White Death. Daniel Blake

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СКАЧАТЬ A neoclassical courthouse with columns out front; red-brick office blocks designed in Georgian Revival; and what looked like an enormous Gothic castle gatehouse.

      A uniform checked Patrese’s badge and lifted the tape for him to duck under.

      ‘Detective Kieseritsky’s over there, sir.’ The uniform pointed to a small lady in a charcoal trouser suit. Patrese nodded his thanks and walked towards her.

      ‘You must be Agent Patrese,’ said Kieseritsky when he was still ten yards from her.

      She was mid-thirties, all lines and angles: hair parted at the side and cut short at the back, cheekbones tilting above a pointed chin, arms forming triangles as she splayed her hands on her hips. If there was any warmth in her voice or bearing, Patrese couldn’t detect it: then again, he wouldn’t have been full of the milk of human kindness either if he’d spent the first part of his Sunday at a double homicide.

      ‘Looked you up while you were on your way,’ she added. ‘You ready?’

      ‘Sure.’

      ‘Any preference?’

      ‘Preference?’

      ‘Which one you want to see first.’

      ‘Whichever’s nearer.’

      ‘John, then.’

      ‘John?’

      ‘John Doe. That’s what they still are. John Doe and Jane Doe.’

      There were three churches on the east side of the Green, arranged in a neat line: one at the north end, one at the south, and the third smack in between. Kieseritsky headed toward the middle one. Patrese fell into step alongside her.

      He gestured all round them. ‘Big place,’ he said, and instantly cursed himself for being so facile.

      Kieseritsky shot him a look which suggested she was thinking exactly the same thing, but her tone was polite. ‘Sure is. Designed by the Puritans to hold all those who’d be spared in the Second Coming.’

      Patrese tried to remember the Book of Revelation. ‘A hundred forty-four thousand?’

      ‘You a religious man, Agent Patrese?’

      ‘Used to be. Not anymore.’

      ‘Then we’re gonna get along just fine.’

      She led the way through a line of trees, and now Patrese could see the headless corpse on the church steps. The man was lying naked on his back, though curiously the pose didn’t look especially undignified, at least to Patrese’s eyes. Perhaps, he thought, it was because the cadaver hardly looked human anymore, not without its head.

      ‘Snappers have all been and gone,’ Kieseritsky said.

      Patrese nodded. She was telling him that the crime scene had already been photographed from every conceivable angle and distance, so he could – within reason – poke around to his heart’s content.

      Crisp fall morning or not, dead bodies stink. Patrese gagged slightly when the stench first reached him, but not so obviously that anyone would notice. Just as well he’d gone for the gutter option a few minutes before, he thought.

      He crouched down beside the corpse.

      No head, no right arm, and the skin gone in a large circle from sternum to waist. Hard to tell too much from any of that about whoever this poor soul had once been, but from the crinkly sagging of fat around the man’s waist, the faint wrinkles on his remaining hand and the gray hairs on the arm above it, Patrese guessed his age as mid-fifties.

      No blood, either: no blood anywhere around the body, even though it had suffered two major amputations. John Doe had clearly been killed elsewhere and brought here.

      Patrese peered closer at the points where the killer had performed those amputations. Clean cuts, both of them, even though taking off a head and arm involved slicing through tough layers of tissue, muscle, cartilage and bone. Must have used something very sharp, Patrese thought. Must have been skilled at using it, too. A surgeon? A butcher?

      The man’s neck looked like an anatomy exhibit: hard white islands of trachea and esophagus surrounded by dark-red seas of jugulars and carotids. The stump of his shoulder was a sandwich in cross-relief: skin round the outside like bread, livid muscle and nerves the filling within. And where the skin on his chest had been was now a matrix of areolar tissue, thousands of tiny patches like spiders’ webs which Patrese could see individually up close but which blended into formless white from even a few feet away.

      Patrese looked at the signet ring on the man’s pinkie. Kieseritsky had been right when she’d called it as the Benedictine medal: Patrese had grown up a good Catholic boy, and symbols such as these were now hardwired into his memory. There on the ring was Saint Benedict himself, cross in his right hand and rulebook in his left, and around the picture ran the words Eius in obitu nostro praesentia muniamur.

      ‘May we be strengthened by his presence in the hour of our death,’ said Kieseritsky.

      Patrese nodded, wondering whether John Doe had indeed felt the presence.

      ‘This isn’t a Benedictine church, though?’ he asked.

      Kieseritsky shook her head. ‘United Church of Christ.’

      ‘And the other two?’

      She shook her head again. ‘That one’ – pointing to the church at the north end of the green – ‘is also United Church. The other’s Episcopal.’

      Patrese looked over the rest of the corpse. Indentations on the skin of both ankles: restraints, Patrese knew. That apart, nothing: no watch, no jewelry, no tattoos.

      There was something next to John Doe’s hand. A playing card, by the look of it.

      Kieseritsky handed Patrese a pair of tweezers. He picked the card up.

      Not a playing card; well, not one of the standard fifty-two-card deck, at any rate.

      The card pictured a man in red priestly robes sitting on a throne. On his head was a triple crown in gold, and in his left hand he carried a long staff topped with a triple cross. His right hand was making the sign of the blessing, with the index and middle fingers pointing up and the other two pointing down. At his feet were two crossed keys, and the back of two monks’ heads could be seen as they knelt before him.

      Beneath the picture, in capital letters, THE HIEROPHANT.

      Patrese knew exactly what it was. A tarot card.

       4

      There was a tarot card by the cadaver of Jane Doe, too. Hers was THE EMPRESS. The figure on this card was also sitting on a throne, though this one was in the middle of a wheat field with a waterfall nearby. She wore a robe patterned with what looked like pomegranates, and a crown of stars on her head. In her right hand she carried a scepter, and beneath her throne was a heart-shaped bolster marked with the symbol of Venus.

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