Текст книги "Deviance"

Автор книги: J. F. Penn

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It wasn't a question. Corium nodded slowly. Blake removed one of his gloves and reached out to touch the book.

Chapter 14

Blake could sense vibrations on the surface of the skin through his fingertips, as if it held within itself the energy from the dead soul it had once bound in flesh. The veil of consciousness clouded his vision and he dipped into memory.

He found himself in a basement with high ceilings, the walls and floor tiled so they could be more easily hosed down. There was a copper smell in the cool air, the bitterness of blood. Empty meat hooks hung in a line on a railing above. There was an animal shriek in the darkness, a sound of terror that echoed through the empty space. Blake shuddered and tried to move, but the body he could see through was chained to the wall and couldn't escape.

He heard footsteps coming towards him and a whimper of fear echoed in the basement. He wanted to pull out of the trance, but he needed to see who was there. A man came out of the darkness, a skinning knife in his hand, his face obscured by the mask of the plague doctor, hooked beak swaying as he approached.

As panic escalated, Blake pulled himself from the trance, ripping his hand away from the book and collapsing to the floor. His breath came fast, his chest heaving as he tried to calm himself.

"It's OK, Blake," Jamie whispered, stroking his forehead. "You're safe now."

She gave him some water and he sipped at it, slowly recovering his breath. Corium Jones stood looking at them, his eyes narrowed in interest but not judgement or doubt. Blake supposed that the man was used to the odd in his line of work. But how much did he know of the provenance of the skin he worked on?

"The skin was taken," Blake said after a moment. "This person was murdered for it but the man who did it hid his face. He wore one of those Venetian plague doctor masks with the long beak for herbs to prevent the smell and decay from reaching them."

"Do you have some kind of psychic ability?" Corium asked, fascination in his voice.

Blake stood up and put his glove back on.

"You could call it that," he said. "I can read the emotional resonance of objects."

Jamie pointed at the book. "Who gave you this skin?" she asked, her voice soft but insistent.

"I can't possibly divulge information about my clients," Corium said, turning to walk away from them towards the door. "I think it's time for you to leave now."

Blake took a quick step forward, his blue eyes blazing with anger.

"Don't you understand? This skin is from a murder victim."

"You have no evidence of that," Corium said, pulling open the door.

Jamie picked up a vial of chemicals from a bench next to the bookcase. She put the book of human skin next to it.

"What does this do?" she asked, waving the bottle. Corium's face fell as she pulled the stopper out and held it over the book.

Corium put his hands up in a gesture of supplication.

"No, please. That will burn the skin. It will ruin the book."

There was fear in his eyes, whether for the object itself or the person he made it for, Jamie didn't know. She tipped the bottle a little, splashing the bench next to the book. It made a sizzling sound and the smell of bitter berries filled the air.

"No!" Corium shouted, rushing across the room. Blake stepped in front of Jamie and pushed the man back, a rough shove in the middle of his thin chest.

"Tell us who the client is," Jamie said, holding the bottle over the book again.

Corium's body drooped, his shoulders slumping in defeat.

"I'll give you what I know," he said. "But it's not much." He walked to a filing cabinet in the corner and pulled out a thin cardboard file. "Here, that's everything. Now please, leave the book alone."

Blake checked the file quickly and nodded to Jamie. She put the stopper back in the bottle and put it down next to the book on the bench. Corium rushed to it, cradling the book to his chest like a precious child as he sank to the floor, sitting with his back to the bench as he watched them with hollow eyes.

Jamie pulled out the pages in the file. "There are regular payments here," she said with surprise. "How many of these have you done?"

"Six so far," Corium whispered. "But it's an ongoing contract. I'm expecting more skin in the next day or so and then I produce a book within the following month."

"There's barely any useful information here," she said. "Just a PO Box for the return address."

Blake pointed to the bottom of the page. "But the book is overdue for delivery, so maybe we can stake out the pickup?"

They turned back to Corium.

"Package it up," Jamie said. "We'll deliver it for you."

He clutched it to his chest.

"You don't understand," he said softly. "This is not a man you want to meet in person. He's not someone I want to cross, either. Please, don't do this."

Jamie walked over to him. "A friend of ours is missing," she said. "I don't want to see her skin on your bench." She held out her hands for the book. "If you won't package it, then I will. But we're taking the book."

Corium clutched it tighter. "He'll know if the package is done incorrectly," he whispered, his eyes darting around the room. "If you must take it, I'll do it for you."

He stood and placed the book gently on the bench, preparing the package and wrapping it in bubble wrap, then brown paper. A normal-looking parcel hiding a macabre object inside.

"There." He handed it to Jamie, his voice cold. "Now, get out."

"Gladly," Blake said, as they walked to the door and back out into the sunlight. Corium slammed the door behind them as they headed back along the Cut. Jamie held the package carefully in both hands.

"Did you get any sense of the person when you read?" she asked.

Blake shook his head. "Only the sheer terror of being chained up in what looked like an old abattoir – and the knowledge that the end was coming." He sighed. "I've felt that before. It's anticipation of the inevitable, but of course, those I read have not gone quietly or at peace."

"I'm sorry I involved you in this."

Blake reached out and pulled her to him. They stood for a moment in the sunlight, Blake's arms wrapped around her. Jamie relaxed into him, relishing the moment of connection.

"I'm not sorry," he said. "I want to help you, Jamie. And now I want to help O, too. The research I do at the museum doesn't change anything, but with you, I have the chance to make an impact on the living." He pulled away a little, looking down at her. "Now, let's go catch this crazy skin collector."

Jamie laughed and the moment lifted her spirits. She had begun to despair of finding O, but now they had a real lead. She wanted to call Missinghall and involve the police, but she knew that Blake's vision was inadmissible as evidence. Even if they raided Corium Jones' place, she now had the book of skin. It would take days to test and they would lose the chance to catch the collector when it was delivered.

"Do you know what Corium means?" Blake asked, checking his phone as they headed back towards the bike.

Jamie shook her head. "I just thought it was an unusual name."

"It's the Latin for dermis, one of the skin layers and also a term used for the thickened leathery part of an insect wing."

Jamie sighed, shaking her head. "Only in London," she said.

***

An hour later, Jamie walked into a post office delivery center further east in Plaistow and dropped the package off with a bored clerk on the front desk. He typed the information into his computer and gave Jamie a delivery receipt. As she turned to walk out of the office, he picked up the phone but Jamie couldn't hear his words. She walked back outside to find Blake standing by a lamppost opposite with two takeaway coffees.

"Tell me that you have some kind of useful tracking mechanism," he said. "You've stuck a sticker on the package and we can track it with our phones, right?"

"Of course, my private investigator budget stretches to all kinds of Bond-style gadgets," Jamie said with a grin. "But since we're here, we might as well stake the place out. I think the clerk made a phone call about the package, so we might not be waiting too long." She took a sip of the coffee and looked at her watch. "I'm worried about it being another night before we find O. Corium's workshop looked exactly like the type of place some sick bastard would send her perfect skin to be turned into a book. Did you see anything else in the vision that might help us?"

"Only the abattoir setting," Blake said, pulling out his phone. He opened a map of the area. "Meat processing is mainly done outside the city these days, but an older map might help us with where the abattoirs once stood." He was silent for a moment and then showed Jamie the phone. "Look how close we are to the East London Crematorium," he said. "If you had to dispose of body parts, this would be a good place to do it."

"We could split up," Jamie said. "You can stay here and watch for anyone collecting the package and I'll go to the crematorium and see what I can find."

Blake raised an eyebrow. "Seriously? You want to go alone to the crematorium?"

Jamie shrugged. "The dead don't bother me. It's the living I worry about."

The buzz of a motorbike grew louder as it came up the hill and then pulled to a stop outside the post office. It was a courier bike with the logo of a well-known firm on the side. The leather-clad figure dismounted and then entered the delivery office.

"This must be it," Jamie said. She pulled on her helmet and sat astride the bike. "You coming?"

Blake grinned. "You really know how to give a boy a good time."

He pulled her spare helmet over his head, sitting behind her and wrapping his arms around her waist. The delivery man emerged with the brown paper package under his arm. He put it in one of the side panniers and headed off down the road. Jamie pulled out behind him, keeping him in sight as they drove further east.

The shops changed into housing estates, evidence of homelessness and job seekers in the rundown yards and people hanging out on the corners. Jamie stayed well back, but with the volume of traffic even this far out, it was unlikely the courier would be suspicious. He was only doing his job.

It wasn't long before the courier turned into an industrial estate with only one road in and out. Jamie pulled over at the edge of the road and watched as the bike turned out of sight around a corner towards what looked like a derelict warehouse. The courier opened a roller door, put the package inside, pulled the door back down, and then drove back out of the park. He glanced at Jamie and Blake as he turned from the estate, but with the nonchalance of live-and-let-live London, where anything goes.

As the courier roared away up the street, Jamie drove down to the warehouse, turning off the bike's engine outside the roller-door. Blake dismounted and pulled his helmet off and Jamie followed suit, pulling a flashlight from her pannier.

They stood for a moment, listening for any sound. All they could hear was the noise of the city. There was nothing from inside the building.

Blake reached down and pulled up the roller door to reveal an empty loading bay. The package sat inside the entrance.

"Leave it," Jamie whispered as Blake reached for it. Her years of working for the police had honed a sense of when something wasn't quite right and this place made her skin crawl.

There was a door at the back of the loading bay. Jamie pointed at it and Blake nodded. Together, they walked quietly towards it.

Chapter 15

The door was double padlocked, but that didn't deter Blake.

"Misspent youth," he explained as he picked up a short metal pipe, swinging it a little to heft its weight. Wielding it like a hammer, it only took a few sharp blows to smash off the padlocks. The sound of the metal clashing resounded in the loading bay, and it would definitely warn anyone inside of their presence.

The door opened silently at Jamie's push, evidence that it had been oiled recently which seemed out of place in a derelict building. It was dark inside, but she could sense a wide space in front of them and the sharp lines of machinery loomed from the shadows. A metallic smell pervaded the air. As Blake stepped in behind Jamie, he grasped the door frame, his knuckles white with tension.

"This has to be the place," he whispered. "I recognize the smell of old blood."

As her eyes adjusted to the darkness, Jamie realized the machinery was for meat processing and packaging. Chains and hooks, winches used for heavy carcasses, blades for cutting, crushing weights. She shivered a little, imagining the place spattered in the blood of dead animals. She turned on the flashlight quickly and the beam reflected off shiny surfaces within. The equipment was spotless and left pristine, although a thin layer of dust had settled over it, evidence of time passing since the last animal was processed here.

"This isn't the slaughter room," Blake whispered. "We need to go deeper into the factory."

If she had still been in the police, it would have been well past the time to call for backup, but Jamie knew they wouldn't come for an empty, disused abattoir with a bad feeling about it. Her rational side understood the craziness of following a hunch based on Blake's psychic vision, but he had been right before and they had no other leads on finding O.

She shone the torch around the large processing area, finally locating a door behind one of the machines.

"That way," she said, walking with light feet across the warehouse, her senses alert for any sound. It was so quiet here, too quiet. Blake's hand found hers and squeezed gently as they crossed the space.

"We'll find her," he said, but his voice was shaky.

What had he seen in the vision that had affected him so much? Jamie wondered. And would they face it again in reality behind this door?

There were signs next to the door indicating a cold zone and the safety equipment necessary to enter the slaughterhouse rooms. Jamie pushed the handle down and the door swung open.

She shone the beam inside with her arm outstretched, panning it around the long room. The floor and walls were tiled and meat hooks hung down on chains from the ceiling. A long metal table stood in the middle with grooves down the sides and a drain underneath. Jamie couldn't help but imagine the table running with blood, crimson circling the drain as life ebbed away.

A dripping sound echoed through the space.

"That's water from a cooling system," Jamie said. "If the place is deserted, it shouldn't be on."

She stepped into the room and walked past the table heading for the shadows at the far end. Blake followed close behind, his breath coming fast. The silence was oppressive, as if the walls of the building were closing in on them, ready to crush them into pieces. Jamie couldn't stand the quiet any longer.

"Olivia," she called, her voice echoing in the chamber. "Is anyone here?"

As the echoes died away, they waited in silence but no noise came back except the dripping of water. They walked to the back of the space and found two enormous fridge doors. There was a low buzzing noise, evidence that the fridges were running.

Blake pulled at one of the doors and it swung open, an automatic light coming on inside.

"Oh no," he whispered as he saw what was within.

"What is it?" Jamie yanked the handle, pulling the door fully open so she could see inside.

A metal table sat against one side of the fridge. On top of it were several pieces of flesh, each covered in a tattoo. There were two long strips, one tattooed with a rainbow that Jamie recognized from the picture of Nicholas Randolph. She pushed down the nausea that rose within her. She had been at so many crime scenes, but there was something macabre about this one. The pieces of flesh were clinically clean. But for the tattoos, they wouldn't have known this had once been a man.

"I have to call it in," Jamie said. "This is a police matter now."

"What about the other fridge?" Blake gestured towards the other door, his face sickly pale in the harsh light. Jamie gulped down her hesitation and yanked it open, ready to face whatever horrors might be within.

As the automatic light flickered on, Jamie saw the thin figure huddled in the corner, arms wrapped around herself, head drooped to one side, features pale with a blueish tinge.

Jamie rushed inside and pulled O into her arms, feeling for the pulse at her neck. There was a faint beat there, but it was slow and unsteady. Blake blocked the fridge door open and together they carried O's unconscious form out into the main slaughter area. Blake pulled off his jacket and wrapped it around O's body and head, pulling her close to his warm frame as he rubbed her arms.

Jamie pulled out her phone and called for an ambulance and the police.

***

Several hours later, Jamie and Blake sat in the Royal London Hospital emergency waiting room. They had given detailed statements to the officers in charge of the scene, and after Jamie had spoken to Missinghall, they'd been allowed to leave.

Jamie tapped her foot on the floor, a rhythmic sound of impatience.

"They'll tell us when she's awake," Blake said, putting his hand on her arm. "There's nothing more we can do."

"I hope she remembers the bastard who took her." Jamie stood up and paced the floor. "Missinghall said the abattoir was clean. No prints. Just a lot of bleach. Whoever it was knew police procedure."

A nurse poked her head around the doorway.

"Olivia's awake. She wants to see you, Ms Brooke."

Jamie looked over at Blake and he nodded his head.

"It's OK, I'll stay here and wait for you. She doesn't even know me."

"I'll make sure she understands about your part in finding her," Jamie said. She followed the nurse out of the room and down a white corridor to the ward area. The smell of antiseptic reminded Jamie too much of the morgues she had frequented as part of the homicide team. It was a smell that masked disease and decay in her mind, not a scent of health and wellness. The nurse pointed out a tiny room where a police officer stood outside the door.

"Ten minutes," she warned. "Then she has to rest."

Jamie gave her name to the officer, and after he had checked her ID, she stepped inside. O lay curled up in the bed, wrapped in warming blankets around her body and over her head in a hood. Her eyes were bright blue against her ice-pale skin, but her lips had a pinkish hue now. She would make it.

"How you doing?" Jamie asked, sitting by the bed.

"Better than earlier," O whispered, her voice hoarse. "Thank you."

The words were simple, but Jamie understood the edge of death. She had come close to it herself in the Hellfire Caves and she knew what it meant to come back from the brink.

"Do you know who it was?" she asked.

O shut her eyes for a moment and then sighed. "I wish I did. I was walking back to the flat late last night. I'm not afraid to walk in Southwark – it's my patch, you know." Jamie nodded for O to continue. "As I walked under the arches at London Bridge, a figure came up behind me and covered my mouth with a cloth, holding me tight, and then it was only blackness. The next thing I knew I was shivering in that fridge." She fell silent for a moment. "But I heard a knife being sharpened, Jamie. That metallic repetition as the blade is drawn over and over on the lodestone … and later I heard screaming."

"I believe you," Jamie said. "There were – packages – in the fridge next to yours, but no fingerprints or anything in trace evidence to help us find whoever did it."

"He came in once," O said, her voice so quiet that Jamie had to lean in closer. "He wore black clothes and a floor-length black apron, and a mask on his face with a long beak."

"The Venetian plague doctor?" Jamie asked.

O nodded. "Yes, I've seen similar ones. The mask gave me hope because if he didn't want me to see his face, then he was going to let me go. But then he told me to strip. It was so cold, but I did what he asked. He told me to spin around and show him the extent of the octopus tattoo. I couldn't see his eyes but I felt them on my body. It was like he was measuring me up for something. It was the first time I've wanted to scrub the ink from my skin." Tears glistened in O's eyes and one rolled down her cheek to the pillow. Jamie reached forward and took her hand, waiting for her to carry on. "As I turned, he said that it was a shame I wouldn't be dancing at the masquerade ball. Then he told me to dress and that he would be back."

"And then?" Jamie asked.

"Then I tried to stay warm … and then you were there."

There were voices outside the room and then the door burst open. Magda rushed in, her face stricken, arms outstretched. Jamie stood and let her take her place by O's side, the tears of both women mingling on the pillow as they whispered to each other.

Jamie walked to the window, looking out as they talked for a moment in low voices. She remembered waking up in hospital after the Hellfire Caves, how Blake had been by her side, his hand near hers on the bed. A flicker of a smile played on her lips. It made all the difference having someone who cared enough to be there. She thought of him waiting for her a corridor away. They were both such damaged people, but perhaps there was hope that together, they could transcend their history.

"Thank you, Jamie," Magda said. "If you hadn't found her when you did …"

"I don't think this is the end of it," Jamie said. "We didn't find the man responsible, and if O's right, he could be targeting the masquerade ball next."

"So many of the people going have ink," O said. "Lots of my friends from Torture Garden are attending. Any excuse to dress up extravagantly."

"I need to call my contact at the police and let him know about the threat," Jamie said. "Is there anything else you need?"

O smiled and squeezed Magda's hand. "I've got everything I need right here."

Jamie left them together and emerged back into the corridor. She called Missinghall and he answered quickly.

"Damn it, Jamie," he said. "Those tattooed body parts reminded me of those specimens from the Hunterian case last year. You always seem to find the weirdest crime scenes."

"It started out as a missing persons case, Al. Things just got a little crazy."

"Well, it's definitely got the notice of the big guns around here. Dale Cameron is heading up the case himself now, taking a personal interest in the murders and also pursuing the tattoo angle. He sent a handpicked team to the abattoir. You know he's running for Mayor, right?"

"You mentioned it," Jamie said. "So I guess he's heavily invested in finding whoever's involved."

"Exactly," Missinghall said. "His slogan is 'clean up the city,' so he's trying to make sure that starts now."

"There might be more trouble coming," Jamie said. "I've spoken with Olivia, and she told me that the man who abducted her mentioned the Southbank masquerade ball."

"That's tomorrow night at the Tate Modern," Missinghall said. "We can't shut it down at this stage, but it will be full of the city's finest, including the Mayoral candidates. Let me get the information to the security team and I'm sure they'll assign more security. We'll get this bastard, Jamie."