The Silkworm (Cormoran Strike, #2)(45)

Strike let the note fall back onto the doormat and moved forwards into the hall, observing the scars left on every surface where the chemical substance had been thrown. To his left was a door; he opened it. The room beyond was dark and empty; it had not been tarnished with the bleach-like substance. A dilapidated kitchen, also devoid of furnishings, was the only other room on the lower floor. The deluge of chemicals had not spared it; even a stale half loaf of bread on the sideboard had been doused.

Strike headed up the stairs. Somebody had climbed or descended them, pouring the vicious, corrosive substance from a capacious container; it had spattered everywhere, even onto the landing windowsill, where the paint had bubbled and split apart.

On the first floor, Strike came to a halt. Even through the thick wool of his overcoat he could smell something else, something that the pungent industrial chemical could not mask. Sweet, putrid, rancid: the stench of decaying flesh.

He did not try either of the closed doors on the first floor. Instead, with his birthday whisky swaying stupidly in its plastic bag, he followed slowly in the footsteps of the pourer of acid, up a second flight of stained stairs from which the varnish had been burned away, the carved banisters scorched bare of their waxy shine.

The stench of decay grew stronger with every step Strike took. It reminded him of the time they stuck long sticks into the ground in Bosnia and pulled them out to sniff the ends, the one fail-safe way of finding the mass graves. He pressed his collar more tightly to his mouth as he reached the top floor, to the studio where a Victorian artist had once worked in the unchanging northern light.

Strike did not hesitate on the threshold except for the seconds it took to tug his shirt sleeve down to cover his bare hand, so that he would make no mark on the wooden door as he pushed it open. Silence but for a faint squeak of hinges, and then the desultory buzzing of flies.

He had expected death, but not this.

A carcass: trussed, stinking and rotting, empty and gutted, lying on the floor instead of hanging from a metal hook where surely it belonged. But what looked like a slaughtered pig wore human clothing.

It lay beneath the high arched beams, bathed in light from that gigantic Romanesque window, and though it was a private house and the traffic sloshed still beyond the glass, Strike felt that he stood retching in a temple, witness to sacrificial slaughter, to an act of unholy desecration.

Seven plates and seven sets of cutlery had been set around the decomposing body as though it were a gigantic joint of meat. The torso had been slit from throat to pelvis and Strike was tall enough to see, even from the threshold, the gaping black cavity that had been left behind. The intestines were gone, as though they had been eaten. Fabric and flesh had been burned away all over the corpse, heightening the vile impression that it had been cooked and feasted upon. In places the burned, decomposing cadaver was shining, almost liquid in appearance. Four hissing radiators were hastening the decay.

The rotted face lay furthest away from him, near the window. Strike squinted at it without moving, trying not to breathe. A wisp of yellowing beard clung still to the chin and a single burned-out eye socket was just visible.

And now, with all his experience of death and mutilation, Strike had to fight down the urge to vomit in the almost suffocating mingled stenches of chemical and corpse. He shifted his carrier bag up his thick forearm, drew his mobile phone out of his pocket and took photographs of the scene from as many angles as he could manage without moving further into the room. Then he backed out of the studio, allowing the door to swing shut, which did nothing to mitigate the almost solid stink, and called 999.

Slowly and carefully, determined not to slip and fall even though he was desperate to regain fresh, clean, rain-washed air, Strike proceeded back down the tarnished stairs to wait for the police in the street.





17





Best while you have it use your breath,



There is no drinking after death.



John Fletcher, The Bloody Brother





It was not the first time that Strike had visited New Scotland Yard at the insistence of the Met. His previous interview had also concerned a corpse, and it occurred to the detective, as he sat waiting in an interrogation room many hours later, the pain in his knee less acute after several hours of enforced inaction, that he had had sex the previous evening then too.

Alone in a room hardly bigger than the average office’s stationery cupboard, his thoughts stuck like flies to the rotting obscenity he had found in the artist’s studio. The horror of it had not left him. In his professional capacity he had viewed bodies that had been dragged into positions intended to suggest suicide or accident; had examined corpses bearing horrific traces of attempts to disguise the cruelty to which they had been subjected before death; he had seen men, women and children maimed and dismembered; but what he had seen at 179 Talgarth Road was something entirely new. The malignity of what had been done there had been almost orgiastic, a carefully calibrated display of sadistic showmanship. Worst to contemplate was the order in which acid had been poured, the body disembowelled: had it been torture? Had Quine been alive or dead while his killer laid out place settings around him?

The huge vaulted room where Quine’s body lay would now, no doubt, be swarming with men in full-body protective suits, gathering forensic evidence. Strike wished he were there with them. Inactivity after such a discovery was hateful to him. He burned with professional frustration. Shut out from the moment the police had arrived, he had been relegated to a mere blunderer who had stumbled onto the scene (and ‘scene’, he thought suddenly, was the right word in more ways than one: the body tied up and arranged in the light from that giant church-like window… a sacrifice to some demonic power… seven plates, seven sets of cutlery…) The frosted glass window of the interrogation room blocked out everything beyond it but the colour of the sky, now black. He had been in this tiny room for a long time and still the police had not finished taking his statement. It was difficult to gauge how much of their desire to prolong the interview was genuine suspicion, how much animosity. It was right, of course, that the person who discovered a murder victim should be subjected to thorough questioning, because they often knew more than they were willing to tell, and not infrequently knew everything. However, in solving the Lula Landry case Strike might be said to have humiliated the Met, who had so confidently pronounced her death suicide. Strike did not think he was being paranoid in thinking that the attitude of the crop-haired female detective inspector who had just left the room contained a determination to make him sweat. Nor did he think that it had been strictly necessary for quite so many of her colleagues to look in on him, some of them lingering only to stare at him, others delivering snide remarks.