“How do you think he died?”
She closely examined the eyes, taking her time. “He isn't likely to have died of asphyxia but something else, likely a poisoning.”
“Then the staking of the hands-”
“A hasty cover-up, an afterthought to what may have been a well-planned meal of rat poison, but only an autopsy can say for sure what he ingested.”
He nodded agreement but said, “Still, why don't you have at the tongue, to be sure there's no connection.”
She pulled out a pair of tweezers from her valise, yanked open the dead mouth, and pulled the tongue out while Sharpe flashed his light on it. No marks whatsoever.
Sharpe instantly said, “Put Raehael on this one. We need you focused on the real thing. This most likely involves the fellow's closest friend or relative, roommate or lover, someone who knew him well enough to hate him.”
She thought of Tattoo Man in the States. Same situation, she believed.
After closing down the crime scene, Sharpe offered her company for the night, saying, “We have some things to talk about and some things to nurture.”
She realized that she didn't want to be alone tonight. Looking into Sharpie's strong, steady eyes, the glistening moisture of them sparkling in the blinding police lights, she nodded her assent, casdng all her little doubts and fears aside like so much collected flotsam. She simply could not believe ill of the man.
Jessica dreamed dreams of creamed cream, floating furniture, floating lovers, rising to the ceiling while in embrace as in a Marc Chagall painting. She dreamed of warm places, soft touches, caressing fingertips; she dreamed of wonder and other worlds gone undiscovered in faraway galaxies with strange-sounding names, and at once she wondered how her faraway dream places could possibly have names if they were as yet to be discovered. She dreamed on for the first time in as long as she could remember, dreams of childhood and love, tenderness and morning, of fuzzy animals and milk shakes topped with cherries. She dreamed dreams she wanted to take firm hold of and never let go, dreams she could live as a lifetime, but the images, odors, feelings, sounds, smells, and tastes in this playground of the subconscious all dissipated as candle smoke when suddenly she awoke.
The morning light” woke Jessica where she lay at the foot of Richard's bed, having fallen asleep there after the love-making had exhausted them both. She lay nude, recalling the night of passion they'd shared. The light filtering in bathed the bed they lay upon, but when she reached for him, where his leg ought to be, she found Richard gone. She looked about and called out his name. Nothing. The small place returned a deafening silence. No sign of the man, when suddenly the door clicked, the key turning in the lock to announce his return. He poked a head into the small bungalow and shouted back to her, “Are you up in there? I've brought us some pastries and coffee.”
“Attention to detail,” she said, standing in the hallway now, his white terry-cloth robe wrapped about her. “That's what I like in a man.” If she couldn't have the dream, she'd setde for the Englishman, she thought.
“I suspect you received all the attention you could handle last evening,” he replied, a broad smile coloring his features.
“I'm starved.”
“Good. Soon as we eat and get out of here, we're visiting the RIBA. Should have found time to do so before now.”
“And exactly when would that have been?”
“Eat!” he ordered.
SEVENTEEN
Genuine demonic possession in the annals of church history is rare. Everyday human evil, by comparison, all too common.
At the Royal Institute of British Architecture, Jessica and Richard did indeed locate a large array of information on coal mines and coal mining in England and London in particular. A curator of the museum housed in the bowels of the place, both amused and confused over their interest in the area, became befuddled further when they told him who they were. At that point, he made a phone call and asked that Donald Wentworth Tatham come up from the subbasement to speak to the authorities.
Tatham, a bald, round little man with glasses, lit his face up for them when he learned of their interest in coal-mining history. He could hardly contain his energies, ushering them from his boss's office, a ranting and endless diatribe on coal mines spewing forth now as they made their way through a door marked employees only. Down a flight of stairs and through a set of double-doors and out into a room filled with stacks of metal shelving completely full with boxes of dusty collections of decades and centuries-old junk, far more than the museum had display space for. The stacked metal shelving went to the top of a ten-foot ceiling, and this back basement room appeared as large as any assembly room in any factory.
Jessica marveled at the sheer amount of treasures and his story going unattended and unseen here in the dimly lit, musty backside of the museum.
Through the maze of stacks, they emerged on the other side at another door, and through this portal they stepped and suddenly found themselves in the public exhibit on coal mines, located in a dark, sepulchral comer of the little museum, the terminus of an unlit, musty corridor for those ghosdy few visitors who dared enter here. The place and the exhibit seemed a great anachronism, reminding Jessica of a little whaling museum in the midst of Maui's towering beachfront condos and hotels, a quaint little museum on Maui that saw far more visitors than did this place. Jessica flashed on her trip to Maui, meant as a rendezvous getaway that had never happened, and even her vain effort to get in some diving had failed when a call from a field chief in Honolulu by the name of James Parry had come through. Parry wanted forensic help on a bizarre case that plagued the city of Honolulu on the island of Oahu. It all seemed like a hundred years ago now that she and Parry had put away Lopaka Robert Kowona for butchering native Hawaiian women.
And here she stood amid the beauty of London, again in pursuit of evil. But this evil, an evil that used the raiments of the church and Christ's death as a starting point for itself, for its existence and reason for being, this evil rooted in Christian values seemed a far greater and more twisted beast than any evil she had faced before. Whereas Kowona's evil rested on a pagan religion that sacrificed women to a god, the Crucifier's evil rested firmly on the rock of the crucifixion and resurrection of Christ. Did the killer or killers believe they could and had resurrected the souls of their vicdms?
They now stood before small-scale models and replicas of mining operations in and around London. They stared at hundreds of sketches and photos of early mining operations, framed and under glass. The detail abounded, as did diagrams of whole mining concerns. Here the walls and glass cases were littered with the paraphernalia of the coal-mining industry in its heyday.
“Mind you, coal mining still goes on, but it's run by computers nowadays, all the romance, so to speak, completely taken from it,” said their guide, Tatham. His eyes shone like shiny large seeds, bright with the anticipation of speaking on his favorite obsession.
Already, Jessica had learned that there once had been 160 coal mines in operation all across England, “But this number has dwindled to only a handful about the city, only fifty all told across the nation in operation nowadays,” Tatham added, his small grin growing with the intensity of his excitement about his arcane field.
“We're not interested in any mines outside the city,” said Sharpe. “Have you citywide plans? Original specs of the underground caverns within the city?”
“We're also interested in mines that date back to Roman occupation within the city limits,” added Jessica.
“My, that does narrow the field. London began as a Roman garrison, so we're speaking of quite some time ago,” the museum man replied. “That must be the Marylebone Mine.”
