The floor had been easy. He’d bought the old parquet tiles from an architectural salvage yard. Maple, the man had told him. From the offices of an old woollen mill down Exeter way. It had taken a few evenings to lay them in the closest possible approximation to the remembered arrangement, but it had been a task more boring than truly challenging.
The light fitting had come from a junk shop out on the Taunton road. It had been the very first thing he’d bought, the item that had in fact given him the idea for this magical place. It could have been the original, so closely did its three frosted bowls match his memory. As he gazed at it in wonder in the dingy shop, it came to him that he could make the place live again, reassemble it just as it had been, and make of it a temple to the dark desires it had bred in him.
The furniture was simple. A plain pine table, though the scars on this surface were different from the ones he recalled. Four balloon-backed pine chairs, worn dark along the top from the regular wear of hands pulling them out and pushing them in. A small card table covered in faded green baize, where the tools of his vocation were arrayed, their shining steel glittering in the lamplight. Surgical dissection knives, a butcher’s cleaver, a small handsaw and an oilstone to make sure they were always laser-sharp. Beneath the table was a stack of polystyrene meat trays of various sizes and an industrial-sized roll of cling film.
The killing took place elsewhere, of course. It didn’t matter where. That was irrelevant to the meaning of the ritual. The method was always the same. Strangulation by ligature was the technical term, he knew that. More reliable than hands, which could slip and slither on skin slick with the sweat of fear. The crucial reason for this choice of means was that it did least traumatic damage to the body. Stabbing and gunshot wounds created such havoc, destroying the perfection he craved.
Then came the cleansing. Naked to match his sacrifice, he lowered the stripped body into the warm water and opened the veins to allow as much blood as possible to seep out, to prevent the ugly stains of lividity from spoiling the appearance of his oblation. Then he would drain the bath and refill it. The body would be carefully purified with unscented soap, the nails scrubbed, the effluents of sudden death washed away, the body purged of every defilement.
Finally, he could set about his task. Once the process had begun, he could afford to waste no time. Rigor would start within five or six hours of death, making his job both more difficult and less precise. The body, laid out on the table, pale as a statue, was his votive offering to the strange gods of obsession that he had learned must be placated all those years ago.
First, the head. He sliced through the sinews and complex structures of the throat and neck with a blade so fine that it left a trace no thicker than a pencil line when he removed the knife to exchange it for a cleaver to separate the skull from the first vertebra. He put the head to one side for later attention. Then he made a Y-incision like a pathologist. He peeled the epidermis back, carefully rolling the body so he could remove the skin from neck to toe, stripping it off like a wet suit till he had revealed a cadaver that resembled an anatomy illustration. The shucked skin went into a bucket at his feet.
Then he plunged his hands into the still-warm mass of the abdominal cavity, gently lifting the intestines and internal organs clear before slicing them free and placing them in a pile to one side. Next he broke the diaphragm and carefully removed the heart and lungs, putting them symmetrically on the other side of the torso.
He moved down to the wrists. He severed both neatly, the disarticulation causing him no problem. His career in the butchery trade had provided him with all the basic skills, which he’d refined to an art, he confidently believed. Never had the human body been so perfectly dissected nor so reverently.
The feet were next. The elbows and knees succeeded them, followed by the separation of the remaining upper limbs at hips and shoulders. Now he was working swiftly and surely, jointing the torso with the efficient movements of an expert at home in his specialism. Time flew by as his hands worked methodically, until all that remained was a mound of jointed meat, the head facing outwards at the top of the table.
Now, his excitement was at a peak, his heart pounding and his mouth dry. With a soft moan, he took his penis in his blood-slicked hands and carefully slid it into the open mouth that sat like a totem in front of him. Holding the head by the hair, he thrust into the slack-jawed orifice, his body shuddering with his ecstasy.
All passion spent, he stood with his fists on the table, leaning forward and breathing as heavily as a marathon runner at the finishing tape. The sacrament was over. Nothing remained but the disposal.
For most killers, that would have presented insurmountable problems. If Dennis Nilsen had managed to develop a more practical way of getting rid of his victims, he would probably have been reducing the homeless statistics of London for years.
But for a man who owned a wholesale butchery company, it was a simple matter. He possessed dozens of freezers filled with packs of meat. Even if anyone ever made it through the padlocks of the freezer that his staff knew was his own private cache, they would see nothing more suspicious than dozens of freezer packs. Human flesh, fortunately, looked much like any other kind once it was slaughtered.
TWENTY-SIX
Dusk on Hampstead Heath had never lost its magic for Fiona, especially at this time of year. By early October after a hot summer, full daylight exposed the dust dulling the turning leaves, the faded tones of the grass, the parched grey of the earth. But as the sky purpled in a hazy sunset, the colours resumed their depth and richness, providing maximum contrast with the city spread out below her.
Unlike the Heath, the London streets lost all definition in the gathering twilight. The dying sun dazzled off occasional windows in the taller office buildings, flashes of fire studding the amorphous grey mass like synapses sparking in a brain. It wasn’t the wild and varied landscape of the Derbyshire hills, not by any stretch of her imagination, but it reminded her that such places not only existed but were part of her mental map, there to be regained at need. It was a refreshment, of sorts. In the week since she’d read the news of Jane Elias’s death, Fiona had made her way to the Heath at least once a day. Now she settled on a bench at the top of Parliament Hill, content to do nothing more demanding than people-watching for a while.
Some of the passers-by were familiar from her walks on the Heath; dog-walkers; joggers; a gaggle of skate-boarding boys about to broach their teens; two elderly women from her own street who strode briskly past with a nod of acknowledgement; the bookshop assistant practising her race-walking. Others she’d never seen before. Some were obvious locals, often deep in conversation with partners or children, feet automatic at every junction on the path. Some were obvious tourists, clutching maps and frowning over their struggles to identify landmarks in the dim vista below. Some refused to fit neatly into any category, their pace anywhere between an aimless stroll and an intent hike.
Which category had Susan Blanchard’s killer fallen into, Fiona wondered? Suddenly alert, she asked herself what had prompted that thought.
It wasn’t as if she hadn’t visited the Heath regularly since the murder, although she had tended to avoid the path that passed the crime scene. But why had that thought popped into her head now?
Fiona scanned the path in both directions, convinced she had registered someone or something that had subconsciously triggered thoughts of the murder. It couldn’t have been the thirty-something couple, the man with their baby strapped to his chest. Nor the middle-aged man with his black Labrador. Nor the two roller-blading teenage girls giggling over some anecdote. Puzzled, she looked around.