IT WAS RAINING in London. After the vivid sunshine and lush mountains of Tennessee, England seemed grey and dull. The tube was busy with the tail end of the evening rush hour, the usual day-worn commuters crammed into each other’s personal space. I flicked through the newspaper I’d bought at the airport, feeling the usual sense of dislocation as I read about events that had happened while I’d been away. Coming home after a long trip is always like finding yourself transplanted a few weeks in the future, a mundane form of time- travel.
The world had gone on without me.
The taxi driver was a polite Sikh who was content to drive in silence. I stared out at the early evening streets, feeling grubby and jet-lagged after the long flight. My own street looked somehow different when we turned on to it. It took me a moment to realize why. The branches of the lime trees had been barely shading green when I’d left; now they were shaggy with new leaves.
The rain had slowed to a drizzle, varnishing the pavement with a dark gloss as I climbed out and paid the driver. I picked up my flight bag and case and carried them to the front door, flexing my hand slightly when I set them down. I’d taken the dressing off several days before, but my palm was still a little tender.
The sound of the key turning in the lock echoed in the small hallway. I’d put a stop on my post before I’d gone away, but there was still a forlorn pile of fliers and leaflets on the black and white floor tiles. I pushed them aside with my foot as I carried the cases inside and shut the door behind me.
The flat looked exactly the same as when I’d left it, except dulled by several weeks’ accumulation of dust. I paused in the doorway for a moment, feeling the familiar pang of its emptiness. But not so sharply as I’d expected.
I dumped the case on the floor and set my flight bag on the table, cursing as a heavy clunk reminded me what was inside. I unzipped the bag, expecting to be greeted by the reek of spilt alcohol, but nothing was broken. I set the odd-shaped bottle on the table, the tiny horse and jockey perched on the cork still frozen in mid-gallop. I was tempted to open it now, but it was still early. Something to look forward to later.
I went into the kitchen. There was a slight chill in the flat, reminding me that, spring or not, I was back in England. I switched the central heating back on, then as an afterthought filled the kettle.
It had been weeks since I’d had a cup of tea.
The message icon on my phone was flashing. There were over two dozen messages. I automatically reached out to play them, then changed my mind. Anyone who needed to contact me urgently would have called my mobile.
Besides, none of them would be from Jenny.
I made myself a mug of tea and took it to the dining table. There was an empty fruit bowl in its centre, a slip of paper lying in it. I picked it up and saw it was a note I’d made before I’d left: Confirm arrival time w. Tom.
I balled it up and dropped it back in the bowl.
Already, I could feel my old life starting to reclaim me.
Tennessee seemed like an age ago, the memory of the sunlit garden of dragonflies and corpses, and the nightmare scenes in the sanitarium, starting to assume the unreal quality of a dream. But it had been real enough.
Forty-one bodies had been recovered at Cedar Heights; twenty-seven from the grounds, the rest from the spa and treatment rooms. Kyle hadn’t discriminated. His victims were a random mix of age, sex and ethnicity. Some of them had been dead for almost ten years, and the task of identifying them was still going on. The wallets and credit cards he’d saved speeded the process to an extent, but it soon became apparent that there were more bodies than there were IDs. Many of his victims had been vagrants and prostitutes whose disappearances weren’t always noticed, let alone reported.
If Kyle hadn’t felt the need to prove himself, he could have carried on indefinitely.
But not all the victims were anonymous. Irving’s body had been recovered from the same chamber as Summer’s, and amongst the others who had been identified three names stood out. One was Dwight Chambers. His wallet and driver’s licence were in the pile in the sanitarium’s kitchen, and his body was found in the spa, confirming York’s story about the casual worker he’d hired at Steeple Hill.
The second name to ring alarm bells was that of Carl Philips, a forty-six-year-old paranoid schizophrenic who had gone missing from a state psychiatric hospital more than a decade before. Not only were his remains the oldest that had been found at the sanitarium, but his grandfather had been the founder of Cedar Heights. Philips had inherited the derelict property but never bothered to develop it. It had lain fallow and forgotten, inhabited only by the termites and dragonflies.
Until Kyle had put it to use.
But it was the discovery of the third ID that caused most consternation. It belonged to a twenty-nine-year- old morgue assistant from Memphis, whose faded driver’s licence was lying on the cabinet under the victims’ photographs. His remains had been recovered from undergrowth by the pond and positively identified from dental records.
His name was Kyle Webster.
‘He’d been dead eighteen months,’ Jacobsen told me, when I’d called her after seeing a news report on TV. ‘There’re going to be questions about how an impostor could have secured a job in the morgue, but in fairness his documentation and references were authentic. And there was enough of a resemblance to the real Webster to fool anyone who only had old photographs to go on.’
I supposed it was in keeping with everything else he’d done. The man we’d known as Kyle Webster had delighted in misdirection all along. It shouldn’t have come as a surprise that he’d slipped into the life of one of his victims as easily as he had the sloughed skin from their hands.
‘So if he wasn’t Kyle Webster, then who was he?’ I asked.
‘His real name was Wayne Peters. Thirty-one years old, from Knoxville originally, but worked as a morgue assistant in Nashville and then Sevierville, until he disappeared off the map two years ago. But it’s his background before then that’s interesting. Father unknown, mother died when he was an infant, so he was brought up by his aunt and uncle. Extremely bright by all accounts, did well at high school and even applied for medical college. Then things went sour. Around the time he was seventeen school records show he suddenly seemed to lose interest. He didn’t make the grades he needed and wound up working for the family business until it went broke when his uncle died.’
‘Family business?’
‘His uncle owned a small slaughterhouse. They specialized in pork.’
I shut my eyes. Pigs.
‘His aunt was his last remaining relative, and she died years ago,’ Jacobsen went on. ‘Natural causes, so far as we can tell. But you can probably guess where she and the uncle were buried.’
There was only one place, really.
Steeple Hill.
Jacobsen also gave me one other piece of information. When Wayne Peters’s medical records were examined, it was found that as a teenager he’d had several operations to remove nasal polyps. They’d been successful, but the repeated cauterizations had resulted in a condition known as anosmia. Insignificant in itself, it answered the question Gardner had raised in the spa at Cedar Heights.
Wayne Peters had no sense of smell.
The recovery operation at the sanitarium was still going on, the grounds being dug up to ensure no more victims’ remains were concealed. But my own role there had ended after that first day. By then not only had other faculty members from the Forensic Anthropology Center joined the effort, but the scale of the operation meant that the regional DMORT—Disaster Mortuary Operational Response Team—had also been called in. They’d arrived with a fully equipped portable morgue unit, and less than twenty-four hours after Paul and I had first climbed through its fence, the sanitarium and its grounds swarmed with activity.
I’d been politely thanked for my help and told I’d be contacted if my presence was required beyond the statement I’d already given. As I’d been driven through the ranks of TV and press vehicles camped beyond the sanitarium’s gates, I’d felt both relief and regret. It felt wrong leaving an investigation like that, but then I reminded myself that it wasn’t really my investigation.
It never had been.
