‘It’s OK,’ Steve murmured. ‘Really – it’s OK. It’s just air coming out of his lungs.’
Sally sank to a crouch, trembling. Steve licked his lips and went back to exploring inside David’s mouth. He tilted his chin down and squinted inside, grunted approvingly.
‘That’ll do.’
He put his elbow on the grass and lay almost full length next to David’s body, facing him as if they were going to have a long and involved conversation. With his free hand he fumbled out the phone again and spent almost five minutes photographing the face and teeth. When he had finished he got to his feet and looked at Sally.
‘What?’ she hissed. ‘What now? What happens now?’
‘I told you – I haven’t done this before.’
He went back into the garage and pulled more things from the shelves. She saw him in the weak light pouring petrol from a plastic container into a power tool. The chainsaw. He brought it out and stood in front of the corpse.
‘No,’ she whispered. ‘No. We can’t.’
‘We haven’t got a choice. Not any more.’
She closed her eyes and took a long deep breath. Something was trying to thump its way out through her chest. She breathed hard, counting to twenty, until the static in her head eased and the thing in her chest stopped moving.
She opened her eyes and found Steve watching her expectantly.
‘OK,’ she murmured. ‘OK. Where do we start?’
‘His face,’ he said tightly. ‘Because that’s the worst part. We start with his face.’
Chapter 40
The whisky wore off quickly. They kept themselves together by setting a timer to fifteen minutes. They’d force themselves to work for those minutes, but the moment the timer went off they’d rip off their gloves, drop them on the plastic next to the remains of David Goldrab, and go back into the garage, where they’d stand with their backs to the mess in the garden, drinking another whisky, washing it down with water. They didn’t speak, just drank in silence, holding each other’s eyes as if they needed to look at a living human being. To see flesh that had blood and heat and life moving through it.
‘We can’t go on drinking,’ Steve said. ‘We’ve got to drive.’
Sally let her eyes stray outside to the plastic mat – slick purple lumps shining in the moonlight. Steve kept saying he had good reason to know what the police were like – that without a body and a motive they’d have nowhere to start. He said that human remains were easier to hide than anyone believed – that most criminals just lacked the time, resources and basic balls to hide their victims properly. That it was easy as long as you had the stomach to make the remains unrecognizable as human. Then you could hide them under the noses of the law and they’d walk straight past them. Sally thought he was only talking as if he knew what he was doing to reassure her, but she said nothing. ‘It’s easier from now,’ he said. ‘The worst bit’s over. We can stop the whisky. And we should try to eat something.’
She shook her head. ‘I’m never going to eat again.’
‘Me neither. I’m just saying we should.’
They went back outside and began dividing the pieces into eight piles. Steve had a pair of pliers, which he used to remove some teeth from David’s broken bottom jaw. There was no vice in the garage so he had to hold the jaw between his knees to get a purchase on it. Sally took photos using his camera. She heard the noise of gristle tearing as the teeth came from their sockets, and knew she’d never forget it. To the electric drill he fitted an attachment with a helical blade, meant for mixing paint, then together they loaded joints of bone and flesh into a bucket. They used more plastic sheet taped down around the drill to stop the contents spraying out and Steve switched it on, ramming it into the bucket over and over again, pulverizing the pieces.
By one in the morning he was covered with sweat and ten Lidl carrier bags sat on the lawn, each bulging with an unrecognizable red paste. Sally said they should say a prayer or something. Or make some sort of gesture to mark the death.
‘You think anyone’s up there to hear a prayer like that?’
‘I don’t know.’ She stood on the driveway, transfixed by the bags. ‘Maybe it doesn’t matter if we believe – maybe it only matters if he did. David.’
Steve shook his head. ‘Forgive me, Sally, but we just don’t have time for a morality lesson. If there is a God up there, then don’t waste His time praying for David Goldrab’s soul. Just pray – as hard as you can.’
‘For what?’
‘For us.’
Chapter 41
The clouds cleared and the moon sat, low and dazzling, over the Somerset countryside. Sally arranged her jam-making pans outside on the lawn, filled them with limescale remover and cleaned everything they’d used – the drill, the chainsaw, the plastic sheet, the plastic bags. Then she cut all the plastic into small squares the size of postage stamps and placed them in a bin liner. Meanwhile Steve piled up the clothing they’d worn – with the shoes, the towels – heaped it in a flowerbed on the west side of the house, poured paraffin on it and set it alight. When the fire had died and they’d dug the ashes into the soil, they spread more plastic in the boot of the Audi and loaded in the carrier bags. An eleventh, containing hair and larger pieces of bone that hadn’t been pulverized by the mixer, went into the well below the back passenger seats. The remains filled the car with a foul mixture of offal and faeces. Sally and Steve kept their coats on, the heater up high, the windows wide open.
Steve was from the countryside outside Taunton. He was a rambler – someone who had every Ordnance Survey map of the British Isles ordered neatly according to their code number on his bookshelves. He knew the border lands of Somerset, Gloucestershire and Wiltshire better than Sally did and he had a route already planned. It took in rivers and canals, forests where badgers foraged at night. It took in the Severn estuary – Steve waded out into the mud in the giant grey shadow of the decommissioned nuclear power plant at Berkeley. They stopped on the outskirts of villages and squeezed dollops through sewage grates in the road; they tramped across fields in the Mendips to press the contents of the last bag through the meshes that protected disused Roman mineshafts. Steve stood in the silent darkness, his ear close to the mesh, straining to hear the soft wet patter of the tissue hitting the sides of the shaft.
From time to time Sally turned and looked at his face as he drove, the glow of the dashboard lighting it. She watched his eyes on the road and a strange thought came to her – that for the first time in her life she’d done something as a partnership. An ugly, perverse, unthinkable thing, but it had been done by equals. Crazy though it all was, she decided it was the closest she’d ever been to anyone in her life.
He turned and caught her looking at him. He held her eyes, just for a second, and in that moment something passed between them. Something that made her stomach stir, as if an odd strength was gathering. Like the beginnings of excitement on a holiday, the desire to yell and dance. She opened the window and threw a handful of the shredded plastic into the slipstream, watched it in the wing-mirror, like confetti, lit red by the rear lights. It was so beautiful it could have belonged to a celebration. Funny, she thought, how everything in life was so deceptive.
Part Two
Chapter 1
‘I’ve got something for you.’
‘About time too.’
‘These things don’t just happen overnight. It’s not the way it works.’
The guy at the other end of the phone – a clerk at SOCA, the Serious Organized Crime Agency – was getting a little weary of Zoë and the way she kept pressing him for an answer. It was Monday and in the last four days she’d called at least twice a day to find out if he had any results for the search she’d requested on a pornographer from London, nicknamed London Tarn.