For a few moments, Philip could do nothing but listen to the silence, his senses baffled by the absence of noise. It was as if he’d gone suddenly deaf, or someone had turned off the sound in the world around him.
Trying to make some contact with his senses, he held his hands up to his face. The smell of Parma Violets, and a single drop of blood.
He came to a low fence and decided to step over it, rather than casting backwards and forwards to find a gate or stile. A moment later, he was falling.
16
Journal of 1968
Living underground could have its advantages, I suppose. You’re away from the wind and rain, which is something to be thankful for up here in the hills. But the drawbacks can be fairly serious.
I remember there was always a musty smell, as if something had died in there already. No matter what we tried, there wasn’t a thing we could do about the smell. Well, the ventilation was bad — just this shutter thing in the end wall, and another in the toilet. Precious little air to breathe.
And the smell was all my fault, according to Les. Mister high-and-mighty Number One never took the damp as an excuse, or bad ventilation, or the fact I had nothing to use except what I could carry on my back.
It was my job to haul up the bucket, too, with bright blue Elsan slopping about over my head, terrified every second that the thing would tip in the shaft and come right down on top of me. Les wouldn’t even let Jimmy help me with the bucket. He said there were three jobs, and the sanitary arrangements were my responsibility, since I was the youngest. ‘Sanitary arrangements’ — that’s the way he talked. Jimmy and me, we called it something quite different.
Les had more important things to do, of course. He was saving the world, was Les. A big bloody hero in a hole in the ground.
Well, we were all fighting for freedom, in our own way. It was the age of liberation, after all. Or so we were told. There wasn’t much liberation in our part of the world. Just the same old attitudes, the same instinct to condemn, the implacable willingness to destroy other people’s lives. Whatever happened to ‘ He that is without sin…?’
I suppose those cold, damp walls were supposed to protect us. But really, they could just as easily have been a prison. And, you know what? If I’d been in prison, I might have had more luck with my cell mates.
Even now, I always see Jimmy’s face. I see it as clear as my own reflection when I look in the mirror. There were the three of us, up on top in the daylight. And him, down there in the dark, alone. Just a single shaft of light, falling on his face, gleaming on his glasses.
And then the falling, falling… It seemed to take so long, yet it must have been over in a second. His skull cracked like an egg.
One down. Two to go.
17
Thursday
Diane Fry had never quite got used to stepping out of the real world, a world full of living, breathing people, into the cold, sterile environment of the mortuary. The postmortem room was all stainless steel and grey tiles, the smell of disinfectant barely even competing with the odour of carved flesh and exposed internal organs. Whenever she entered these doors, it was the smell that entered her soul.
The Home Office pathologist, Dr Juliana van Doon, was a cool customer herself. Fry supposed you had to be that way, to work in a place like this. For a while, there had been rumours that she was in a relationship with one of the senior CID officers in E Division, but the talk had died down. These days, Mrs van Doon was starting to look tired, perhaps slightly worn around the edges. The skin of her arms looked a little dry, the hair tucked behind her ears was in need of a colour rinse.
‘We have here a well-nourished Caucasian male; physical condition matches the given age of forty-four,’ said the pathologist briskly, when Fry called in on her way to West Street that morning. ‘Height one hundred and eighty-nine centimetres. That’s a fraction over six feet, for the metrically challenged.’
‘Oh, thank you,’ said Fry. ‘That’s a help.’
The pathologist’s tone made her tense up. It sounded like a challenge, and there was nothing wrong with that to start the day, in Fry’s book. For some reason, she and Mrs van Doon had never really hit it off. Maybe it was something Fry had done herself when she first arrived in E Division, but the hostility had never been far below the surface. Fine, if that was the way she wanted it.
‘His weight is eighty-eight kilos.’
‘Mmm. Fourteen stone?’
‘Very good, DS Fry.’
‘Actually, I was educated entirely in metres and kilograms. But I’ve learned to do the conversion the other way.’
‘A triumph of our modern education system,’ said the pathologist.
Fry gritted her teeth, but stayed calm. She tried to concentrate on the individual whose postmortem she was attending. The important person in all of this — the victim. A glance at the body on the stainless-steel table showed her that he was carrying a bit of surplus body fat, but his muscles were reasonably well toned. He had a fading tan that stopped at the waistband line. A holiday abroad not too long ago. His hair was dark, with hardly a speck of grey to be seen. Now that the area had been shaved and cleaned, the damage to the skull was very evident.
‘Strictly speaking, eighty-eight kilos for a man measuring six feet in height is classed as overweight,’ said the pathologist. ‘But he didn’t seem to have had any problems. The heart is sound. An active occupation, perhaps?’
‘He was a businessman,’ said Fry. ‘A company director.’
Dr van Doon shrugged. ‘A sport would have helped to keep him fit.’
Fry thought of how far Rawson had managed to sprint over rough ground when the need arose. It was said that fear gave you wings, but a lot of men of his age would have been doubled up with stomach cramp after fifty yards.
‘I imagine he didn’t smoke either,’ said the pathologist. ‘We can usually tell that pretty quickly when they arrive in here.’
‘Do we have a cause of death?’ asked Fry.
‘Oh, that.’ With a click of her fingers, Dr van Doon moved to the head of the table. ‘For once, Detective Sergeant, your first guess is almost certainly the correct one.’
‘His head was smashed in.’
‘If you want to be technical. I’ve also heard it referred to as an open compound fracture of the skull. Also present are severe scalp lacerations, some loose bone fragments, and part of the skull has been depressed into the brain, causing a cerebral contusion and serious haemorrhaging.’
‘There was quite a lot of blood at the scene,’ said Fry.
The pathologist looked up. ‘That would be the scalp. It bleeds like a swamp, even from a minor laceration. Lots of nice, thick blood vessels in the scalp. No, the fatal damage is internal.’
‘How quickly would he have died?’
‘Very quickly, if he was unlucky. But you can survive for a surprisingly long time with an injury of this kind. Prompt medical attention would have made a big difference.’
‘It appears that he might have collapsed after the initial attack, then come round and run a few hundred yards across a field before he finally died.’
‘Perfectly possible. Though I would imagine he was staggering rather than running. The human body does have a surprising capacity for physical activity when the brain is fatally damaged.’
