Shadows and Spirits

Chapter 6

The rain had passed the next morning when McEwan arrived at the office, parking his car in the underground car park. The air was cool, fresh and filled with the familiar burnt malt smell from the brewery. It was not there everyday, but it was as much a character of the city as the homeless and the boutiques. He made his way to the office, nodding at Margaret the receptionist on the front desk, who smiled back. So far the day was looking good. He walked down the quiet corridors on the third floor, paused for a moment before entering the cubicled room. A few of the staff had made it in already. JJ; Ian Urqhart, one of the big lads who had rammed the door; and Tim Andrews, no one was sure what he did, but he always seemed to be working on something.

“Anything new, Sir?” said JJ, trapping her hair behind her ear.

“I"m just in the door,” McEwan said, hanging his jacket on the coat stand. “There was nothing new after you left. Still, you might be able to get your holiday now. We"ll see what Malcolm"s come up with. Ian, before I get it in the neck from the boss, please try and be more courteous to Miss Ragnarson in future.”

“She"s a f*****g pain in the arse,” Ian said, his face reddening.

“I realise that, but the company she works for helps pay our wages and it"s her first time embedded with a consultancy team.”

“Aye, Sir,” Ian said.

McEwan found his cubicle, slumped in his chair, and switched on his computer. He had an email from Malcolm asking him to drop by at his convenience. Another one from the photographer, with digital images attached. Copies of the film prints would take a few more hours. McEwan rarely noticed any significant difference, but after one agency had had their digital files tampered with both types had been mandated by quality control, one for speed and one for trust. He printed out the attached images and began sorting through them, using them to recall his mental image of the scene. He concentrated on the characters carved into the victim"s flesh.

Early on in the case, he had discovered the symbols belonged to an alphabet known as Enochian. First used by the Elizabethan magus John Dee, while his sidekick Edward Kelley was in a trance, communicating with the angel Uriel. Dee claimed it was the primordial language spoken by Adam and all mankind before Babel. Adam"s descendant Enoch had used it to write a book about what he had learned when angels had taken him to visit heaven. It was this book that Kelly dictated to Dee with angelic help. A whole system of ceremonial magic had sprung up using tables Dee had constructed with these Enochian characters. Some people, however, believed Dee to be a spy and this language was his invention, a cipher used to send coded messages.

McEwan opened his word processing program. Using an Enochian font he had downloaded from the Internet and the character map, he began transcribing the characters on the corpse into a document. As he did so, he thought a pattern was emerging, but he couldn"t see anything definite and, besides, occasionally he wasn"t sure what symbol to use. Either the curve of flesh, or some artefact of light and shadow made it difficult to be sure, so he had to use a photo editor to zoom in.

“How"s it coming along?” asked Amanda Lane, breaking his concentration. McEwan"s line manager stood by his cubicle, dressed in a conservative, but fashionable, charcoal trouser suit, dark hair falling to her shoulders.

“I don"t know. I have a feeling this one is different, that it isn"t gibberish like the others. It"s just I"m not sure why yet,” he said.

“Perhaps because it"s your final report for this case? You got your man, congratulations. I"m sure you"ll make Senior Consultant after this.” Her left hand rested on the navy blue cubicle divider.

“Oh? No. I mean thank you, but I"m not certain we have.”

“What do you mean?” said Amanda, looking at him over the rim of her thin rectangular glasses, a menacing tone in her voice. McEwan knew he was on thin ground; the Consultancy couldn"t afford to admit failure at this stage. “The papers and TV seem pretty certain that you said you had found the killer. That was a little foolish if isn"t true, don"t you think?”

McEwan groaned inside. “That"s not quite what I said. The evidence we have so far indicates the dead suspect was the killer. I will have to get confirmation of that from Malcolm and the forensics team.”

“So you did find the killer then.” Amanda folder her arms and smiled a cruel, thin smile. “All you need is the confirmation.”

“If the results prove he killed the women, then I still need to know who killed him,” said McEwan, standing up to tower over the tiny woman.

“You know as well as I do, that we can"t afford to keep a staff this size, running on a case this long, without a result. You got your break, found the killer and it"s unfortunate that a vigilante got to him first. That murder is another case. All you need to do,” Amanda"s finger stabbed towards McEwan"s chest, “is write the report. Case closed.”

“It isn"t closed if he wasn"t the killer,” said McEwan, irritated. He was careful not to show his full anger to his boss and his staff. He wanted to scream with frustration. It had taken them a long time to get this far; he didn"t want to take a short cut in case someone else died.

“Then you"d better pray that he was. Otherwise, you"ll be on your own.” Her eyes narrowed, challenging him.

“I guess I"ll keep on it then,” he said, holding his ground.

“OK,” she smiled, the smile not touching her eyes. “But I want that report on my desk by the end of the week. And Alex, we had a complaint from Ms Ragnarson. I"m sure I don"t need to say anything more on the matter.”

“No. I"ve already taken care of it.”

“Good.” Amanda turned on her heel and left the office.

McEwan stared blindly after her, exhausted by the unexpected encounter. What was the point of doing this job if they didn"t catch the bad guy? He came back from his thoughts and noticed the rest of the team looking at him. “Someone killed him. Murderer or not, mourned or not, it"s still a crime.”

No one said anything. He could see they agreed with him, but they"d heard Amanda, he was on his own.

McEwan sat back down and tried to focus on the symbols again. He checked the character frequency and decided which symbol could be e and which was t and so on. His mind just wasn"t on it now. He hadn"t determined enough of the symbols to tell if a substitution cipher would yield useful information. After half an hour he wasn"t making any significant progress on identifying the remaining glyphs so he decided to go and visit Malcolm in the mortuary and view the body directly.

If there was a code hidden in the characters, then substituting the symbols for English letters seemed incredibly simple. Cryptographers and computers had not found any code hidden in the writing on the previous bodies. He felt the need to try. It was nagging at him and he had learned to follow those instincts.

Malcolm"s offices and the morgue were situated in the bowels of the building. Stopping in Malcolm"s office first, McEwan found him pouring a cup of coffee from a filter machine set up in the corner. Malcolm nodded in greeting and lifted a used mug with a questioning look on his face.

“Yeah, thanks,” said McEwan, something to wake him up was welcome.

“Milk and two sugars?” said Malcolm.

“I"m amazed you remember, given how many times you"ve made me a cuppa,” said McEwan.

“Not many people come down to have coffee with me. Maybe if there were more I would forget,” Malcolm said.

“Somehow I doubt it,” said McEwan.

“How few people visit me, or that I would forget?” said Malcolm.

“That you would forget,” McEwan said. In McEwan"s experience Malcolm was usually better referenced than the case files as not only was the information more usefully recited, but it was also accessed faster than even the best search engine. “You asked to see me,” he said.

“Indeed. I haven"t gone home yet, so I hope you slept well. It"s likely the victim was killed using the knife we found and that the knife is also the murder weapon used on the others. I have taken samples of blood from the knife, some of which was fresh and some old. With luck, the forensics lab will be able to extract enough DNA to allow us to say exactly whose blood is on it. We can compare that DNA with that of the other victims and hopefully conclude which of them may have been killed with the scalpel. I was also able to take fingerprints from the knife and again I hope to match them with the victim, or his attacker,” Malcolm said.

“That"s a good start. Any idea how long it will take?” asked McEwan.

“Results should be in this afternoon, with luck.”

“What about the corpse itself, has it given up any secrets?”

“I can tell you what he ate over the last few days, but there is nothing unusual there. His internal organs were healthy for a man in his late thirties, no sign of substance abuse, but we will have to wait on the toxicology results to confirm that. So the really interesting clues come from the characters written in the flesh.” Malcolm paused. “There appear to be differences, when compared with the other victims.”

Intrigued, McEwan looked at Malcolm. He had thought it unlikely the victim had carved the symbols on himself, but it would be good to have this confirmed and a clue to who had was always welcome. “What sort of differences?” he asked.

“The characters are written similarly, but there are slight stylistic issues. It"s more a matter of handwriting if you like. It does not appear to have been performed by the victim; the angles of incision are wrong for that. This would suggest a second party, which is supported by the slightly different style. The cuts are more surgical in their manner. I also think the author started on the face, then worked on either the right or left arms, before proceeding down the torso. The author was also sitting astride the body while he did this. He then moved onto the legs, which he worked on while sitting on the corpse"s left hand side. Again, working down towards the knees and feet. This differs from the other victims who were, as you will recall, mutilated entirely from the right. I would say that the calligrapher was about one point five to two metres tall, which doesn"t give us enough to suggest a sex.”

“So there is a distinct change, different cutting technique and a change in victim gender, even though the general cause of death and mutilation remains the same. That means that this victim probably was the serial killer, and he was killed either in mockery or mimicry, depending on the motives of this new killer,” McEwan said. Malcolm nodded his agreement. “Hopefully this was a one off vigilante killing and not a new serial killer taking up the mantle. You suspect a "he" rather than a "she"?”

“Yes, but I have no evidence for that,” Malcolm said, shrugging, “beyond the usual statistics in these cases.”

“Have you been able to pick up anything; hair, blood that sort of thing?”

“No, there doesn"t appear to have been a fight. So no gouged flesh under the fingernails and no circumstantial remains. It doesn"t help that the victim was naked. That being said, we are checking on all remains from inside the bag and anything washed off the body.” Malcolm squeezed the bridge of his nose with his right hand, closing his eyes briefly as he did so.

“Maybe you should go home now?” McEwan said, glad he had had some rest.

“I will. Is there anything else I can do for you until the labs get their results back?”

“I"d like to look at the body myself. I want to get a good look at some of these carvings. They aren"t entirely clear from the photographs.”

“Okay, follow me and I"ll take you through.”

Malcolm led the way out the door and down to the Morgue itself. He punched a number sequence into the keypad outside the steel double doors and pushed the left one open. He walked in and held the door open for McEwan.

“Thanks,” McEwan said, as he took the door from Malcolm. The room was brightly lit with two large metal slabs raised to waist height in the centre. Each had a lip and a hose to allow the washing of bodies and the collection of any waste and evidence in the drain. Over them was a large lamp that could be angled to focus light on any part of a body. Along one wall a row of six brushed metal doors reflected a dull sheen. On the right slab the body of the most recent murder victim, the suspected killer himself, lay grey and inanimate. The difference between living people, even those terminally sick or in comas, and the dead, still held a grim fascination for McEwan. The spark, the vitality, the way the body still held itself together rather than slumping like a balloon half-deflated. Even in his line of work it wasn"t something he saw often.

The carvings were black and blue where some final bruising had come out. The round face showed a light emergence of stubble hairs. The Y-shaped cut, across the whole torso, now sewn back up, did not interfere with any characters he had been unable to identify. McEwan angled the light at the symbols he had been unable to discern and quickly found the corresponding character in the font. Malcolm watched patiently, making sure McEwan didn"t destroy something that may prove to be of importance later. It only took five minutes.

McEwan straightened up and looked at Malcolm, who seemed to have drifted off inside himself.

“Do you need a hand putting him away?” McEwan said.

“No, I"ll do that myself and then head home for a few hours kip,” Malcolm said.

“Thanks Malcolm, let me know when you get anything.”

“Will do.”

McEwan pushed the door release button and headed back to the office. Very shortly he had completed his limb-by-limb recording of the characters. Then he checked the frequency of each symbol again. He substituted the letters and made a couple of good guesses. Some of the words were backwards, but there it was.

A message. A name. An address.

Catherine Harlow. Kelvinbridge.

It was a clue, as clear as day.

He sat stunned for a few moments, not sure what he was seeing was real. He had only been thinking of Kate yesterday, after the speed-dating event. He had met her while he was at university, but he hadn"t seen or heard from her in years. Seeing her name sent a shock through him. His feelings for her weren"t as dead as he had thought.

He checked the symbols, the frequencies, changed some of his guesses just to be sure. But there it was – a simple substitution code.

There was no mistake.

It might be a trap, someone, the new killer, using an old flame to get at him. But Kate, if it truly was her, was also in danger. He picked up his jacket and headed for the car park.