Or rather, what was left of a man. The naked victim had been suspended upside down from the frame by the ankles. His arms were stretched and tied to each of the posts by the wrists. The hideous grimace of pain on the face of the man, down there by the bloodied floorboards, showed the torment he had been through.
He had been flayed. Flayed alive, it seemed, very slowly and diligently, the skin peeled, or scraped, strip by strip, flap by anguished flap, from the man’s body. The raw pulsing flesh had been left uncovered at each stage, leaving blobs of yellow fat; though sometimes this fat had been flensed away, exposing the raw red muscles underneath. You could actually see the organs and the bones in certain places.
De Savary put a forefinger to his nose. He could smell the body, smell the muscles and the lustrous fat. He could see the neck muscles taut with agony, the grey-and-white lungs, the curving definition of the ribcage. It was like an illustration of the muscles and tendons of the human body in a biology textbook. The genitals were missing, of course. A dark and scarlet socket was left where the penis and testicles should have been. De Savary guessed they had been forced into the victim’s mouth: he had probably been obliged to eat them.
He stepped around. It looked like the work of more than one person. To do it this carefully, without killing the victim at once, needed care and skill. If you flayed a person correctly they could live for hours, as the muscles and organs slowly dried and crinkled. Sometimes the victim might faint with pain, De Savary imagined, but you could bring them round, before starting again. He didn’t want to reconfigure the scene. But he had to. The terrified caretaker brought in here. Tied upside-down. Hanging by his feet from the bar. Then lashed with his arms to either post. Like an inverted crucifixion.
And then-then De Savary imagined it-the terrible horror that must have overcome the victim as he realized what they were doing: the initial tentative scrape of flesh at the ankle or on his feet. Then the searing pain as the skin was peeled away, leaving the pulp exposed to cold and heat. If anything had touched the raw flesh the pain would have been virtually unendurable. He must have screamed as the gang worked their way down his quivering, agonized body, working like expert butchers, making a pelt of his skin. Perhaps he had screamed too loudly at one point, so they had chopped off his genitals, folded the bloody handful of flesh into the screaming mouth, to shut him up.
Then the major flaying: the chest, the arms. Technically quite difficult. They must have practised beforehand, on sheep, goats or maybe cats. Getting it right.
He turned away, shuddering.
Forrester put an arm around the academic’s shoulder. ‘Yes, I’m sorry.’
‘How old was he? It’s hard to tell when there’s no…skin on the face.’
‘In his forties,’ Forrester said. ‘Shall we go outside?’
‘Please.’
The policeman led the way. As soon as they were outside they made for the garden bench. De Savary was pleased to sit down. ‘Just ghastly,’ he said.
The sun was still warm. Forrester took his overshoes off with a grunt. They sat there in a heavy silence. The sweetness of the early summer air seemed sickly now.
After a while De Savary said, ‘I think I can help.’
‘You can?’
De Savary rephrased. ‘That is to say, I think I understand what their psychology might have been…’
So?’
‘Clearly there are Aztec themes. The Aztecs had…many methods of human sacrifice. The most famous, of course, is live heart excision. The priest would plunge the obsidian knife into the chest, rip open the chest cavity, and yank out the beating heart.’
They both watched as a police car pulled up the driveway. Two officers stepped out, carrying metal suitcases. They nodded briskly at Forrester, and he nodded back.
‘Pathology.’ said Forrester. ‘Go on Hugo, the Aztecs…?’
‘They would feed people to jaguars. They would bleed them to death. They would fire little arrows into warriors until they died. But one of the most elaborate methods was flaying. They even had a special day for it, the Feast of the Flaying of Men.’
‘A special day for flaying?’
‘They would strip the skins of enemy prisoners. And then they would dance through the streets of the city, wearing the flayed skins. Aztec nobles often wore the flayed skins of their victims: they considered it an honour for the victim. Indeed there is a story that they once captured an enemy princess, then a few weeks later they invited her father, an enemy king, to a feast, to make peace. The king presumed they were going to hand back his daughter, alive, as part of that peacemaking. But the Aztec emperor clapped his hands after dinner and a priest walked in, wearing the slain princess’s skin. The Aztecs thought this was a great honour for the enemy king. I think the peace overture was not a great success.’
Forrester had gone very pale. ‘You don’t think they are wearing this skin? That Cloncurry is driving around in this guy’s fucking skin?’
‘It’s very possible. That’s what the Aztecs would do. Wear the human skin of their victims, like a suit, until it literally rotted away from them. The stench must have been appalling.’
‘We certainly haven’t found the skin yet. We’ve called in the dog unit.’
‘That’s a good idea. I consider it entirely possible they are wearing the skin. As they are following the Aztec method so closely.’
They both fell silent once more. De Savary gazed across the rolling parkland, the lofty trees bending over the river; the beautiful scene of tranquil, bucolic Englishness. It was hard to reconcile with that…that thing suspended on a wooden frame, just yards away. The pink and inverted cadaver; with its hideous grin of pain.
The detective stood up. ‘So what were they looking for? The gang. I’ve been searching. There’s no connection with the Hellfire Club at all.’
‘No.’ said De Savary. ‘But there is a curious connection between this school and the Middle East.’
‘And that is what?’
De Savary smiled, very hesitantly.
‘If I recall from what I read on the train, the tuck shop should be down here.’ He strode around the front of the building, Forrester following. At the far end of the south wing there was a curious gabled building adjoining the main elevation. It looked like a chapel. De Savary stopped.
Forrester gazed at the red-and-black design of the impressive doors: a motif of winged metal lions. ‘What’s that?’
‘This is the Nineveh Porch. It has a profound association with Iraq and Sumeria. Shall we see if our guys were down this end?
Forrester nodded.
De Savary prodded the metal door and it swung open easily. Inside, apart from some peculiar stained glass windows, it looked like a normal tuckshop for a rich school. There was a Pepsi machine. A till. And boxes of snacks and crisps chaotically scattered on the floor. But the boxes were scattered too randomly. The unlit room had been ransacked. On closer examination, the wooden panelling along one wall had been ripped away; a window was broken. Someone had been in here, vigorously searching for something. Whether they had taken anything was a different matter. De Savary guessed they hadn’t. The scattering of items in the tuck shop looked angry: frustrated and thwarted.
They stepped out into the peaceful sunshine and walked along the pathway. Pollen drifted languidly on the mild sunny air as De Savary told the tale of the Nineveh Porch. ‘The porch was ordered by Lady Charlotte Guest and her husband Sir John around 1850. It was built after a design by the architect Charles Barry, better known as the creator of-’
‘The Houses of Parliament,’ said Forrester. And he smiled shyly. ‘Architecture is a private hobby.’
‘Quite so! The Houses of Parliament. Anyway the Nineveh Porch was a private loggia, built expressly for the purpose of housing some famous Assyrian reliefs gathered from Victorian explorations of Mesopotamia. Hence the rather unusual doors, with the Assyrian lions.’