The sound of the second fridge door closing.
The sound of brisk footsteps receding across the lino.
The sound of the dissecting-room doors swinging together with a creak and a bump.
Patrick strained to hear the beeps of the keypad, but couldn’t. Instead he waited until he realized he’d just woken up, freezing cold, still jammed tightly into the fetid yellow bin.
‘OK,’ he said, ‘let’s go,’ and he struggled out of the bin and made his quiet way to the anatomy-wing door, where Meg’s code turned out to be 5544. Typically balanced and memorable.
The outer door was also an emergency exit, which he opened easily from inside by pushing a metal bar. An unexpected break.
Patrick tucked the head under his arm and walked home as fast as his knee would allow. All the way there his chest fizzed with adrenaline.
The dead can’t speak to us, Professor Madoc had said.
But that was a lie.
Samuel Galen was dead – but he was still telling Patrick all the truth he needed to know.
48
PATRICK HEARD THE scream of a rabbit being taken in the night. Without truly waking, he listened for another but nothing came, and so he drifted back into sleep.
‘Wake up,’ said his father. It was dawn and they were going to go hiking on the Beacons. Maybe up Penyfan if it wasn’t too busy. At the weekends it was one long string of over-equipped hikers, but midweek it was almost deserted – especially if the weather was lousy. Patrick hoped it was hot and too busy because, for some reason, every part of him ached.
‘Wake up.’
‘My head hurts, Daddy.’
‘I said wake up!’
Patrick opened his eyes slowly and looked into the hole in the middle of a gun. Not the middle; the end of a gun. Where the bullets come from. The deep black holey thing. The—
‘Barrel,’ he said, relieved that he’d remembered.
‘Shut up,’ said the policeman at the other end of the gun. ‘Shut up and turn over. Hands behind your back.’
He was short and shaven and not alone; there was another, older man in the doorway, and Patrick’s landlord – the waspish middle-aged Mr Boardman – hovered in the background.
From somewhere downstairs he could hear Lexi crying.
‘What’s going on?’ asked Patrick.
The shorter policeman made a snorting noise and said, ‘You tell us, sunshine. There’s a head in the fridge.’
‘Yes,’ said Patrick. ‘It’s mine.’ Then he laughed because it wasn’t his head, of course – it was Number 19’s.
‘Jesus Christ,’ said Shorter. ‘He’s completely crazy.’
‘And look what he’s done to my carpet!’ wailed Mr Boardman.
‘It was dirty,’ shrugged Patrick.
‘It was brown!’ yelled Mr Boardman.
‘I told you to get this man out of here!’ said the older policeman sharply.
There was a noisy pause while several sets of feet pounded up the stairs and Mr Boardman was led down them, muttering.
Older cleared his throat. ‘Patrick Fort,’ he said, ‘I am arresting you on suspicion of murder.’
Patrick frowned. ‘That doesn’t make sense.’
The policeman held up a hand, closed his eyes and spoke over him. ‘You do not have to say anything—’
Patrick interrupted him, finishing more quickly. ‘But it may harm your defence if you do not mention when questioned something that you later rely on in court. Anything you do say may be given in evidence.’
‘Done this before?’ said Older.
‘No,’ said Patrick, ‘I watch TV. Aren’t you supposed to ask me if I understand it?’
‘Do you understand it?’
‘Of course. I’m not an idiot.’
‘Smart-arse,’ said Shorter. ‘Turn over and put your hands behind your back.’
‘Why?’ said Patrick.
‘Because you’re under arrest.’
‘But I didn’t do anything. The head in the fridge is just proof.’
‘Of what?’ said Older.
Patrick frowned. ‘I don’t know. There’s a lot of bits to it. Number 19 had a peanut in his throat, although he was allergic to them. Dr Spicer has bite marks on his finger. But he lied about them and then tried to kill me. So I took the head because of the gouges and because of the teeth. Maybe Number 19 bit Dr Spicer, but I’m not sure.
‘It’s your job to find out the rest,’ he added. ‘I’ve done my bit.’
‘What the fuck are you talking about?’ said Shorter.
‘Patrick!’ yelled Jackson up the stairs. ‘Don’t say anything without a lawyer!’
‘I don’t need a lawyer,’ Patrick told Older. ‘I haven’t done anything wrong.’
‘That’s good,’ said Older, jotting down notes in a small black book. ‘Then you won’t mind answering a few more questions down at the station.’
‘No,’ said Patrick. ‘I don’t mind.’
Older nodded at Shorter.
‘Then turn over and put your hands behind your back!’ said Shorter.
‘I have to get the head,’ said Patrick and stood up. Shorter gripped his shoulder – and everything went from calm to mayhem in the blink of an eye. Patrick punched and flailed against the hated hands on his bare skin, and soon had his face in the pillow, a knee in his back, what felt like hot wire around his wrists – and a left ear that buzzed so hard that the only underwater sound he could hear was Kim shrieking, ‘Don’t hurt him! Don’t hurt him!’ over and over again.
While Patrick Fort was half dragged, half carried out to the car, Detective Sergeant Emrys Williams stared once more into the fridge and thought, This is how everything changes.
There was salad and chocolate on the top shelf, old rice and curling bacon on the bottom, and – squeezed on its side on the middle shelf – a severed human head, lips drawn back, veins poking from the frayed flesh and pressed against the frosted glass. One eye socket was empty, the other was hidden by a jar of Tesco Value peanut butter.
Williams stood, bent at the waist, lit by the fridge as if bowing down before a golden calf, and knew that here, finally, was the Big One – the case that would put him on the map.
Emrys Williams had become a policeman straight out of school because the careers master had told him he’d be able to retire at forty on two-thirds of final salary. The careers master had seduced a lot of them that way – early retirement on good pensions or – for teachers – long summer holidays. He’d been more of an anti-careers master, really, selling them the spaces between work.
But neither the careers master nor the young Emrys had foreseen that life’s rich tapestry would weave him two ex-wives, four gadget-hungry sons, and a girlfriend who only seemed happy to drain him at night if she were permitted to drain his wallet for the other twenty-three and a half hours a day.
So, at the age of forty-eight, Williams was still a policeman. And a policeman who was still only a detective sergeant, years after his contemporaries had climbed the promotion ladder. Somewhere along the line, petty crime and paperwork had squeezed all the ambition out of him.
Of course, he’d helped to put away his fair share of burglars and muggers and rapists and wife-beaters. They’d had murders knocked down to manslaughter on a plea, and murders that had stuck. But never – not once – had DS Williams been involved in a Big One. He had never been part of the kind of high-profile case that captures the public imagination and the newspaper headlines. He’d never been on the telly – not even the local news; never worked a case that anyone else would have heard of or cared about – bar Gary in the canteen, who was some kind of OCD memory freak.