to Walsall.
Joanna came from Blackheath, and had a rather bleak sense of humour. That was something we shared. She used to repeat bits of Dolly Allen monologues, an elderly comedienne who was well known in the Black Country at that time. Like the story about the vacuum cleaner salesman:
One day when the sky was clear, we went for a walk inland. The footpath took us through an abandoned farm. The old farmhouse was in ruins, its roof-beams open to the sky. The sun was burning and we needed shelter, so we slipped into the barn.
Gaps in the roof showed where the rain had got in and rotted the bundles of hay. Something moved at the edge of my vision — a snake or a mouse. Joanna turned to me and we kissed hungrily in the shadows. We made love with some violence, our fingernails and teeth leaving marks in each other. Afterwards, we struggled for breath and held each other more tenderly than we had all week.
At that moment, I recognized the cold fever-smell of stagnant water. Looking over Joanna's shoulder, I saw a barrel standing behind the haystack we'd used as a bed. It was nearly full of water.
In the dim light, I could just see a number of pale tubes hanging down from the water surface. But I couldn't see what they were connected to. I reached over and let my fingertips brush the water. At once, the tubes convulsed. They were connected to long, translucent maggots that jerked in the water. My finger touched one of them. I threw myself backwards and stood there, breathing hard and trying not to vomit.
Joanna started at me as if I'd gone mad. 'What's wrong with you?' I gestured at the water-barrel. She turned and stared at the murky surface. 'Oh, some rat-tailed maggots. Horsefly larvae. Not very pleasant, are they?' Her biological knowledge was more wide-ranging than mine, as I'd noticed on other occasions. 'The long tubes are for breathing. They live in foul water where there's no oxygen. If you see them, you know the water's not fit for anything much.'
I'd been back at the Green Lane station for three hours before DI McCann saw fit to tell me the news. 'By the way, that nutter of a jewel thief has escaped from the secure unit they were keeping him in. Broke a guard's leg and ran for it. They said he'd been such a good prisoner, they weren't expecting it. You think they'd be used to the insane.
'Anyway, can't imagine he'll come back here. There's nothing for him, now the jewels have been returned to their rightful owners.'
I stared at him. 'You're joking, aren't you?'
He looked confused.
'Of course he'll come back here. To the house. His woman.'
'But that's just madness. There's no woman there.'
'To him there is. Look, you interviewed him five or six times. The woman was more real to him than you were.'
It took me another ten minutes to persuade McCann to drive out to the railway bridge. Night was falling, and I wished we'd brought more officers along.
This time, we had a key for the back door; but there was no singing inside. The house was empty of life, except for the secondary life of rot and decay.
We used our torches to search the waste ground behind the house. He was where I'd known he would be: in the shallow pond close to the back door. There didn't appear to have been a struggle. He'd used stones to weigh himself down.
When we pulled him out he was curled up, his arms crossed, his knees close to his chest. Like a kid in a school assembly.
Later, we drained the pond and found nothing more, apart from a mass of weeds and insect life. But I wonder about the layers of marsh and silt beneath those houses. How easy it might be to make tunnels, or to close them down.
It's in the nature of life to adapt. If you don't have food, or oxygen, or love, you find a way. It might not be a good way by someone else's standards, but it's a way.
The autopsy confirmed that Jason Welles had died by drowning in shallow, dirty water. The only external damage was some fretting or eroding of the mouth, caused by small fish or water snails.
The only other significant detail had no bearing on the cause of death, and was described by the pathologist as 'demonstrating the feverish reproductive activity of aquatic life at certain times of the year'.
When they opened up the dead man's body to remove the viscera, they found that the wall of the body cavity was lined with thousands of tiny pearl white eggs.
JOE HILL
Thumbprint
The first thumbprint came in the mail.
Mal was eight months back from Abu Ghraib, where she had done things she regretted. She had returned to Hammett, New York, just in time to bury her father. He died ten hours before her plane touched down in the States, which was maybe all for the best. After the things she had done, she was not sure she could've looked him in the eye. Although a part of her had wanted to talk to him about it, and to see in his face how he judged her. Without him, there was no one to hear her story, no one whose judgment mattered.
The old man had served, too, in Vietnam, as a medic. Her father had saved lives, jumped from a helicopter and dragged kids out of the paddy grass, under heavy fire. He called them kids, although he had only been twenty-five himself at the time. He had been awarded a Purple Heart and a Silver Star.
They hadn't been offering Mal any medals when they sent her on her way. At least she had not been identifiable in any of the photographs of Abu Ghraib — just her boots in that one shot Graner took, with the men piled naked on top of each other, a pyramid of stacked ass and hanging sac. If Graner had just tilted the camera up a little, Mal would have been headed home a lot sooner, only it would have been in handcuffs.
She got back her old job at the Milky Way, keeping bar, and moved into her father's house. It was all he had to leave her, that and the car. The old man's ranch was set three hundred yards from Hatchet Hill Road, backed against the town woods. In the fall, Mai ran in the forest, wearing a full ruck, three miles through the evergreens.
She kept the M4A1 in the downstairs bedroom, broke it down and put it together every morning, a job she could complete by the count of twelve. When she was done, she put the components back in their case with the bayonet, cradling them neatly in their foam cut-outs — you didn't attach the bayonet unless you were about to be overrun. Her M4 had come back to the US with a civilian contractor, who brought it with him on his company's private jet. He had been an interrogator for hire — there had been a lot of them at Abu Ghraib in the final months before the arrests — and he said it was the least he could do, that she had earned it for services rendered, a statement which left her cold.
Come one night in November, Mai walked out of the Milky Way with John Petty, the other bartender, and they found Glen Kardon passed out in the front seat of his Saturn. The driver's side door was open and Glen's butt was in the air, his legs hanging out of the car, feet twisted in the gravel, as if he had just been clubbed to death from behind.
Without thinking, she told Petty to keep an eye out, and then Mal straddled Glen's hips and dug out his wallet. She helped herself to a hundred and twenty dollars cash, dropped the wallet back on the passenger side seat. Petty hissed at her to hurry the fuck up, while Mal wiggled the wedding ring off Glen's finger.
'His wedding ring?' Petty asked, when they were in her car together. Mal gave him half the money for being her lookout, but kept the ring for herself. 'Jesus, you're a demented bitch.'
