Not a shred.
The inspector carefully skirted the huddle of fleshly remains and bent over what appeared to be the implement of destruction. A heavy iron poker, the lower third of which had the metal twisted round in a spiral so that when thrust it might worm itself into the coals.
The whirling indentation had retained fragments of tissue that might be useful, although there was enough to be going on with, scattered all around.
He peered at the weapon and produced a magnifier to squint through but there were no foreign substances and only smears of blood upon the handle.
McLevy had read recently in the scientific journal
Though there was nothing on the handle of the poker but red smudges, whoever had wielded it with such ferocious purpose might well have worn a hand covering of some kind. A strange contradiction; the crime suggested mindless violence but was there an element of calculation involved?
He placed the poker aside neatly, to be wrapped up and scrutinised later at the station, then moved to the mantelpiece with his magnifier.
And who desired vengeance?
He bent down, and using the magnifier, carefully scanned the fireplace, grunting a little as his body did not take to folding over in such fashion. By the side of the grate, his painstaking search uncovered a thin strand of hair. He fished it out between finger and thumb then raised it up to the light.
Indeed it was human filament but not the servant’s or Morrison’s. Fergus was white haired and the deceased Gilbert, from McLevy’s memory, had few hairs if any, a bald pate like a monk – it must have made a fine target.
But this was long, darkish in colour as far as he could tell and, under the magnifier, perhaps even a little wavy.
He sniffed at the hair and then his fingers. An acrid trace of ash from the fireplace but something else as well.
So faint as to be near unidentifiable. A pomade of sorts? Hard to tell. McLevy’s eyes were not the best but his nose was infallible; possibly some oiling agent, some unguent? The odour though, what was it?
Honey? A sweet smell but fading even as he sniffed; he was lucky it had lasted this long. He would store it in his olfactory bank and hope for a similar waft someday.
McLevy diligently placed the hair into some thin paper and deposited it into the evidence bag.
Man or woman? Long enough for either but he would wager a man.
His little secret for the nonce.
Mulholland entered and McLevy turned; they spoke across the crushed cadaver as if it had no meaning or life, which latter indeed was true enough.
A necessary callousness becomes the good policeman; too much sensitivity and you’d never get anything done.
‘Came in through the skylight, wrenched the thing right off its hinges. No mark of a tool. Bare hands.’
Having announced this, Mulholland demonstrated the action somewhat dramatically for he had been impressed by the mangled frame still propped against the chimneybreast.
‘That takes a bit of doing,’ muttered the inspector.
‘You should see it.’
‘I intend to.’
Both men then looked at the corpse as if it might contribute to the discussion.
‘Find anything?’ Mulholland asked.
‘Looks like murder,’ was the answer.
A glint of gallows humour but there was no gainsaying the fact that this was a crime with a strange supernatural bent as if some berserk elemental force had come in to wreak havoc and vengeance.
Mulholland looked at the name on the wall.
‘Judas,’ McLevy remarked. ‘Gets the blame for everything.’
‘Something from the past caught up with Mister Morrison?’
‘Possible. We’ll dig it up and see.’
Morrison had the reputation of a ruthless swine who would sell his granny for a profit, or at the very least put her on a tramp steamer.
This, however, was beyond natural retribution.
This was violent death, intense and savage.
The constable shivered slightly.
‘Whatever did the deed, I wouldn’t want to meet the same without a revolver to hand.’
‘Not even your hornbeam stick?’
‘Not even that.’
‘Near Halloween. Maybe the devil paid a visit.’
While they had been almost idly discoursing both had been sweeping the room with their eyes to see if anything besides the fairly obvious carcass was awry, but nothing seemed out of place.
Just the dead body.
All the mayhem had been localised.
‘The poker is the murder weapon.’
‘I noticed that.’
‘But did you observe the angle of the neck?’
‘No. You sent me to skies above.’
‘Observe it now.’
The constable collapsed his lanky frame somewhat like a giraffe getting to its knees and gazed at the columnar connection between the trunk and smithereens on top.
Oddly enough, though the head was smashed to bits the neck remained intact. Reasonably.
‘Snapped clean,’ he announced.
‘Uhuh. I would wager before the attack upon the face.’
‘He was dead already?’
‘That’s my contention.’
This put a different complexion on the event. A mixture of explosive ferocity and deliberate intent.
McLevy also knelt and then took out a flat leather pouch from which he extracted a thin metal rod with a delicate sharp point. One of a matching set of lock-picks that had mysteriously found its way into his possession and which he had put to many uses.
He used this one to scrape under the nails of the dead hand, finding imbedded beneath first and second fingerplates fragmentary scraps of a stiff, dark blue material.
Mulholland took one and held it up to the light while McLevy sniffed at the other, on guard lest it disappear up his nose.
‘Tarry,’ he opined.
‘Scraped off – but from what?’
Then Mulholland had a sudden thought and answered his own question.
‘Gauntlets, perhaps? To protect and leave no trace?’
‘But they did,’ said McLevy. ‘And it’s the protection that interests me.’
Again he was struck by the contrast of animal fury and careful planning.
Also something that had been nagging at him since the sighting of the body had just fallen into place; probably it possessed no relevance but the inspector was a great believer in random slices of the brain.
‘I once saw a victim as bad smashed as this but it was a bullet had done the trick. Shot from close. Down by the docks. I was a constable then. Not my case.’
