McGrath’s deep-set eyes glinted as he sat down at a desk. “That sounded slightly defensive.”
Did it?” For a moment Jerome was prepared to be offended by McGrath’s perception and unusual directness, then he realized he was being offered a rare opportunity to bridge the chasm that separates human beings. “I suppose that’s because I wasn’t too well qualified as an engineer, either. I was a draughtsman in a general engineering outfit and I handled what we referred to as day jobs—jobs that were too small to make it worth while putting them into the computer. I could have them sketched and checked and into the workshop while a programmer was still adjusting the angle of his chair.”
“What went wrong?”
“The old hands in the workshop retired and a computer took over their jobs—and it couldn’t read my drawings.”
McGrath nodded thoughtfully, indicating to Jerome that he should sit down. “And you didn’t want to work on the computer.”
“I was born with one of my own.”
“Something tells me,” McGrath said, with the hint of a smile, “that it was quite an experience for you to talk to Arthur Starzynski’s daughter.”
Jerome smiled back, glad of the change of subject, and took out his notebook and pen. “According to what Maeve Starzynski told me, her father’s remains looked as though they had been cremated. Is that correct?”
“No.”
Jerome was relieved and disappointed at the same time. “She seemed so…”
“A crematorium oven couldn’t produce anything like that result in just a few minutes,” McGrath cut in. “This isn’t the sort of thing people usually like to discuss, but I can tell you that when a cadaver is cremated it is subjected to 1,200 degrees Celsius for ninety minutes, and then to one thousand degrees for anything up to three more hours. Even then, what comes out of the oven is far from being fine ash or dust. You get a lot of bone fragments which have to be pulverized by machine, but in Starzynski’s case there was only fine ash. Except for the hand, of course.”
Jerome paused in his note-taking, aware that his jaw had almost sagged while he was absorbing the figures just quoted. McGrath stared back at him in morose satisfaction, his face like hewn marble in the sterile glow from the tubes in the ceiling. From another part of the building there came the faint rumble of a sliding door, sounding like distant thunder.
“That makes it all the harder to accept,” Jerome finally said, wishing he could have produced a less obvious comment. “What sort of temperature would have been needed?”
“I don’t know—interesting field of experiment there—but the small change in Starzynski’s pants pocket was fused into a single lump.”
“May I see it?”
“The police took that and it’s my guess they sent it up to Concord for forensic examination.” McGrath stood up, took an overlong jacket from the back of his chair and shrugged it on. “Come and have a look at the real evidence.”
Jerome got to his feet, experiencing a sudden timidity, and closed his notebook. “Is it pretty gruesome?”
“Good God, no.” McGrath emitted a dry laugh. “A dish of chicken livers is ten times more unattractive than this little lot. I don’t know how my wife can bring herself to make pâté.” As he was leading the way out of the office and along the corridor he glanced down at Jerome’s notepad. “You must be the only reporter in the country who still writes shorthand.”
“I’ve always used it, even when I was doing part-time work with a trade journal.”
“Part of your one-man boycott of the electronics industry?” McGrath paused at a double door. “What’s wrong with a recorder?”
“A recorder is fine for dictation. It can even cope, after a fashion, with a multiple conversation—provided everybody is obliging enough to speak in turn and you keep telling it who they are. But when you get a bunch of people arguing and mumbling and talking over each other and using gestures and facial expressions to carry their meaning a good shorthand note is far superior.”
“And are you good at it?”
“Nearing three hundred words a minute.”
“I might have guessed,” McGrath said with an enigmatic expression. He opened the door and they went into a large room, clinically white, which had triple rows of square doors built into two walls. Jerome was surprised to hear bluegrass music, then he saw a chubby young man who was sitting at a desk and listening to a pocket radio while he ate pink-filled sandwiches. The air was noticeably cold, causing Jerome to give a single shiver as it touched his skin.
“Don’t be daunted by all this.” McGrath made a sweeping gesture which took in the serried doors. “They’re nearly all empty. The architect who designed the place must have thought we were a branch of CryoCare.”
Jerome hunched his shoulders. “It certainly feels that way.”
“Not another hothouse plant!” McGrath went to the desk and rapped it imperiously with his knuckles before speaking to the plump youngster. “Forgive me for interrupting your dedicated pursuit of obesity, Mervyn, but we want to view the Starzynski remains.”
“Number eight,” Mervyn said, handing him a set of keys.
“Thank you.” McGrath switched off the radio, drawing a startled glance from its owner, beckoned to Jerome and went to one of the lockers.
He opened the door and pulled at a drawer which rolled out easily on telescopic cantilevers. Wisps of vapour drifted down its sides. Jerome moved closer on reluctant legs and saw that the drawer held two plastic bags. One was full of grey-black ash and the other, already dewing over with condensation, contained Art Starzynski’s left hand. The wrist tapered to a black point and the fingers were straight and splayed out, as though Starzynski had experienced an electrifying pang of astonishment or terror in the instant before he was overtaken by death.
Jerome stared down at the grotesque object, prepared for revulsion, but found in himself a curious lack of emotion. The destruction and dehumanization of Art Starzynski had been too complete. The hand could have been a relic of Ancient Egypt, or a fossil, too divorced from the immediacy of life to have any significance for those who still breathed and could feel the warm cardiac tide in their veins.
“See what I mean about the consistency of the ash?” McGrath said, gently prodding the larger bag with one finger. just don’t know what temperature it took to do this. A lot of heat was involved.”
“But there was practically no fire damage in the rest of the room.”
“So they say.” McGrath gave a dismissive shrug. “I’m glad I don’t have to establish the root cause of what happened to this man.”
“Have you no theories at all?”
“The only one I would have given any credence to is that Maeve Starzynski either killed her father or found him dead, then dismembered him and spent a week or so reducing the pieces in a high-powered furnace.”
Jerome sniffed to signal his scepticism. “Why should she do that?”
“I’ve no idea—my only concern is with explaining the physical condition of the remains—but the theory is useless anyway, because neighbours were talking to Starzynski less than an hour before he died. Are you through in here? Are the eyes sufficiently feasted?”
“Yes, and I think I understand the problem better now. Thanks for giving me your time.”
“Glad to be of service.” McGrath slid the drawer and its macabre contents back into the wall, locked the door and returned the keys to the young man at the desk. Mervyn nodded silently, beginning to unwrap another sandwich, and before McGrath and Jerome had fully left the room it was again pervaded by the incongruous strains of bluegrass.