17
Best while you have it use your breath,
There is no drinking after death.
John Fletcher, The Bloody Brother
It was not the first time that Strike had visited New Scotland Yard at the insistence of the Met. His previous interview had also concerned a corpse, and it occurred to the detective, as he sat waiting in an interrogation room many hours later, the pain in his knee less acute after several hours of enforced inaction, that he had had sex the previous evening then too.
Alone in a room hardly bigger than the average office’s stationery cupboard, his thoughts stuck like flies to the rotting obscenity he had found in the artist’s studio. The horror of it had not left him. In his professional capacity he had viewed bodies that had been dragged into positions intended to suggest suicide or accident; had examined corpses bearing horrific traces of attempts to disguise the cruelty to which they had been subjected before death; he had seen men, women and children maimed and dismembered; but what he had seen at 179 Talgarth Road was something entirely new. The malignity of what had been done there had been almost orgiastic, a carefully calibrated display of sadistic showmanship. Worst to contemplate was the order in which acid had been poured, the body disembowelled: had it been torture? Had Quine been alive or dead while his killer laid out place settings around him?
The huge vaulted room where Quine’s body lay would now, no doubt, be swarming with men in full-body protective suits, gathering forensic evidence. Strike wished he were there with them. Inactivity after such a discovery was hateful to him. He burned with professional frustration. Shut out from the moment the police had arrived, he had been relegated to a mere blunderer who had stumbled onto the scene (and ‘scene’, he thought suddenly, was the right word in more ways than one: the body tied up and arranged in the light from that giant church-like window… a sacrifice to some demonic power… seven plates, seven sets of cutlery…) The frosted glass window of the interrogation room blocked out everything beyond it but the colour of the sky, now black. He had been in this tiny room for a long time and still the police had not finished taking his statement. It was difficult to gauge how much of their desire to prolong the interview was genuine suspicion, how much animosity. It was right, of course, that the person who discovered a murder victim should be subjected to thorough questioning, because they often knew more than they were willing to tell, and not infrequently knew everything. However, in solving the Lula Landry case Strike might be said to have humiliated the Met, who had so confidently pronounced her death suicide. Strike did not think he was being paranoid in thinking that the attitude of the crop-haired female detective inspector who had just left the room contained a determination to make him sweat. Nor did he think that it had been strictly necessary for quite so many of her colleagues to look in on him, some of them lingering only to stare at him, others delivering snide remarks.
If they thought they were inconveniencing him, they were wrong. He had nowhere else to be and they had fed him quite a decent meal. If they had only let him smoke, he would have been quite comfortable. The woman who had been questioning him for an hour had told him he might go outside, accompanied, into the rain for a cigarette, but inertia and curiosity had kept him in his seat. His birthday whisky sat beside him in its carrier bag. He thought that if they kept him here much longer he might break it open. They had left him a plastic beaker of water.
The door behind him whispered over the dense grey carpet.
‘Mystic Bob,’ said a voice.
Richard Anstis of the Metropolitan Police and the Territorial Army entered the room grinning, his hair wet with rain, carrying a bundle of papers under his arm. One side of his face was heavily scarred, the skin beneath his right eye pulled taut. They had saved his sight at the field hospital in Kabul while Strike had lain unconscious, doctors working to preserve the knee of his severed leg.
‘Anstis!’ said Strike, taking the policeman’s proffered hand. ‘What the—?’
‘Pulled rank, mate, I’m going to handle this one,’ said Anstis, dropping into the seat lately vacated by the surly female detective. ‘You’re not popular round here, you know. Lucky for you, you’ve got Uncle Dickie on your side, vouching for you.’
He always said that Strike had saved his life, and perhaps it was true. They had been under fire on a yellow dirt road in Afghanistan. Strike himself was not sure what had made him sense the imminent explosion. The youth running from the roadside ahead with what looked like his younger brother could simply have been fleeing the gunfire. All he knew was that he had yelled at the driver of the Viking to brake, an injunction not followed – perhaps not heard – that he had reached forward, grabbed Anstis by the back of the shirt and hauled him one-handed into the back of the vehicle. Had Anstis remained where he was he would probably have suffered the fate of young Gary Topley, who had been sitting directly in front of Strike, and of whom they could find only the head and torso to bury.
‘Need to run through this story one more time, mate,’ said Anstis, spreading out in front of him the statement that he must have taken from the female officer.
‘All right if I drink?’ asked Strike wearily.
Under Anstis’s amused gaze, Strike retrieved the Arran single malt from the carrier bag and added two fingers to the lukewarm water in his plastic cup.
‘Right: you were hired by his wife to find the dead man… we’re assuming the body’s this writer, this—’
‘Owen Quine, yeah,’ supplied Strike, as Anstis squinted over his colleague’s handwriting. ‘His wife hired me six days ago.’
‘And at that point he’d been missing—?’
‘Ten days.’
‘But she hadn’t been to the police?’
‘No. He did this regularly: dropped out of sight without telling anyone where he was, then coming home again. He liked taking off for hotels without his wife.’
‘Why did she bring you in this time?’
‘Things are difficult at home. There’s a disabled daughter and money’s short. He’d been away a bit longer than usual. She thought he’d gone off to a writer’s retreat. She didn’t know the name of the place, but I checked and he wasn’t there.’
‘Still don’t see why she called you rather than us.’
‘She says she called your lot in once before when he went walkabout and he was angry about it. Apparently he’d been with a girlfriend.’
‘I’ll check that,’ said Anstis, making a note. ‘What made you go to that house?’
‘I found out last night the Quines co-owned it.’
A slight pause.
‘His wife hadn’t mentioned it?’
‘No,’ said Strike. ‘Her story is that he hated the place and never went near it. She gave the impression she’d half forgotten they even owned it—’
‘Is that likely?’ murmured Anstis, scratching his chin. ‘If they’re skint?’
‘It’s complicated,’ said Strike. ‘The other owner’s Michael Fancourt—’
‘I’ve heard of him.’