Twenty-Eight
Brook stood in the doorway. His head and hand throbbed with pain and he felt as if he needed to sleep for a week. He closed his eyes for a second and stepped towards the sarcophagus. When he lifted his eyes he saw Adele Watson. Young. Beautiful. Immortal. She seemed at peace. Her face was calm, and her long slender hands were crossed beneath her smooth throat.
‘Don’t touch anything in the coffin,’ said a white-suited SOCO.
Brook picked up her cold hand and caressed it with the thumb of his good hand.
‘Didn’t you hear me?’ said the SOCO. ‘We’ve not done the coffin.’
Brook turned blankly to the officer. ‘Get out.’
‘Pardon?’ said the officer.
‘Get. Out.’
Noble appeared at the doorway. ‘Graham,’ he called to the officer. ‘Got a minute?’ Reluctantly Graham hauled himself into the corridor, preparing to berate Noble in Brook’s place. Noble waited for him to pass then glanced up at Brook but he’d already turned back to Adele.
Brook picked up her hand again. ‘Forgive me, Adele. I let you down.’ He placed her waxy hand back down on to her chest and carefully opened the handwritten volume resting on her stomach.
The missing book. She’d left her diary behind. She’d left her rough notes behind. But when sudden fame engulfed her, she had her collection, her anthology of doom, ready for the world. Be damned and publish. Brook flicked through it with some difficulty. Every page was full of poetry. She had a lot to say.
He placed the book back on her bandaged abdomen.
Brook and Noble walked slowly through the derelict building, following in Gadd’s footsteps as she explained what little she knew. The two Detective Sergeants covered their noses against the sickly-sweet smell of old blood mingling with the caustic chemical odour of embalming. But Brook was oblivious to all sensory input. Noble monitored his empty expression. He’d seen him this way before. He was back on the tightrope.
‘The hospital closed in 2004,’ explained Gadd. ‘Smethwick used to volunteer here but we’re still looking for documentary proof of that. My guess is when it closed he had the run of the place and decided it would be a perfect base of operations.’
‘How come it’s not as wrecked as the rest of the site?’ asked Noble.
‘It’s the furthest building, for one thing. And I’m guessing he made a big effort to secure it from intruders. He was an engineer, remember. He boarded and barred all the windows and barricaded all the doors from the inside — except the way he came in. He seems to have rigged something up that only he can access. It took us ages to break in.’
Gadd looked sympathetically across at Brook but he was completely blank. ‘We found Phil Ward and Jock — they were embalmed and partially mummified. Jock’s insides are on the floor. It looks like Poole knocked over his canopic jar. From the look of his tracksuit, he must’ve spent some time sitting in the remains. .’ She shuddered.
Noble’s phone began to croak. He listened for a few moments then rang off with a puzzled expression. ‘That was Cooper. Traffic found Rifkind’s Porsche. It was in the centre of Derby, just pulling into Westfield car park.’
Brook cocked his head. ‘Derby?’
Noble was glad to see Brook back with them. ‘That’s not the weird bit,’ he said. ‘Rifkind and his wife were in it. They were going shopping.’
‘But the cottage. .’ began Brook.
‘Rifkind says he wasn’t living there; he was working on his novel at home. He told his wife to lie to anyone who called.’
‘But I saw the car at his cottage,’ said Brook.
‘Rifkind said you told him to keep it out of sight because of Adele’s father, so he left it at the cottage. He fetched it yesterday.’
Brook’s smile was thin. ‘So Rusty escaped on a bicycle.’
‘Bicycle?’ said Gadd. ‘We found one in the same bay as we found the ambulance. It looks like the one Rusty was riding towards Borrowash.’
Noble smiled over at Brook. ‘No bicycle. No Porsche. Face it, Rusty didn’t get away. He’s impersonating a slice of toast at the mortuary. You got him.’
The mid-morning sun shone weakly through high skylights in the domed roof. On a large wooden table lay a bizarrely dressed figure wearing tight white binding around his legs and dark green face paint which matched his dark green knitted mittens. A white conical headdress with feathers was on the floor nearby.
‘Lee Smethwick aka Ozzy Reece aka Osiris,’ said Gadd.
‘He’s not been embalmed,’ said Noble.
‘No,’ replied Gadd. ‘Should he be?’
‘That was why they took Len,’ murmured Brook.
‘Ex-pathologist,’ explained Noble. ‘He had the skills to embalm Smethwick’s body so he could live forever in the Afterlife.’
‘Well, obviously Poole didn’t play ball,’ said Gadd.
‘Len must’ve realised what lay in store if he got out,’ said Brook softly.
‘Good riddance, I say,’ snarled Noble.
A voice boomed from the shadows. ‘
DC Cooper walked out of the gloom and beckoned them to follow. He led them past the four rooms. Adele’s body was in the first, Kyle’s the second and Becky’s the third. As they passed the fourth room, a SOCO taking photographs illuminated Poole’s limp body dangling from the end of the rope.
They arrived at the end of the corridor. Rusty appeared on the monitor of a small laptop. He was sitting in Brook’s kitchen, baseball cap on his head. Brook could see the night sky through the window.
Rusty grinned now.
He waved a hand behind him.
