Jack Fallon stood with his back to the window, hands deep in the pockets of his coat. Ronnie Jeffrey was down on his knees in front of the fireplace, taking close-up pictures of what lay on the floor, half on the carpet and half on the stone kerb. The camera flashed twice in quick succession. When Ronnie turned, Jack could only see his eyes. The rest of his face was covered with a handkerchief knotted behind his neck, worn like a bank robber in an old western movie.
"Right, Ronnie," Jack said. "That should do it."
"About time too," Ronnie said, his voice only slightly muffled by the mask. "What a stink. She must have been here for days."
"Maybe. Where's Ralph? I want him to start the prints. And watch your feet on that glass."
"I'll ask him in." Ronnie heaved himself to his feet and backed away carefully, unable to avoid the smaller shards on the floor under his heavy shoes. They crunched with a sound that grated in Jack's ears and tingled the nerves between his shoulderblades. The photographer got to the door and pulled the handkerchief down.
"Still stinks, even from here. Like a barbecue in a cemetery."
"Could have been worse. Might have been summer," Jack agreed. He hadn't moved position since he'd taken up station at the window. His frame blocked off some of the light coming through the dusty pane, but not much. Outside it was cold and overcast. Implacable winter weather. If it had been summer, the stench in the room would have been overwhelming, stomach-clenching. The place would have been buzzing with bluebottles and the body would have been squirming with maggots wriggling under the skin.
"Thank God for small mercies," Ronnie grunted as he left the room.
Jack stood for a while longer, eyes drifting almost lazily around the room, trying to shake off an oppressive feeling of threat that had been sparked off by the grating sound.
The place was a shambles. Three of the chairs which would have sat around the circular table were overturned, lying on their sides. A fourth was upside down on a low settee on the far side by the door. It looked as if it had been flung violently. The table itself, set solid in the centre of the room under a drop light, was deeply scored in grooves, fresh by the look of it, in the places where the blood hadn't flowed. It was blood, Jack Fallon knew from long experience - too long, he sometimes thought - though it had blackened and caked in the runnels. He'd have known the smell anywhere, just as he knew the smell of burned flesh and decaying corpses. All three were here, present and correct, each clamouring for his attention and getting it. He felt the muscles of his throat twitch and he gulped beck the reflex. He hadn't had breakfast, and that was definitely a bonus.
The old woman hadn't been covered up yet. An ambulance crew were waiting downstairs, and they'd have to wait a little longer. She wasn't going anywhere. Hadn't been going anywhere for a couple of days, maybe a week, Jack estimated, thou Robbie Cattenach's pathology lab would give him a better guess. no doubt. He looked down at her. The sleeve and half the bodice of her black dress were burned away, along with her arm, which was stretched out right into the cold embers of the fire. They hadn't been cold, though. What stretched out from the woman's body was a twisted skeletal claw on a black, stick-like extension. The flesh had shrivelled and melted, causing the arm to warp. At the crook of the elbow, the tendons and muscles had bunched and torqued in the heat. On the floor just beneath, a two-foot wide greasy splatter had hardened on the floor. Jack knew it was the woman's body fats. They'd have sizzled out and dripped, like a roast on a spit. The fire hadn't gone far, maybe because there was little to burn on the woman. It hadn't made the leap over the kerb, or the whole place would have gone up. The room was a fire hazard. Old dry books lined the shelves on the walls, or at least some of them. Most of them were scattered around the floor. Some of them were ripped apart, and a few single torn pages were strewn about the floor just at Jack's feet. On a shelf, a box filled with newspaper clippings. Lace curtains on the window, and dried flowers in vases. They had probably stood on every horizontal surface, but now they too were strewn about like weeds in a cut hayfield. It would have gone up like a torch.
He shifted his stance, allowing the weak light to filter through the net curtain onto the woman's face. Only half of it was intact. The side nearest the fire was wasted, burned almost away. The flesh was gone, exposing the animal-like clench of the jaw right up to behind the ear. The eye had shrunk, probably burst first, then dissolved into the dark socket. The other side of the face was still human, though the shrivelling of skin and muscle on the burned side had pulled everything out of shape, drawing that side into a strange plastic grimace. The skin on the unburned side was blackened with bruising. Blood streaks had hardened into thick scabs. The mouth, the half that was left, was wide open.
Almost on the terminator line, where the burned and puckered skin stopped and the untouched part remained, a piece of glass was wedged into the centre of the forehead. It glinted weakly like an eye, giving the corpse an alien look that was oddly alive. Above that, slender shards of glass stuck up from the wasted scalp like shiny bristles. Slivers were strewn around the body, twinkling on the hearth around the blackened, contorted arm. Fragments of the flower-vases were scattered like sharp confetti all over the floor. Down one side of the room, two lengths of the thick, old fashioned wallpaper had been stripped from ceiling to floor and lay tangled and crumpled. Down the pillar-like lines, three yards apart, were two words, daubed vertically on the plain plaster in bold, dark capitals. That more than anything else raised a question mark in Jack Fallon's mind. It took his mind off everything else.
"She's been thrown all over the place. Hit with everything," he said aloud into the dull room. The smell was overwhelming.
"What's that?"
Ralph Slater came in from the hallway. There was a streak of powder on his cheek. He was wearing thin rubber gloves which made his hands look artificial. All his gear was in the battered leather case.
"Nothing Ralph. Just thinking."
"Smell would stop a clock. Want a mint?"
Jack shook his head. He needed a coffee, strong and black, with three sugars. In the palpable air of the claustrophobic, ransacked room, even the thought of coffee was nauseating. He really needed a drink, but he'd been needing a drink for a while.
"No. Might as well get on. You know your bit. Ronnie's taken his snaps. I'll need everything from here."
Ralph nodded. He put his case down on the old brocade settee, after making sure there was nothing there worth checking. There were enough smooth surfaces in the room to make the fabric of the upholstery hardly worth dusting.
"What about that then? Looks like a gang slogan," Ralph said, nodding at the scrawled words.
"Not any gang from around here."
Heteros. There was an odd slant to the letters on the bare space next to the door.
Etheros. The same twist to the right on the wall where the paper had been stripped beside the window.
The words, if they were words, started at the ceiling, at twice the height of a man. Whoever had written them must have used something to get up there, and then removed whatever he'd used. He must also have been confident that nobody would disturb him. Did that mean she'd known her attacker? That would make it easier, Jack thought.
Still it was too early to say. He'd got the call an hour before and had arrived ten minutes after that. A young policeman, just out of cadet school, had been standing at the outside door, one foot in a dirty puddle. When Jack had approached him, the youngster had turned and retched violently, obviously not for the first time. Jack dug into his pocket and gave him a fresh tissue. The constable had wiped his mouth vigorously before straightening up. His eyes were red-rimmed.
"They told me to wait here for you sir. It's the third floor. neighbours were complaining about the smell. Doors weren't locked."
"Touch anything?"
The young man - he looked no more than a boy - gave Jack a look which declared he would have just as soon cut off his hand. He gave another shiver and tried to gag again, shaking his head all the time.
"There's a car on its way," Jack told him. "When it gets here, get back up to division and have a cup of tea. Then when you're feeling a bit fresher, write down everything you saw."
The constable nodded, still wiping at his lips. Jack by-passed him. At the second level, he realised what the neighbours had been complaining about. Once inside, he wondered why they hadn't noticed sooner.
Ralph's two assistants came in and were going over the place, starting at the door and working their way in. They didn't seem badly affected by the smell. They were used to working with the dead. Jack could have done without it.
Oh, he could have done without it, nothing was surer.
He turned away and pulled the curtain to the side. The window faced north, across the main street up to the Barwoods behind the town. They clouds were dark and heavy, getting set to drop two days of clammy misery. After that, the weathermen said it was going to be cold. it was already cold out there. Down in the street, he could see the winking lights of the ambulance and the police cars, bright electric-blue flashes against the background of grey. People were walking past, heads down against the cold west wind.
Working with the dead.
Somebody had to do it. There was always somebody who would do it. Jack Fallon did not know if he was man enough for it any more. He wasn't sure he was man enough for anything any more. On the window, the smirr of rain had thickened to droplets which ran in jagged streaks, fuzzing out the grey outside, breaking up the winking blue lights. His mind started going back to another dismal day when he'd seen the same electric flicker through the rain on the windscreen of the unmarked car, and something had flickered through his mind, not like a light, but a darkness. It had come blaring in like radio message with no source, over and above the hubbub of sirens and lights and real radio crackle and a sudden surge of dread had made his stomach drop like a weight. That had been...that had...
He turned himself away from the window before the vision came back to him, otherwise he would not be able to function. He shook it away with an almost savage twist of his body, gritting his teeth so hard he could feel them grind like stones. The memory tried to edge in, and he knew it would come back in force later on, when the work was done, when his mind wasn't focussed, and then it would take him on the black dance again. But now, he had to think clearly.
Ralph's scene of crimes team worked quickly and efficiently. dabbing here, collecting pieces there. The small tools of that trade were cutting and picking and probing around the room, watched by the dispassionate, drily blind eye of the dead woman, and the winking cyclopean shard set in the middle of her forehead.
"Any of you know her?"
"Name's Herkik. Polish or something," Ralph mumbled back. His tongue was poking out between his teeth and he scraped a sample of the blood on the table, working with delicate deliberation.
"Hungarian," Jack corrected. "No, I mean, does anybody know anything about her?"
Ralph shook his head. the two others made no reply.
"Right. We'll get it door to door. How long will this take you?"
"Another half an hour. Dr Cuthbert's made a prelim. The drivers can take her away when you're done."
Jack crossed the room, careful not to stand on anything, which was difficult enough in the tight confines of the demolished room. He got to the door.
"Finished here?"
Ralph nodded, letting him know that he could touch the door. Jack closed it behind him and made his way downstairs, ignoring the old woman who peeked out, nose almost caught in the burglar-chain.
In the street, the air was clean, but the drizzle made it a dirty morning.
John McColl was standing at the back of the nearest police car, using his big hands for emphasis as he spoke to two younger men in long raincoats and another three uniformed policemen. Jack reached him just as the others turned away.
"Bit of a mess," the big sergeant said matter-of-factly. "Got an idea or two from the neighbours, nothing much. They've had their heads up their arses this past week."
John was a couple of inches taller than Jack Fallon's six foot, and another few inches wider. His hair had gone prematurely gray. he looked the senior officer of the two, but Jack outranked him by two levels.
"You're telling me." Jack took a deep breath of air. He could feel the winter on the west wind.
He ran through the procedure. John McColl told him what the door-to-door team were doing, and what they'd got so far. He flipped open his notebook, turned against the rain and used a big broad forefinger to point out the words as he spoke.
"Marta Herkik. Hungarian. Came to live with her brother. He's been dead about six years. Bit of a faith healer, the old lady, into spiritualism, that sort of thing. Fortune telling and the like. Should have been able to see this coming if she'd been any good, eh?"
Jack nodded him on. John was a straight-talking, irreverent policeman who had little respect for authority unless it was earned. His father ran the family's three pubs in Glasgow, and John could have had an easy life if he'd chosen. The family wealth perhaps allowed him to forego the obsequiousness often demanded by superiors, but he liked Jack Fallon, and they had a mutual, easy-going respect.
"Neighbour below has been on night-shift at the rig yard. Hasn't heard a thing. The one next door said there was a bit of a rumble on Saturday last week. Nothing much. She thought the old dear was shifting furniture. The walls here are two feet thick and the floors nearly the same. Built to last, this old place. Not much noise drift."
McColl closed the book. "Any idea what killed her?"
"Just about everything in the place."
"There was a case like that up in Creggan a few years back. Bastard got off on impeachment. Blamed somebody else and the jury was pulled both ways."
"We'll wait for the street teams. No point in jumping in. When Ralph's finished, let the ambulance crew go up. I'll be back at the office."
"Taking the car?"
"No. I'll stroll it. Want to think for a bit."
Jack shrugged his collar up higher against the rain. A hank of black hair had fallen down over his forehead and was trickling water onto his brow. He wiped it away with his hand and turned along River Street, took a left turn at Market Vennel, easing his way through the throng of umbrellas which stabbed at his eyes in the narrow lane, and out to College Way towards the station.
The sense of unease he'd felt in the house where the dead woman sprawled on the hearth stayed with him all the way.