen-year-old girl and a nineteen-year-old boy and a professor of
philosophy at the university? That you three insisted on it, as a matter of
urgency, and that I then decided that it was wise to obey?’