Silencing the Dead Will Harker (free ebooks for android TXT) 📖

into the scene log. I could see that Tallis’ sergeant wasn’t best pleased by my presence, but a look from his senior officer quelled any objection. As we passed into the stone-flagged entrance hall, the DCI gestured towards my forehead.

“That wound you got from Cloade still looks nasty. You should get it seen to.”

“I will,” I muttered. At that moment, all I could feel was a dull ache. “Any news on him, by the way?”

“Seems to be hunkering down in his church,” Tallis said. “One of my DCs looked in on him last night. Found him flat on his face before his altar, begging God to deliver him from evil spirits.”

“He should do the tour at Purley,” I said. “The housekeeper there would soon set him straight.”

Tallis might have asked what I meant, but by then we’d reached the great staircase with its dark-oak bannister and the faceless man sprawled across its steps. A photographer had just finished filming the corpse in situ when Tallis begged a moment before the waiting forensics team swept in.

“Keep your distance,” he told me. “If you need any details confirmed, I’ll get one of these guys to take a closer look.”

I was pretty sure that wouldn’t be necessary. The morning light streaming through the gallery windows above our heads illuminated the scene better than any floodlight. I could see from the angled stain on the newel post—thick with blood at the top of the cap, tapering into a light smear as it ran downwards—that, like Genevieve and Tilda, Thorn had been struck from behind. A spot or two of unsmeared blood on the flagstones as he staggered to the staircase. Then, his right hand automatically going to the wound before he grabbed the newel cap for support, he had finally fallen, twisting around as he clung to the post. He had landed on his back, the blood flowing freely onto the step pillowing his head until his heart had stopped.

“He knew the killer,” I said, explaining my reasoning to Tallis. “Let him in just like the others.”

“Except this one isn’t quite like the others,” Tallis observed.

Those words from Mozart’s Lacrimosa, the requiem Haz claimed he’d been practising with his fictitious choir, replayed in my head. Full of tears will be that day; When from the ashes shall arise; The guilty man to be judged. Well, Sebastian Thorn had certainly been judged guilty by the killer. In this latest recreation of the witchfinder’s execution methods, we had reached the hanged witch. After death, a coarse rope had been knotted around the victim’s throat, and drawn taut, lashed to one of the staircase spindles on the landing. Just as with the drowned doll and the pricked doll, a wax effigy had been left beside the corpse.

But Tallis was right. There were differences here in the killer’s MO, ones that had already been suggested in the murder of Tilda Urnshaw. For a start, although his doll was faceless, my initial impression of Thorn’s injuries had been mistaken. His features masked with blood, I hadn’t realised that most of them remained intact. His hands, too, had been spared, though the effigy’s had not.

“Most serial killer rituals evolve over time,” I said. “Become ever more detailed and elaborate. But our murderer seems to be devolving, losing his enthusiasm for the trademarks of his slaughter.”

Tallis nodded. “But he persists.”

“I wondered with Tilda if there was something half-hearted about it all,” I said. “As if the ritual itself wasn’t crucial to the killings. Have his teeth been taken?”

Tallis made a gesture and a forensics officer went to huddle over the body. After a moment or two, he glanced back at us. “The teeth haven’t been touched but there is something caught at the back of his throat. Give me a second.” He went to work with a pair of tweezers before finally dislodging the foreign object. “Got it.”

Although the scrawled biblical quotation from Exodus had not been attached to Thorn’s doll, a different passage had been left inside the victim. On a scrap of moist paper, I read: 1 Timothy 6:10. Tallis looked it up on his phone.

“For the love of money is the root of all evil.”

I nodded. “He mocked Genevieve’s power by taking her hands. Mocked Tilda by claiming she was a fool. Now he’s condemning the legacy of Sebastian Thorn, a man who made his fortune from the promotion of witches. I wonder what he’ll be laughing at while his fourth victim burns.”

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

“Burns?” Tallis echoed.

“If the pattern holds, that’s the fate of the last victim. The burned witch.”

Before leaving the hanged man, I took a final look around the entrance hall. In the shadow behind the doorway, I could see a scatter of white pills, left like a trail of breadcrumbs in a children’s story. There were about a dozen in all, each the same size and shape.

“We’re checking his medical records, but we assume they’re Thorn’s,” Tallis said. “Maybe they dropped out of his pocket when he fell.”

I knew the DCI was too smart to believe this explanation. Was he already aware that Nick had been sent by Everwood to check in on Thorn? His constables in the carpark would have made a note of the time the Bentley left the site. Perhaps someone had told him about Nick’s addiction. He might even be aware of our past association and was waiting for me to reveal it before he asked the question himself.

All I could think of when I saw the pills was a pair of pinprick pupils and trembling hands. Hands that would reach instinctively for the dulling reassurance of the pain meds, and fumbling, drop them. Of course, in his time, Nick had seen sights as bad as this, worse even, but he was trying to leave such horrors behind. Now, finding the battered corpse of Sebastian Thorn, had the blood and agony of other men returned to him? Men he’d broken under his fists? In my mind’s eye,