Walkers (3 page)

Henry came up, and although he was
trembling himself, he said, as steadily as he could, ‘You know what they used
to do in Vietnam, to get the leeches off?’

‘That’s right,’ said the medical
examiner. ‘They used to burn them off with lighted cigarettes. Does anyone here
have a cigarette?’

Everybody looked at each other. In
the end, Detective Warburg said, ‘Nobody smokes, sir.’

‘Jesus,’ said the medical examiner.
‘Only in Southern California.’

‘Perhaps a cigarette-lighter, from
one of the cars,’ Henry suggested.

Detective Morris jogged off to the
nearest car, and came back a minute or so later with his belly bouncing, and a
glowing cigarette-lighter held up in his hand. He handed it to the medical
examiner, and the medical examiner immediately touched it against the eel’s raw
neck.

There was a sharp sizzle, a sickly
odour of burning; then the eel’s jaws clamped convulsively tight and bit away
the whole of the policeman’s upper lip and nostril, dropping on to the ground
in a sudden spurt of blood. The policeman let out a tight, choked shriek, his
upper teeth hideously exposed, and Lieutenant Ortega had to wrestle him down
against the sand.

‘Plasma!’ the medical examiner
shouted. ‘And you!’ he ordered the injured policeman’s partner. ‘Take that head
and cut the damn thing in half, and get your buddy’s face out of its mouth!’

It took the medics less than five
busy minutes to bandage the policeman’s face and set him up on to a plasma
drip, to reduce the effects of shock. While they worked, the policeman’s
partner manhandled a pair of bolt-cutters out of the trunk of his patrol-car,
and nudged the eel’s head around on the sand so that he could position it
between the blades. He tried twice to cut it in half, but both times the head
slipped out. Then Gil came forward and rested the head against the toe of his
shoe, so that it wouldn’t roll away. There was a sharp, crisp crunch, and the
eel’s skull was chopped apart. The medical examiner stooped down and extracted
the bloody rag of flesh that the creature had wrenched away from the
policeman’s face.

‘I want that bastard in a plastic bag,’
he told Detective Morris. ‘Head, tail, and anything else you can find.’

Lieutenant Ortega looked at his
watch. ‘It’s almost seven. Let’s get this beach cordoned off. Warburg – call
for some back-up. I want a digging detail. If those eels killed that girl, I
want them dug out and destroyed. I want the coastguard alerted, too.

They’ll probably want to put up a
temporary ban on swimming. Morris, you go along with the M. E. I want the
fastest post mortem in the history of the world.’

‘Is there anything that we can do?’
asked Henry.

Lieutenant Ortega stared at Henry as
if he had never seen him before. ‘You? Oh, you can go home. Give your name and
address to Detective Morris here, he’ll come and talk to you later. And,
please, don’t leave the area, not until you’ve made your statement. And don’t
talk to the newspapers or the television. This is one of those situations that
causes panic, you understand me? I’d rather we kept the whole thing quiet, just
for now.’

Henry said to Gil and Susan, ‘That’s
it. I guess we can leave.’

Susan was very pale. ‘I think I’m
going to faint,’ she said.

‘Sit down for a moment,’ Henry told
her. ‘Put your head down between your knees.’

While they waited for Susan to
recover, Henry looked across the beach at the body of the girl they had found.
From where he was crouching, next to Susan, he was unable to see the gaping
cavity of her stomach; the girl could have been lying serene and naked in the
mist, waiting for the sun to break through. She was really quite beautiful,
Henry thought to himself, and somehow that made her death seem even more
horrifying.

‘I’m all right now,’ said Susan. She
tried to get up, and Gil gave her his arm.

Henry was watching the medics lift
the girl’s body off the beach, and zipper it up in a body-bag. Against the
mist, the figures looked like an Oriental shadow-play. ‘I never saw anything
like that before in my whole life,’ he said. ‘Those eels – did you ever see
anything like that? And I used to be married to an oceanographer.’

They walked up the beach together.
When they reached the boardwalk, Henry suggested, ‘Come and have a drink.
That’s my cottage, right over there. I expect you could use something to settle
your nerves.’

‘I think I want to get home, thank
you,’ said Susan. She glanced back down at the beach and her eyes were staring
with repressed hysteria.

Gil asked her, gently, ‘Where do you
live? I could take you.’

‘Do you have a car?’

‘Sure, that Mustang convertible
right across the street.’

‘Okay, then, thank you.’

They walked off together, Gil and
Susan, leaving Henry standing alone. After a while, Henry shrugged, and walked
the sixty yards back to his cottage, unlocking the door with the key which he
always kept around his wrist. He went through to the living-room, opened up the
glass-fronted cocktail cabinet, and poured himself a very large vodka, straight
up, no ice, and drank it.

He coughed as the vodka burned its
way down his throat. Then he filled up his glass again, and walked over to the
wide sliding windows which led out on to the balcony.

He could see the police cars from
here, with their flashing lights, and Lieutenant Ortega in his
cinnamon-coloured suit. Further down the beach, towards Del Mar, two uniformed
policemen were already dragging trestles across the beach, marked
Police Line – Do Not Cross.

Henry watched the police activity
for almost twenty minutes. Then he went back into the cottage and sat down on
the white-painted bamboo sofa, and stared at himself in the shiny glass door of
the stereo cabinet on the opposite side of the room.

Life after death? The only life in
that poor dead girl had been those wriggling eels; and what kind of life did
they
represent?

He thought about the morning’s
events and all he could see was a series of frightening still pictures. The girl’s
hand, clutching at the beach. The silver chain on her ankle. The whiteness of
her back. Then the eels, in their complicated Chinese-puzzle pattern. And the
severed head of that single captured eel, gripping the policeman’s face like an
ancient symbol of evil persistence.

He finished his third glass of
vodka, and then tilted across to the cocktail cabinet to drain the bottle into
his glass. ‘Stolichnaya,’ he pronounced, with what he liked to think was a
thick Russian accent. Then,
‘Zdarovya.’

With inebriated care, he went to the
bookshelf at the end of the room, under the window, and ran his finger along
the spines of all the marine books that his less-than-dear departed wife had
left behind her. At last he came across a large illustrated volume entitled
Anguilliformes: Migration & Life-Cycles
of Common Eels.

He tugged it out, took it over to
the coffee-table, and opened it up.

It was the quotation on the opening
page that caught his attention first of all. It said simply, The eel was eaten
in olden times because it was thought to give exceptional potency. In certain
parts of ancient Scandinavia, shoals of eels were described by a single
mystical word which meant “sperm of the Devil”.’

Henry was about to take another
drink, but he paused, and read the quotation again.

Then he looked towards the balcony,
and out towards the beach, and frowned.

G
il and Susan said very little as
they drove back to Del Mar Heights Road, where Susan lived. Gil glanced across
at Susan from time to time, but he could see that she was still shocked by what
had happened at the beach. He was pretty queasy himself, thinking about those
eels writhing silvery-black in that woman’s white body, and how that
policeman’s face had been half bitten off.

Susan said, ‘Here – here it is,’ and
Gil steered the shiny yellow Mustang up the steeply angled concrete driveway,
and yanked up the handbrake. He hopped out of the car without opening the door,
and went around to the passenger side to let Susan out.

‘This your grandparents’ place?’ he
asked her. It was a small Mexican-style house, with a balcony overlooking the
garden, and rows of pink-painted arches. Three lizards watched them from the
clay-tiled roof, blinking in prehistoric small-mindedness. Outside the back
door there were six or seven recently watered azaleas, in terracotta pots, and
matching rocking-chairs, in white-painted cane.

‘Thank you for driving me home,’
said Susan. ‘I really felt nauseous.’

‘You’re welcome,’ Gil told her. He
nodded, and smiled, but made no immediate move to get back into his car.

Susan glanced behind her. ‘I’d
invite you in, but – well, my grandparents are kind of old fashioned. They’d
want to know everything about what happened, you know; and right now I just
don’t feel like talking about it at all.’

Gil scuffed his trainers on the
concrete path. ‘You’re going to want to talk about it sooner or later. You’re
going to have to.’

She stood with her hand on the
wrought-iron balcony rail, looking at him with one of those distinctively
teenage expressions, bored, curious, go-on-show-me; her eyes in shadow. From
inside the house, they could hear a vacuum-cleaner ruminating from room to
room, and a television turned up loud so that whoever was using the
vacuum-cleaner could listen to
Josie and
the Pussycats.

‘Could I call by later? ‘asked Gil.

‘Well, I don’t know,’ said Susan.
She turned toward the house. ‘I mean, no offence or anything, but I really want
to forget it.’

‘Well, I’ll tell you what,’ Gil
suggested, ‘I’ll leave you my number, and then if you want to talk about it you
can call me. Or even if you
don’t
want
to talk about it, I don’t mind.’

Susan thought for a moment, and then
said, ‘Okay. But I have to go in now.’

‘Do you have a piece of paper?’

She picked up a piece of chalk from
the flowerbed. ‘I’ll write it with this.’

‘Okay, then. It’s 755-9858.’

‘ Where’s that?’

‘Solana Beach, on the Boardwalk. My
father owns the Mini-Market.’

‘Oh, really? Okay, then.’

At that moment, Susan’s grandmother
came out of the house, a small porky woman with strawberry-ice hair done up in
curlers, and a strawberry-coloured tracksuit.

‘Susan?’ she said, querulously. ‘You
came back quick.’

‘Oh, Gil here gave me a lift.’

‘Gil?’ demanded her grandmother, and
lifted up the gold-framed spectacles which she wore around her neck on a long
gilded chain.

‘Gil Miller, ma’am,’ said Gil,
giving her a wave. ‘Nice to meet you.’

‘Have I seen you before?’ Susan’s
grandmother wanted to know.

‘Could be, ma’am. My father owns the
Mini-Market down at Solana Beach.

Sometimes I serve behind the deli
counter.’

Susan’s grandmother lowered her
spectacles and allowed her face to subside into a soft blancmange of
disapproval. ‘Susan’s dating a medical student from Scripps,’ she told Gil. ‘A
fine boy, with a fine career in front of him. Irish.’

Gil said, ‘Well, ma’am, that’s
excellent,’ even though he could see that Susan was desperately embarrassed. He
waved his hand again, an odd Howdy-Doody wave that he hadn’t really meant to do
at all, and then he swung himself back into his car and started up the engine.

‘Grandma,’ Susan protested, under
her breath. Then she called out, ‘Thanks for the ride, Gil.’

‘Yeah. You’re welcome,’ said Gil,
and backed himself out of the driveway.

Susan watched him turn around in the
roadway, all screaming torque and squealing tyres, and roar off back towards
the beach. Then she followed her grandmother into the house, making sure that
the screen door banged noisily behind her. In the kitchen, her grandfather
looked up from his
San Diego Tribune
and
said, ‘Your friend Daffy’s here.’

‘Yes, and I was ashamed to let her
into your room,’ her grandmother admonished her. ‘The mess! I never saw
anything like it. You have drawers for your clothes, don’t you, and shelves for
your books?’

‘Oh, Grandma, I can’t keep
everything immaculate, the way that you do.’

‘It’s a state of mind,’ her
grandmother told her. ‘If your mind is tidy, then your house is tidy. Goodness
knows what Daffy thinks of you.’

‘Daffy thinks I’m very neat. You
should see her room. World War Eight isn’t in it.’

Her grandmother hovered by the
doorway. Susan could tell that she was torn between going back to her
vacuum-cleaning and broaching the subject of Gil Miller.

She went over to the icebox and
poured herself a large glass of Mountain Spring water, topping it up with ice
cubes. She drank almost the whole glass without once taking a breath.