The Love of the Dead (7 page)

“I promise. Peter?”

“Hon?”

“Thanks.”

She imagined him nodding. No problem. They hung up. Then the doorbell rang.

“Seriously,” she muttered and opened the door. There was a package on the doormat. No postman. No van. No nothing.

“Coleridge, you bastard,” she said, and pulled the package in the house. Now she had another phone call to make. She didn’t need it. She really didn’t.

Long way to go until happy hour. It seemed like it was right over the horizon.

Chapter Twenty

“Is she in?”

“Who are you?”

“The fat bastard that’s going to knock her teeth in. Now, is she in, or do I start with you?”

“What?”

Coleridge stomped to the desk and the little twerp sitting behind it.

“Where’s her office?”

The twerp was shaking. It made Coleridge happy, which was good, because he was just angry enough to snap the man in two.

“I don’t even know who you’re talking about!”

“Sam! Sam fucking Wright! Where’s her office?”

He pointed, and Coleridge was off, the floorboards shaking under his furious steps. The top half of Sam’s door was glass.

Fuck it, thought Coleridge. Nothing like making an entrance. He smashed the door open and the glass broke and tumbled down.

“What’s this shit?” he shouted, and threw the paper before he realized Sam had no head.

The rolled up paper hit the stump of her neck and landed in the pooled blood behind her with a sickly wet thump.

“Ah...fuck.”

He went up to her desk and looked down. Same as the others. Her head was gone and her shirt had been ripped open. He didn’t need to pull the shirt aside to know her heart, behind shattered ribs, was as absent as her head.

“Come off it. Come off it.”

He sat in a chair to the side of the desk and looked at Sam Wright’s corpse. Then he took his cell phone from his jacket pocket.

The twerp from the front desk came to the door. He turned white, then green.

“Don’t fucking puke in here,” Coleridge told him, but he did it anyway. He didn’t even bother to lean forward. He puked down his front, covering his shirt, his tie, his jacket. Puke ran all the way down until it splashed on his expensive shiny shoes.

Fuck it, thought Coleridge. There’d be no evidence anyway. What did it matter?

“Knock yourself out then, son.” He dialed the station.

“We’ve got another one,” he said.

Chapter Twenty-One

The package was heavy. She didn’t want it in the house, but she didn’t want it out on the porch, either. Whoever had taken her photograph could just as easily help themselves to the box.

She put it on the kitchen table and went into the hall to get the phone. Then she came back and sat at the table. She put the phone down. Picked it up. Put it down. Went to find Coleridge’s number. She’d kept it somewhere.

She searched her crap drawer in the kitchen. Went back into the hall and searched the table out there. Padded down the hall in her socks to the bedroom. The letter he’d sent with the Tarot pack was on her dresser, under a piece of jewellery.

Beth got as far as the first five digits before she put the phone down.

There were no markings on the box. It was just a plain box with brown wrapping-tape covering the openings at the top and bottom. Nothing unusual about it, but for the sound coming from within.

It was muffled. It sounded like a recording, or a CD playing under a blanket. Now she was curious. Knocking it on the table must have hit play or something. Why the hell would Coleridge send her a CD player? A recorder?

Would he?

She didn’t think he would.

She went to the kitchen drawer again, the bottom one, and rifled through it until she found some scissors.

Now she was having reservations, but you had to do things. If you started worrying, started thinking things through too much, you ended up doing nothing.

She always wanted to hide away. Every day, she woke up, and wished she’d stayed asleep. But getting up, facing the day, even when you didn’t want to...that was what being an adult was all about.

She puffed out a big breath and got on with the job at hand. She could call Coleridge after, tell him to stuff it.

For now, she was curious.

The scissors slid through the packing tape holding the lid of the box shut. The lid flapped open. She put her hand in and felt hair. Unmistakeable.

“Oh...oh, God...” Her heart pounded, and she knew she could be afraid. When she was scared, thought she could fear no more, there were new depths.

And below the hair, muttering. Like someone trying to speak. A head in a box, trying to speak. A model, something meant to scare her. That was all it was. Just a model.

She realized she was muttering, too. A thin, keening kind of sound, just under her breath.

Miles took her hand in his and she screamed. She leaped away, thinking it was the killer, but not knowing, not daring to look at the cold flesh that touched her hand. Miles came toward her and took her hand again, his grip firm and insistent. He pulled her back toward the box. He practically dragged her.

“No. Miles. No. No.”

She couldn’t shake his grip. He was strong. He put her hand back on the hair. She was crying now, so scared, so freaked out, but he was stronger than her.

Her hand touched the hair and grasped it. Miles pulled with her.

The head came out of the box, dripping blood from the neck. A woman’s head, once pretty, but her jaw was clenched so tight her face looked out of proportion.

It wasn’t a model. She couldn’t fool herself.

The woman was muttering because there was a card stuck between her teeth. She wanted to take it out, to talk, but she couldn’t. She couldn’t take the card out herself.

Miles did it for her. He pulled the card from the woman’s teeth, and her mouth dropped open. Her features, her muscles, her mouth, all suddenly slack.

Her eyes rolled in her head. The whites of her eyes were shot through with blood and one pupil was huge and red and awful to look at. Then she spoke.

“A gift for you, Beth. Are you grateful? Are you? His gift to you. He told me to tell you that. He told me to tell you, and that he’d let me go. God, let me go! Let me go now.”

Tears pooled in the dead woman’s eye, tainted by blood. She looked so sad. A last sigh came from her lips and she was gone. The sigh sounded like relief, like a lover giving a last mercy fuck and knowing for sure, at last, it’s over. All the pain, all the hurt. Like letting go and being happy to fall.

Beth felt her stomach clench but she wouldn’t throw up. Not here. Not on the woman’s head.

She dropped it like it was something dirty. She was sweating and shaking, but Miles was there by her side, stroking her hand, trying to comfort her as best as he could with no words.

The head hit the cupboard under the sink. The cleaning products and the bin and the whiskey cupboard.

Miles tugged at her hand. She looked down, and he held the card out to her.

The Fool.

She laughed as she moved the head aside with her toe and opened the cupboard and took the whiskey out. It was okay to break the rules. Sometimes it was okay to be drunk at any time of the day. All day, if necessary.

When she finally called Coleridge she was very drunk, but thank god she’d stopped laughing, because it was the kind of laughter that hurt her head, right back where her skull joined her neck, and not the kind that split your sides.

Chapter Twenty-Two

The police came and brought the circus with them. The crime scene technicians, someone to pronounce the woman’s head dead, which nearly made Beth laugh again, but she managed to cover it by biting down on her cigarette filter so hard she cut it in two. Detectives came, people took photographs, made drawings, took notes, asked her questions.

They did what the police always do: clean up other people’s shit. They went again, like they always do. But Coleridge came with them, and they either left him behind because he’d failed, like a punishment, or he stayed off his own back. Beth couldn’t decide, and she was far too drunk to think much about it.

She looked at him but her eyes hurt. Her head hurt. She wanted to carry on drinking, but drinking with an audience had never been her thing. It was a private solace, something for her to know, maybe Peter, of course Miles, but it was nothing to do with the policeman.

With the rest of them, it had been impersonal. It hadn’t mattered that she was falling down, pissing herself drunk. They hadn’t mattered. Just a bunch of people, treading softly ’round the blood but traipsing shit everywhere else.

But Coleridge...Coleridge had a way of looking at her that was making her angry, because his face said he thought he understood.

But he didn’t understand a damn thing.

“You got coffee?” he said.

“You staying?” she said.

“I am.”

“Can I do anything about that?”

“Sorry,” he said. “It’s the way it’s going to be.”

“I could kick you out.”

“You could. It’s pretty windy. Cold out this time of year. Fat man like me, bad circulation?”

“I don’t care.”

He pursed his lips, looked at her sadly. She got angry all over again. But she didn’t really want to be on her own. She didn’t know why. It wasn’t like her. She didn’t need people. She didn’t need company.

She sure as hell didn’t need a fucking friend.

“Coffee’s in the cupboard in the corner. Pot’s in the cupboard over there.”

He nodded, busied himself making coffee. She thought about talking to him, but she figured it wasn’t up to her to make conversation. If he wanted to talk, he could come out on the porch.

The back door slammed in the wind, so she put a chair from her garden set in front of it. She could hear the coffeemaker going in the kitchen. She tried to ignore it and focus on the sea. Whiskey in hand, glass on the table. Cigarettes in her pocket. Should be a lovely night.

The sky was clear and black, no clouds or moon, just a cloak of stars. The wind was chilly—probably freezing, she knew—but she’d drunk enough to be insulated against the worst of it.

She tried to light her cigarette, but the wind snatched her flame again and again.

“Fuck it.”

She got up and went into the kitchen. The policeman was sitting at her table. Her kitchen table. It was hers. Not his. He looked completely at home, even though he had no right to be.

He nodded at her.

She lit her cigarette and went back out to the porch to smoke.

The sea was high. She could see the whitecaps foaming in the weak light from her kitchen. She watched that and tried not to think about the policeman. She tried hard, but she was angry and wasn’t thinking straight. She was scared. Pretty drunk, too. She didn’t need him here. She could feel him, right there. Looking at her. Sizing her up, like he was waiting for the right moment to hit her, but with kind words instead of a bunched fist.

She lit a second cigarette from the butt of the first and pretended she didn’t know he was standing behind her in the doorframe.

“You want to talk about it?”

“I don’t want you here,” she said. Like it would do any good. She couldn’t throw him out. She probably couldn’t even push him an inch. He must weigh as much as your average hatchback.

“Not that.”

“What else is there?”

“Mrs. Willis...”

“Don’t call me that. If you’re going to rape me in my own home call me Beth, at least, or bitch, or whatever rapists do, but don’t be fucking
polite
.”

“What?”

“This is my home!”

“Beth, I’m not here to wind you up. I’m here because you were sent a human head by a man that’s killed seven people for sure, maybe more we haven’t heard about. I’m here because you’re in danger and you can’t look after yourself.”

“You don’t know a fucking thing!”

“Why are you shouting at me?”

“I don’t know! Stop being so...so...
fucking
reasonable!”

He shut up. Pursed his lips. He didn’t look at her. She was shaking and the wind had smoked the last of her cigarette right down to the butt.

“The card.”

Now it was her turn to be put on the wrong foot. “What?”

“The card. It’s different. Tell me about it.”

She shook her head. Thought about shouting at him, but it was about as much good as trying to throw him out.

“It’s from the Crowley-Harris Thoth Deck.”

“What does that mean?”

“The other cards, they’re Rider-Waite. The Crowley-Harris deck differs. Different pictures, full of weird symbolism. Some of the names are different. See, the Fool, the card in...” She took a breath. Settled herself. “The head. The woman’s...oh.”

“Yes,” he said, gentle, low, soothing. Just loud enough so she could hear. She wanted to punch him for it, even though it wouldn’t do any good.

She pushed her whiskey away. Maybe she’d had enough. What was she going to do? Bottle him? Bottle him for being kind?

“The horns, for example. I guess it’s all part of the symbolism. The Fool on the Rider-Waite deck doesn’t have horns, but the card in the woman’s mouth, that Fool had horns. Like the devil, you know? The Father of Lies. The Fool’s a liar.”

“He got that right.”

“What do you mean?” she said.

“The woman he killed, her name was Sam Wright.”

She looked blankly into his soft face. Shook her head.

“The reporter. The one who wrote the article.”

She took a moment to figure out what that meant. What the head had said. What that meant for her and Coleridge. The depths the killer could go to. The fact that he said she was a gift.

What kind of creature could think such a thing?

She laughed out loud.

“What?” he said. She shook her head. She couldn’t explain it. It just struck her as funny all of a sudden. Not in a good way.

Why was she even speculating? Coleridge didn’t know the half of it. She hadn’t told anyone what the head had said. She was keeping a lot of secrets. Maybe she was wrong. Maybe she could tell him. He looked like he could be a listener. She didn’t just need a listener, though. She needed a believer.