Mentally, she still lived her life. Regardless of her inability to recall her name or the fact that she was hanging like an insect pinned to a wall, she relived every detail of her life. It must mean something. She told herself that a life lived must mean something. Even he had to respect that. Then she wondered if she was making any sense at all. And if she couldn't make sense, would God Himself understand her? Would He make sense of her senselessness, of her death? Did her death make sense?
Inhaling without result, unable to exhale whatsoever, yet feeling the need to do so, Katherine O'Donahue smiled, recalling having signed over all her holdings to Mother Church. This much pleased her.
The fact that she was being crucified, the fact of its being witnessed by a man who whispered promises of a better life in the hereafter, none of it any longer got past the unfeeling, uncaring, unhealing, and inert body that now could not sustain itself. None of it, not even her own death, held any more meaning for… Again she'd lost all trace of her name. Perhaps that was part of death, to let go of such earthly ties as names, language, home, religion, beads, wishes, bread, needs, wine, flesh, bone, appearances, and such. Who am I? The suffering stopped. TTiis life and this world held no more meaning or allure. Slowly, as with her breath, all thought drifted off like smoke over the railing of a cruise ship, until her last breath caught and died with her.
ONE
— For the detectives, the most appalling visions have always demanded the greatest detachment.
Charing Cross Pier, River Thames, London September 5, 2000
“Elderly woman, I warrant fifty if she's a day,” said Inspector Sharpe to his partner Copperwaite. “Looks like someone's mum. Looks local.”
“Then you don't make her out a whore, Sharpe? Killed possibly because she'd gotten too old to draw in enough shillings?”
“I shouldn't assume her a whore, Coppers.”
“Looks like someone's mum actually,” Copperwaite agreed. “Still doesn't rule her out as an old whore. Lots of mums are whores, you know.”
The dead woman's body had no identifying marks, no clothing and so no ID. “Nothing whatever to inform us of a bloody thing,” muttered Sharpe. “And I resent your summing her up as a whore, Stuart.”
Lieutenant Inspector Stuart Copperwaite, working his way up to full inspector status, felt compelled to agree with his superior. “You're right, of course. Sharpie. Just Another-nother.”
Sharpe thought of the sad term law enforcement in the United States used: Jane Doe, and its British equivalent A.N. Other. Murdered, but murdered in an unmistakably brutal and bizarre fashion. “Something altogether unique about this nobody,” said the Scotland Yard inspector. “This poor, wretched woman has died the most horrid death, staked to a tree, Stuart.”
Sharpe stepped away from the body and walked in little circles, ever-widening the breech between himself and the other authorities on hand. “Each time I look on such unconscionable, and despicable acts as this, I begin to believe that no new evil can ever rival what I must deal with before me. Yet… yet some fiend always finds a new twist, a new evil beyond anything you or I might ever have imagined possible, and this certainly proves the case here. Something evil this way comes…”
Sharpe's feet, hands, and lungs ached from the thought of how this elderly woman had died literally crucified. He imagined the hours it had taken for her to suffer this tormenting death. The same agony faced by Christ.
“I've interviewed the bridgeman. He's of no use,” Copperwaite said in Sharpe's ear. “The man called us about the body after sobering up. Discovered it physically 'in his way' as it were. In fact, he… ahh had ran over the body with the Volkswagen Jetta now parked below the bridge. 'An accident,' he called it, believing he had killed the woman. At the same time, an early morning American tourist, using a zoom lens, also spied the bridgeman with the body and reported a murder in progress.”
Oddly, the body lay close but not quite in the River Thames. It appeared to glisten as if washed, yet leaves, grass, and dirt adhered to it due to some sticky substance that it- she-had been bathed in. “Smells awful, doesn't she?” commented Sharpe's younger partner. “Like a salad that's set too long.” He covered his nose with a handkerchief.
As if unsure which element to choose, water or land, the killer had dumped her below the bridge. On a day when the wind proved right, a passerby might be treated to the sound of Bow Bells-the bells of Bow Church on Bow Street in the city of London. Since the location of the body itself proved of interest-so near the tourist circuit, within walking distance of Westminster-no doubt, the press would play it up; but the place also represented Sharpe's home. He'd been born within the sound of Bow Bells himself, and as the locals in London said of anyone actually bom within this geographical area, “You're then born true Cockney.”
Sharpe had worked hard, however, to lose his Cockney accent. He had aspired to a more military and even genteel-sounding professional voice, although he called upon his former speech pattern when occasion warranted.
Now full circle, Inspector Richard Sharpe, Criminal Investigation Division (CID) of the New Scotland Yard, looked over the result of a most horrid crime. He returned from his walkabout to again crouch over the pained face of the dead, squatting and wondering if the victim had also been a true Cockney.
“You think she's from here about?” asked Stuart.
For Sharpe the geography mattered for two reasons. One, he felt a sense of kinship with anyone born in the district. Two, and perhaps more important, it mattered in that if she were local, she'd be easy to identify down the road, perhaps at the first bar or restaurant he came to. However, if she were not from the Bow Bells district, she could prove difficult to name, and the investigation might drag on until he retired and after, perhaps falling into the category of a cold file, a case that relentlessly went on, unsolved forever. And the number of such cases already staggered the imagination.
Sharpe again lifted from his haunches to his full height, rivaling a signpost that warned of no swimming in the Thames. Methodically he stepped away from the body and peered out across the dirty river, taking in what he could amid the fog of Charring Cross Pier where one of the many water buses plied its trade back and forth across the wide, winding way. In the water boat's infrequent wail he heard the victim's voice crying for vengeance and retribution.
Through the fog, Sharpe could make out Westminster Bridge. To his left he could easily find Waterloo Bridge. He was surrounded by beauty on all sides, near Somerset House and King's College on the Victoria Gardens Embankment and the newly erected replica of Shakespeare's Globe Theatre loomed nearby. It seemed an ill-fit, dumping the tortured, murdered victim's remains here amid the flower gardens, which blanketed the Thames on either side. Sharpe wondered if this said something about the killer, about his relationship to his victim, about his last thoughts for her, or if the bastard simply wanted to be splashy.
The killer must know the businesspeople and the early morning tourists would be going by on the river ferries, and that someone would spot the body lying so near the water's edge. Yes, the body appeared to have been purposefully placed here with loving attention and concern. Always a twist in such strange cases, Sharpe thought, that so brutal a killer could be so gentle with the body afterward-after she could feel no pain. “Bastard,” he muttered aloud to the soft fog overhead. “Perhaps he meant to place her in the river but his plans were spoiled by our drunken bridgeman.”
“You think so, Sharpie?” asked his young partner, but Sharpe ignored the silly question.
When officials had first arrived on scene, everyone expected the usual floater-some poor slob victim of a domestic dispute gone bad, or a whore whose badly beaten body had been thrown into the river and had washed to the embankment. No one could for a moment have suspected the woman to be the victim of crucifixion, least of all Sharpe.
Young Inspector Stuart Copperwaite, Sharpe's assistant, now ruminated over the hideous and grisly wounds they'd found, pleading for some meaning to surface, asking his superior to help him make sense of it all.
