Excerpt
Prologue
***
It had been the hottest day that
summer. The mountainous heaps of sand at the Dunball Wharf Aggregate Works had
dried out so completely that a choking dust rose from them. The waters below
had heated until their reek oozed into the nostrils. No one wanted to move
fast, and sounds were muffled, as if the late afternoon sun had thickened the
air.
The two detectives had arrived as the
body was trundling on a gurney over to the white tent where the pathologist
waited like an adjudicator at some macabre contest. The woman was found
stripped of any clothing and the technician had thrown a green sheet over her
poor mutilated and rotting body for that short journey, but the gurney jerked
as its wheels stuck to the walkway, which was so burning hot it was melting the
policemen’s thick soles, and the woman’s head slid to the edge, her heavy locks
falling free, as if she’d just unpinned them. Despite the river weed and silt,
her hair was still glorious; as black as a nighttime lake, not tampered by
bleach or dye.
Detective Sergeant Gary Abbott had
stepped forward, his hand outstretched, and touched the woman’s hair, crying
out like a distressed relative. “Take care with her, for God’s sake!”
I know this, because Detective
Inspector Reynard Buckley told me so, months later, in hisses and whispers
directed at the black winter sky, his big, knuckled hands hiding most of his
face. It hadn’t been the drip of sloughing skin that distressed him. It had
been his sergeant’s reaction.
On the way to the wharf, Gary Abbott
had been his usual cocky self. He’d put on the flashers and put down his foot,
taking every obstruction as a personal challenge. “Body got trapped in the
Dunball Clyce,” he’d joked. “Ve-ery nasty, that Dunball Clyce…whatever the fuck
it is.” Of course Abbott knew it was the sluice at the Dunball Wharf, where the
King’s Sedgemoor Drain fed into the River Parrett; every Bridgwatarian did. It
was the sort of quip he’d make, trying to distance himself from any emotion on
the job, which is why Rey had been puzzled by his reaction at the site.
And then, apparently, on first
examination at the scene, the pathologist had stated that because the body had
undergone prolonged scavenger predation, bacterial action and abrasion, it
was impossible to estimate the date or the time of death, or even say if she
had been dead before entering the water, which was the one thing the detectives
really wanted to know. But she had said – and this was why I was able to recall
every word Rey whispered – that freshwater specimens sometimes displayed
abdominal protrusions; sections of gut that had burst through the skin,
speeding aquatic decomposition. It reminded me of how unwanted spirit energy
can intrude into a person’s ethereal body, demonstrating its existence as
strange, projecting emanations, which a skilled shaman can sometimes observe.
Rey hadn’t quizzed Abbott until the
body had left the site.
“What was all that about?”
“Nothing.”
“C’mon, Gary. Were you IDing her?”
“Really, no. She just reminded me…was
all.”
Gary moved away. They had been
planning to interview the boy who’d found her, a seventeen year-old lad that
worked on the dredgers. He’d spotted bits of white tissue in among the silt
sucked from the river bed. At first, apparently, he had thought it was a large,
dead fish, but then an entire piece of intestine arrived and he had fallen to
his knees on the deck and vomited. Abbott had strode off to get his story, but
Rey told me that he’d never believed Abbott had meant “nothing”. He had meant,
“wait until I’ve checked it out”.
Rey Buckley understood that line of
thinking. Sometimes, he’d let a hunch brew for a while, in the same way. I
understood too; you have to stay patient, but alert, until something drops down
into the fermentation. Then suddenly, it all makes perfect sense. If Abbott
needed time to brew his thoughts, that was fine.
Trouble was, Abbott never did let on.
Not in his lifetime.
***
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