'You haven't the stomach for it,' his co-student murmured, nudging him in the ribs during peritoneal and upper GI topology. 'Get it? You haven't the — oh, forget it.'
He'd saved the allowance made to him by his parents and bought a flat in Lewisham — a ground-floor flat with a square garden and brick wall in front. After class he lay in the bedroom, curtains closed, and fantasized about the corpse so often that it seemed to have rubbed part of his brain raw. She took on the proportions of a goddess in his mind: waxen, motionless white face; serene and cool, a marble muse, blue veins showing in her lips, her blond hair fanned out on the pillow for him. Waiting in infinite stillness. It was the stillness and pallor which attracted him: so unlike the plump, wriggling Lucilla.
Panic-stricken, he made clumsy attempts at self-administered aversion therapy. He wrote to researchers in the States asking for supplies of Depo-Provera. When they refused he tried injecting himself with diamorphine before anatomy class. But it made him too nauseous to get to his feet. Worse, it offered no relief from the fantasies.
It was only six weeks later, almost at the end of his first term, just before Christmas, when disaster truly struck.
The lab technicians had overstayed their welcome in the Standard, and hadn't returned the anatomy specimens to the cadaver tanks in the anteroom. Harteveld, sick and shaking with the possibility this opened to him, loitered behind after the last anatomy class of that term, crouched in the corner, at eye level with the polished pneumatic valves used to raise and lower the dissecting tables.
It was 2 p.m., and already the flinty northern light was fading from the sky. The old heating system creaked and shuddered in the belly of the building, but in the lab the air was chill and stale. Harteveld wrapped his arms around his knees and rocked himself gently. The bodies lay silent in the weak hibernal light, skin stripped in neat sections from the arms, clamps, haemostats, retractors sprouting like small spines from their gelid grey stomach meat. She was in the centre of the room. From here he could see the dun fall of her hair.
And then the big door at the far end of the lab opened.
Security.
Harteveld's heart stilled. He mustn't be found here. He should stand up and pretend casually to be collecting something. Quickly now. But his legs were trembling, useless. A cold sweat broke out across his scalp. He was trapped.
And then something happened which changed everything.
The security guard locked the door, from the inside, and pulled the blinds.
18
At 10.30 p.m., when Caffery left Shrivemoor, the night was still warm. He left the radio off and drove in silence, promising himself a bath and a healthy shot of malt whisky when he got home. Under the moment-to-moment preoccupations — his tiredness, traffic lights, the too-bright headlights on the South Circular — he was aware of a new inhabitant in his thoughts, like a scrawled image at the bottom of a shifting lake, the beginnings of a picture, a real picture, of Birdman.
A necrophile. How could they have missed it?
He turned left at Honor Oak, right across Peckham Rye, the ghostly white dabs of gravestones in Nunhead cemetery floated beyond the trees. The bloody arc of Birdman's career fleshed itself out in his head. A man — tall? short? — squatting like an incubus, a carrion crow, eyes running with excitement, moving his hands over a corpse. The dead and the undead. An unholy alliance.
And the backbeat of unanswered questions continued: a live bird sewn inside a body cavity, long after death. Why? And why can't you forget that image? The strange, ordered cuts to the scalps — except Kayleigh, his subconscious prompted. Why not Kayleigh? And how did Birdman keep his victims still for the injection? This problem breathed its own peculiar brand of unease. It whispered mind control; worse, it whispered a toxin that modern forensics couldn't identify.
He parked the car under his neighbour's flaking plane tree, and wearily climbed out, his head thudding. All he wanted now was quiet. He slung his jacket over his shoulder. A Glenmorangie and a bath.
But something unnaturally pale waited for him in the shadows on the doorstep.
He stopped, hand on the gate, as his eyes adjusted to the night. When he realized what was gleaming gently in the half-light he knew it was Penderecki's work.
Two dolls, naked, the colour of lifeless babies, plastic limbs linked, face to genitals, face to genitals. Splayed out on the step in front of them a note on a pink Ladbroke's chit:
ringing me is like ringing you're neck
Caffery unbuttoned his shirt cuff, pulled it down over his hand and carefully turned the bundle. A girl's doll, blond nylon hair, lolled outwards, blank eyes turned upward, arms held up and out as if ready to catch a beach ball. Barbie or Sindy. Smooth nippleless breasts, finger's-width waist and, scribbled obscenely on the slope of plastic between its legs, overlarge as if infected, a raw red-ink vulva.
Very Penderecki.
He prodded the other doll and rolled it onto its back. Action Man, or GI Joe, the same blind stare and scratched-in genitalia, the same rigid beseeching hands. HASBRO was stamped in the small of the back.
And this Caffery recognized. This had once been Ewan's toy.
He clearly remembered the mystery of its disappearance. One sunny afternoon in the early Seventies. Before lunch it had been lying face down in the grass in the back garden, pinned by the lead weight of miniature grenades and water canteens. After lunch it was gone. Spirited away. 'Well now, Ewan,' their mother, as mystified as they were, giving the sky a suspicious look, 'maybe it was stolen by a crow.' The next day she bought the all-new Action Man from Woolworth's in Lewisham. 'Look at his hands, Ewan. They can grip. Isn't that better?'
This was not new from Penderecki, this subtle torture. Caffery gathered the dolls up, found his keys and wearily pressed inside his front door.
The kitchen light was on and he could see a pile of his shirts freshly folded on the ironing board.
Veronica.
In his tiredness he hadn't noticed her car outside.
Be good to her, Jack. She's ill. Don't forget, be good.
In the kitchen he threw his jacket on the chair, took a roll of cling film and carefully wrapped the dolls individually, ready to be filed away in Ewan's room. The Le Creuset was on the hob and from the living room Gershwin's 'Rhapsody in Blue' came twining around the good cooking smells of ginger and coriander. From the shelf he took a glass and the Glenmorangie and poured himself a large shot. His body ached with fatigue. He wanted silence, his whisky, a bath and then bed. Nothing more. He certainly didn't want Veronica.
'Jack?'
'Yeah, hi,' he called dully into the hall.
'I let myself in. I hope you don't mind.'
Well, Veronica, if I do mind what good will it do me?
'Come up.'
In Ewan's room. Why did she always gravitate to that room? Taking the dolls and the whisky he slowly climbed the stairs.
She was sitting in the middle of the floor, wearing a carefully tailored navy skirt suit with white starched cuffs secured by gold pins. She had kicked her shoes off so he could see the pale moons of her toenails through the flesh-coloured tights. Scattered around her were the contents of all his Penderecki files.
'Veronica?'