Some thirty seconds later he glimpsed the tall, dark figure jogging towards the entrance through the glittering rain, hands still in her pockets; she was frightened that she might have missed him, that he was already on a train.
He took a swift, confident step out into the doorway to face her – the false foot slipped on the wet tiled floor and skidded.
‘Fuck!’
With an undignified descent into half-splits, he lost his footing and fell; in the long, slow-motion seconds before he reached the dirty wet floor, landing painfully on the bottle of whisky in his carrier bag, he saw her freeze in silhouette in the entrance, then vanish like a startled deer.
‘Bollocks,’ he gasped, lying on the sopping tiles while people at the ticket machines stared. He had twisted his leg again as he fell; it felt as though he might have torn a ligament; the knee that had been merely sore was now screaming in protest. Inwardly cursing imperfectly mopped floors and prosthetic ankles of rigid construction, Strike tried to get up. Nobody wanted to approach him. No doubt they thought he was drunk – Nick and Ilsa’s whisky had now escaped the carrier bag and was rolling clunkily across the floor.
Finally a London Underground employee helped him to his feet, muttering about there being a sign warning of the wet floor; hadn’t the gentleman seen it, wasn’t it prominent enough? He handed Strike his whisky. Humiliated, Strike muttered a thank you and limped over to the ticket barriers, wanting only to escape the countless staring eyes.
Safely on a southbound train he stretched out his throbbing leg and probed his knee as best he could through his suit trousers. It felt tender and sore, exactly as it had after he had fallen down those stairs last spring. Furious, now, with the girl who had been following him, he tried to make sense of what had happened.
When had she joined him? Had she been watching the Quine place, seen him go inside? Might she (an unflattering possibility) have mistaken Strike for Owen Quine? Kathryn Kent had certainly done so, briefly, in the dark…
Strike got to his feet some minutes before changing at Hammersmith to better prepare himself for what might be a perilous descent. By the time he reached his destination of Barons Court, he was limping heavily and wishing that he had a stick. He made his way out of a ticket hall tiled in Victorian pea green, placing his feet with care on the floor covered in grimy wet prints. Too soon he had left the dry shelter of the small jewel of a station, with its art nouveau lettering and stone pediments, and proceeded in the relentless rain towards the rumbling dual carriageway that lay close by.
To his relief and gratitude, he realised that he had emerged on that very stretch of Talgarth Road where the house he sought stood.
Though London was full of these kinds of architectural anomalies, he had never seen buildings that jarred so obviously with their surroundings. The old houses sat in a distinctive row, dark red brick relics of a more confident and imaginative time, while traffic rumbled unforgivingly past them in both directions, for this was the main artery into London from the west.
They were ornate late-Victorian artists’ studios, their lower windows leaded and latticed and oversized arched north-facing windows on their upper floors, like fragments of the vanished Crystal Palace. Wet, cold and sore though he was, Strike paused for a few seconds to look up at number 179, marvelling at its distinctive architecture and wondering how much the Quines would stand to make if Fancourt ever changed his mind and agreed to sell.
He heaved himself up the white front steps. The front door was sheltered from the rain by a brick canopy richly ornamented with carved stone swags, scrolls and badges. Strike brought out the keys one by one with cold, numb fingers.
The fourth one he tried slid home without protest and turned as though it had been doing so for years. One gentle click and the front door slid open. He crossed the threshold and closed the door behind him.
A shock, like a slap in the face, like a falling bucket of water. Strike fumbled with his coat collar, dragging it up over his mouth and nose to protect them. Where he should have smelled only dust and old wood, something sharp and chemical was overwhelming him, catching in his nose and throat.
He reached automatically for a switch on the wall beside him, producing a flood of light from two bare light bulbs hanging from the ceiling. The hallway, which was narrow and empty, was panelled in honey-coloured wood. Twisted columns of the same material supported an arch halfway along its length. At first glance it was serene, gracious, well-proportioned.
But with eyes narrowed Strike slowly took in the wide, burn-like stains on the original woodwork. A corrosive, acrid fluid – which was making the still, dusty air burn – had been splashed everywhere in what seemed to have been an act of wanton vandalism; it had stripped varnish from the aged floorboards, blasted the patina off the bare wood stairs ahead, even been thrown over the walls so that large patches of painted plaster were bleached and discoloured.
After a few seconds of breathing through his thick serge collar, it occurred to Strike that the place was too warm for an uninhabited house. The heating had been cranked up high, which made the fierce chemical smell waft more pungently than if it had been left to disperse in the chill of a winter’s day.
Paper rustled under his feet. Looking down, he saw a smattering of takeaway menus and an envelope addressed TO THE OCCUPIER/CARETAKER. He stooped and picked it up. It was a brief, angry handwritten note from the next-door neighbour, complaining about the smell.
Strike let the note fall back onto the doormat and moved forwards into the hall, observing the scars left on every surface where the chemical substance had been thrown. To his left was a door; he opened it. The room beyond was dark and empty; it had not been tarnished with the bleach-like substance. A dilapidated kitchen, also devoid of furnishings, was the only other room on the lower floor. The deluge of chemicals had not spared it; even a stale half loaf of bread on the sideboard had been doused.
Strike headed up the stairs. Somebody had climbed or descended them, pouring the vicious, corrosive substance from a capacious container; it had spattered everywhere, even onto the landing windowsill, where the paint had bubbled and split apart.
On the first floor, Strike came to a halt. Even through the thick wool of his overcoat he could smell something else, something that the pungent industrial chemical could not mask. Sweet, putrid, rancid: the stench of decaying flesh.
He did not try either of the closed doors on the first floor. Instead, with his birthday whisky swaying stupidly in its plastic bag, he followed slowly in the footsteps of the pourer of acid, up a second flight of stained stairs from which the varnish had been burned away, the carved banisters scorched bare of their waxy shine.
The stench of decay grew stronger with every step Strike took. It reminded him of the time they stuck long sticks into the ground in Bosnia and pulled them out to sniff the ends, the one fail-safe way of finding the mass graves. He pressed his collar more tightly to his mouth as he reached the top floor, to the studio where a Victorian artist had once worked in the unchanging northern light.
Strike did not hesitate on the threshold except for the seconds it took to tug his shirt sleeve down to cover his bare hand, so that he would make no mark on the wooden door as he pushed it open. Silence but for a faint squeak of hinges, and then the desultory buzzing of flies.
He had expected death, but not this.
A carcass: trussed, stinking and rotting, empty and gutted, lying on the floor instead of hanging from a metal hook where surely it belonged. But what looked like a slaughtered pig wore human clothing.
It lay beneath the high arched beams, bathed in light from that gigantic Romanesque window, and though it was a private house and the traffic sloshed still beyond the glass, Strike felt that he stood retching in a temple, witness to sacrificial slaughter, to an act of unholy desecration.
Seven plates and seven sets of cutlery had been set around the decomposing body as though it were a gigantic joint of meat. The torso had been slit from throat to pelvis a
nd Strike was tall enough to see, even from the threshold, the gaping black cavity that had been left behind. The intestines were gone, as though they had been eaten. Fabric and flesh had been burned away all over the corpse, heightening the vile impression that it had been cooked and feasted upon. In places the burned, decomposing cadaver was shining, almost liquid in appearance. Four hissing radiators were hastening the decay.
The rotted face lay furthest away from him, near the window. Strike squinted at it without moving, trying not to breathe. A wisp of yellowing beard clung still to the chin and a single burned-out eye socket was just visible.
And now, with all his experience of death and mutilation, Strike had to fight down the urge to vomit in the almost suffocating mingled stenches of chemical and corpse. He shifted his carrier bag up his thick forearm, drew his mobile phone out of his pocket and took photographs of the scene from as many angles as he could manage without moving further into the room. Then he backed out of the studio, allowing the door to swing shut, which did nothing to mitigate the almost solid stink, and called 999.
Slowly and carefully, determined not to slip and fall even though he was desperate to regain fresh, clean, rain-washed air, Strike proceeded back down the tarnished stairs to wait for the police in the street.
17
Best while you have it use your breath,
There is no drinking after death.
John Fletcher, The Bloody Brother
It was not the first time that Strike had visited New Scotland Yard at the insistence of the Met. His previous interview had also concerned a corpse, and it occurred to the detective, as he sat waiting in an interrogation room many hours later, the pain in his knee less acute after several hours of enforced inaction, that he had had sex the previous evening then too.
Alone in a room hardly bigger than the average office’s stationery cupboard, his thoughts stuck like flies to the rotting obscenity he had found in the artist’s studio. The horror of it had not left him. In his professional capacity he had viewed bodies that had been dragged into positions intended to suggest suicide or accident; had examined corpses bearing horrific traces of attempts to disguise the cruelty to which they had been subjected before death; he had seen men, women and children maimed and dismembered; but what he had seen at 179 Talgarth Road was something entirely new. The malignity of what had been done there had been almost orgiastic, a carefully calibrated display of sadistic showmanship. Worst to contemplate was the order in which acid had been poured, the body disembowelled: had it been torture? Had Quine been alive or dead while his killer laid out place settings around him?
The huge vaulted room where Quine’s body lay would now, no doubt, be swarming with men in full-body protective suits, gathering forensic evidence. Strike wished he were there with them. Inactivity after such a discovery was hateful to him. He burned with professional frustration. Shut out from the moment the police had arrived, he had been relegated to a mere blunderer who had stumbled onto the scene (and ‘scene’, he thought suddenly, was the right word in more ways than one: the body tied up and arranged in the light from that giant church-like window… a sacrifice to some demonic power… seven plates, seven sets of cutlery…)
The frosted glass window of the interrogation room blocked out everything beyond it but the colour of the sky, now black. He had been in this tiny room for a long time and still the police had not finished taking his statement. It was difficult to gauge how much of their desire to prolong the interview was genuine suspicion, how much animosity. It was right, of course, that the person who discovered a murder victim should be subjected to thorough questioning, because they often knew more than they were willing to tell, and not infrequently knew everything. However, in solving the Lula Landry case Strike might be said to have humiliated the Met, who had so confidently pronounced her death suicide. Strike did not think he was being paranoid in thinking that the attitude of the crop-haired female detective inspector who had just left the room contained a determination to make him sweat. Nor did he think that it had been strictly necessary for quite so many of her colleagues to look in on him, some of them lingering only to stare at him, others delivering snide remarks.
If they thought they were inconveniencing him, they were wrong. He had nowhere else to be and they had fed him quite a decent meal. If they had only let him smoke, he would have been quite comfortable. The woman who had been questioning him for an hour had told him he might go outside, accompanied, into the rain for a cigarette, but inertia and curiosity had kept him in his seat. His birthday whisky sat beside him in its carrier bag. He thought that if they kept him here much longer he might break it open. They had left him a plastic beaker of water.
The door behind him whispered over the dense grey carpet.
‘Mystic Bob,’ said a voice.
Richard Anstis of the Metropolitan Police and the Territorial Army entered the room grinning, his hair wet with rain, carrying a bundle of papers under his arm. One side of his face was heavily scarred, the skin beneath his right eye pulled taut. They had saved his sight at the field hospital in Kabul while Strike had lain unconscious, doctors working to preserve the knee of his severed leg.
‘Anstis!’ said Strike, taking the policeman’s proffered hand. ‘What the—?’
‘Pulled rank, mate, I’m going to handle this one,’ said Anstis, dropping into the seat lately vacated by the surly female detective. ‘You’re not popular round here, you know. Lucky for you, you’ve got Uncle Dickie on your side, vouching for you.’
He always said that Strike had saved his life, and perhaps it was true. They had been under fire on a yellow dirt road in Afghanistan. Strike himself was not sure what had made him sense the imminent explosion. The youth running from the roadside ahead with what looked like his younger brother could simply have been fleeing the gunfire. All he knew was that he had yelled at the driver of the Viking to brake, an injunction not followed – perhaps not heard – that he had reached forward, grabbed Anstis by the back of the shirt and hauled him one-handed into the back of the vehicle. Had Anstis remained where he was he would probably have suffered the fate of young Gary Topley, who had been sitting directly in front of Strike, and of whom they could find only the head and torso to bury.
‘Need to run through this story one more time, mate,’ said Anstis, spreading out in front of him the statement that he must have taken from the female officer.
‘All right if I drink?’ asked Strike wearily.
Under Anstis’s amused gaze, Strike retrieved the Arran single malt from the carrier bag and added two fingers to the lukewarm water in his plastic cup.
‘Right: you were hired by his wife to find the dead man… we’re assuming the body’s this writer, this—’
‘Owen Quine, yeah,’ supplied Strike, as Anstis squinted over his colleague’s handwriting. ‘His wife hired me six days ago.’
‘And at that point he’d been missing—?’
‘Ten days.’
‘But she hadn’t been to the police?’
‘No. He did this regularly: dropped out of sight without telling anyone where he was, then coming home again. He liked taking off for hotels without his wife.’
‘Why did she bring you in this time?’
‘Things are difficult at home. There’s a disabled daughter and money’s short. He’d been away a bit longer than usual. She thought he’d gone off to a writer’s retreat. She didn’t know the name of the place, but I checked and he wasn’t there.’
‘Still don’t see why she called you rather than us.’
‘She says she called your lot in once before when he went walkabout and he was angry about it. Apparently he’d been with a girlfriend.’
‘I’ll check that,’ said Anstis, making a note. ‘What made you go to that house?’
‘I found out last night the Quines co-owned it.’
A slight pause.
‘His wife hadn’t mentioned it?’
‘No,’ said Strike. ‘Her story is that he
hated the place and never went near it. She gave the impression she’d half forgotten they even owned it—’
‘Is that likely?’ murmured Anstis, scratching his chin. ‘If they’re skint?’
‘It’s complicated,’ said Strike. ‘The other owner’s Michael Fancourt—’
‘I’ve heard of him.’
‘—and she says he won’t let them sell. There was bad blood between Fancourt and Quine.’ Strike drank his whisky; it warmed throat and stomach. (Quine’s stomach, his entire digestive tract, had been cut out. Where the hell was it?) ‘Anyway, I went along at lunchtime and there he was – or most of him was.’
The whisky had made him crave a cigarette worse than ever.
‘The body’s a real fucking mess, from what I’ve heard,’ said Anstis.
‘Wanna see?’
Strike pulled his mobile phone from his pocket, brought up the photographs of the corpse and handed it across the desk.
‘Holy shit,’ said Anstis. After a minute of silent contemplation of the rotting corpse he asked, disgusted, ‘What are those around him… plates?’
‘Yep,’ said Strike.
‘That mean anything to you?’
‘Nothing,’ said Strike.
‘Any idea when he was last seen alive?’
‘The last time his wife saw him was the night of the fifth. He’d just had dinner with his agent, who’d told him he couldn’t publish his latest book because he’s libelled Christ knows how many people, including a couple of very litigious men.’
Anstis looked down at the notes left by DI Rawlins.
‘You didn’t tell Bridget that.’
‘She didn’t ask. We didn’t strike up much of a rapport.’
‘How long’s this book been in the shops?’
‘It isn’t in the shops,’ said Strike, adding more whisky to his beaker. ‘It hasn’t been published yet. I told you, he rowed with his agent because she told him he couldn’t publish it.’