days, the salt cellar at the dinner table was a huge affair, as tall as a pedestal, the size “of a typical vase, you see, and it marked where the upper-and lower-class citizens sat at the table. Old stout Boulte is somewhat highborn.”
Copperwaite added, “He's no alehouse politician.”
“Don't know that I've ever seen him take a drop.”
“Sounds like what we in the States call a tight-ass,” Jessica said, joining them.
“Oh, that he is,” agreed Copperwaite, now openly laughing. “And that thing he does, talking about how he gives charitably to all the poor-all my eye and Betty Martin, he does! The man's as cold as false charity, that's what!”
“Coppers, you're as near to the man as damnit is to swearing. Your skills of observation have improved tremendously to be sure, but to be fair, the man's facing an all-rounder here-a triple homicide,” cautioned Sharpe.
“Oh, I've got 'im down, I do. As near as makes no odds. And the man's personality, well, it's all the fun of the fair, right Sharpie?” Copperwaite continued in levity. “And if I hear the man say, 'It won't answer' once more, I shall bloody run from the building screaming.”
“And how is that the answer?” joked Sharpe. “Still, you do yourself a sad disservice speaking ill of superiors before such as the driver. Some in the department are paid bonuses to repeat what you and I have to say, Stuart. Believe me.”
Jessica studied the modem edifice before them, staring at the entranceway to the famous Scotland Yard, and she asked, “Will your Chief Inspector Boulte be on duty this early?”
“He's lost a good deal of sleep over the Crucifier thing, and he knows we're returning. So yes, he'll likely be here. He'll want a full report. Very proper chap, as they say. Strictly by the book, you see.”
“Really?” asked Jessica in a lilting tone. “More so than you?”
“Why, I'm not at all proper, not once you get to know me. Under the right conditions, some would call me a hell-raiser.”
“Really?”
London bustled with life all around them, people on the street passing them, cars and double-decker buses blaring anger and resentment, making Jessica wonder if the cops here had as much difficulty with traffic quarrels as those in major cities in America. She guessed they must.
Looking about, Jessica found herself feeling downright naked without an umbrella. Everyone on the street carried a proper umbrella, it appeared. And everywhere, in shops, in doorways, in windows, in the hands of men and women, she saw flowers. Flowers simply abounded here.
“Shall we?” asked Sharpe, indicating the way.
Jessica followed Sharpe through an archway that led to the gleaming glass doors of the modem facility. As in America, the British taxpayer must pay dearly for crime, she thought; her understanding of the tax structure had the average Britisher paying three times as much as the American taxpayer. Back home, she herself paid enough in taxes to finance most third world countries; she felt some pity for the British taxpayer.
They went through a series of brightly lit corridors, down which the blip-blip-buzz and drone of noisy offices careened, as if manic to escape the building. They next passed through a door, past cubicles and several glassed in partitions where suspects in various crimes were being rigorously interrogated. Sharpe quipped, “We call that assisting the police. Problem is, most of these back-enders speak only back-slang, you know, that peculiarly British pastime of making words up by turning them round, like ecilop for police. It's how the term slop for police came to be.”
Finally they stepped into a larger, open area in which ongoing murder cases were “displayed” to anyone in official capacity and interested in the cases set forth. Each case had its own “booth”-not unlike the booths set up at state fairs and in state capitals to display the work of Jaycee and Booster clubs. But here the subject matter presented a grim portrait of the various horrors dreamed up by mankind, so that the Scotland Yard operations room took on the quality of a house of horrors. The walls were papered with gory crime-scene photos, the tables were littered with the paraphernalia of murder- any and all clues to the identity of the victim, the killer, and the murder weapon. All of it lay before her like the artifacts dug from a recently unearthed archaeological site. Sharpe and Copperwaite left Jessica and went on to Chief Inspector Boulte's office down the hall. Left alone for the first time since leaving America, Jessica studied the objects on a table below the heading of Crucifixion Murders.
The Scotland Yard detectives hadn't exaggerated. They had nothing to go on. As Copperwaite had put it the day before, “We've nothing, down to the bloody heirs and assigns who stood to gain from the deaths of these three victims, nothing what-bloody-ever”
Victim number one had no living relatives. Victim number two had been estranged from his family, and despite child support and alimony payments, none of the family had heard a word from him in over eleven years. Number three had children, but like number two, he had had nothing to do with his children after a particularly nasty divorce, save sending the assistance checks, which he did like clockwork until his sons came of age and the money dried up.
Obviously, the usual methods, such as following the money trail, proved fruitless in the case of the Crucifier. All money leads had led the detectives nowhere, since in each case the only parties to benefit were each victim's favorite charitable organization. Each left explicit directions, in wills found in their bank vaults, as to how their estates were to be divvied up.
Jessica briefly wondered if, on the whole, Britons took more care with such postmortem matters than did the average American. Victim number one left her meager savings, amounting to 24,000 pounds, to the Church of Christ's Divination; number two left his entire savings, amounting to 36,000 pounds, to the Church of Our Lady of Merciful Tears, while number three ironically left a far greater sum, 170,000 pounds, ironically to the First Church of the Crucifixion.
According to records, each church benefactor had been closely scrutinized, but no collusion or duress raised its ugly head with respect to the various churches to benefit from the deaths of the victims.
The monies all being nontaxable, as they'd gone to charitable organizations, no one in government was interested save the watchdogs who saw to it that the organizations actually did charitable work.
So there appeared no money motive for killing these three individuals. Unless, Jessica facetiously thought, you just happened to be a mad priest capable of knowing what a person's last wishes might be, or capable of accessing their records, say electronically. After a mild, inward laugh, Jessica dismissed money as a motive, just as Copperwaite and Sharpe had done before her. Her eyes went over the minutia of murder laid out before her. Each item was labeled with a crime-scene number that corresponded to each victim.
Since the bodies were all found nude, early identification of the first two had been nearly impossible; while the third, a relatively well-known radio commentator, had been easier. The bodies had no pockets, a phrase in police parlance that meant IDing the victim would require great effort; this also meant that anything lying about the body had either been there before the body was dumped or had belonged to the killer.
As she stared down at the objects lying before her, Jessica realized that the killer may or may not have dropped a lapel button, may or may not have left a cigarette packet found at the scene, may or may not have left prints on the discarded candy-bar wrapper, or on the Essex Hotel ballpoint pen found near one of the bodies. A railway spike labeled “possible” murder weapon lay alongside the items found at the scene, but this had been introduced by the coroner whose guesswork led him to believe the hands and feet were pinned to the cross with something similar in size and weight. The railway spike then had not been recouped from the crime-scene area at all.
Jessica lifted the hefty, metal stake and imagined for a moment what it must feel like as it penetrated flesh and bone at the extremities. The thought gave her a chill. She imagined a helpless victim with three such stakes hammered in to pinion her body to some rough-hewn, splintery surface.
“Unfortunately, we don't have the actual murder weapons used by the killer or killers in this case. They seem cagey, these two. Not so stupid as to leave their prints on the stakes lying about for us to find.” It was Chief Inspector Paul Boulte, Jessica assumed since he'd come in the company of Richard Sharpe.
Boulte stood huge and round, a white James Earl Jones: broad-shouldered, full-faced, a painted grin, and he stood a head taller than Jessica. He appeared to like looking down on her-perhaps all women-from his high eyeball perch. Gargoyle eyes, she registered.
'Tidy killers, actually,” the big man continued. “Very little blood involved, naturally, given the method of
