There had been a baby: or more accurately the ghost, the promise of a baby and then, supposedly, the death of a baby. Charlotte had told him that she was pregnant, refused to consult a doctor, changed her mind about dates, then announced that all was over without a shred of proof that it had ever been real. It was a lie most men would have found impossible to forgive and for Strike it had been, as surely she must have known, the lie to end all lies and the death of that tiny amount of trust that had survived years of her mythomania.
Marrying on the fourth of December, in eleven days’ time… how could Helly Anstis know?
He was perversely grateful, now, for the whining and tantrums of the two children, which effectively disrupted conversation all through a pudding of rhubarb flan and custard. Anstis’s suggestion that they take fresh beers into his study to go over the forensic report was the best Strike had heard all day. They left a slightly sulky Helly, who clearly felt that she had not had her money’s worth out of Strike, to manage the now very sleepy Tilly and the unnervingly wide-awake Timothy, who had reappeared to announce that he had spilled his drinking water all over his bed.
Anstis’s study was a small, book-lined room off the hall. He offered Strike the computer chair and sat on an old futon. The curtains were not drawn; Strike could see a misty rain falling like dust motes in the light of an orange street lamp.
‘Forensics say it’s as hard a job as they’ve ever had,’ Anstis began, and Strike’s attention was immediately all his. ‘All this is unofficial, mind, we haven’t got everything in yet.’
‘Have they been able to tell what actually killed him?’
‘Blow to the head,’ said Anstis. ‘The back of his skull’s been stoved in. It might not’ve been instantaneous, but the brain trauma alone would’ve killed him. They can’t be sure he was dead when he was carved open, but he was almost certainly unconscious.’
‘Small mercies. Any idea whether he was tied up before or after he was knocked out?’
‘There’s some argument about that. There’s a patch of skin under the ropes on one of his wrists that’s bruised, which they think indicates he was tied up before he was killed, but we’ve no indication whether he was still conscious when the ropes were put on him. The problem is, all that bloody acid everywhere’s taken away any marks on the floor that might’ve shown a struggle, or the body being dragged. He was a big, heavy guy—’
‘Easier to handle if he was trussed up,’ agreed Strike, thinking of short, thin Leonora, ‘but it’d be good to know the angle he was hit at.’
‘From just above,’ said Anstis, ‘but as we don’t know whether he was hit standing, sitting or kneeling…’
‘I think we can be sure he was killed in that room,’ said Strike, following his own train of thought. ‘I can’t see anyone being strong enough to carry a body that heavy up those stairs.’
‘The consensus is that he died more or less on the spot where the body was found. That’s where the greatest concentration of the acid is.’
‘D’you know what kind of acid it was?’
‘Oh, didn’t I say? Hydrochloric.’
Strike struggled to remember something of his chemistry lessons. ‘Don’t they use that to galvanise steel?’
‘Among other things. It’s as caustic a substance as you can legally buy and it’s used in a load of industrial processes. Heavy-duty cleaning agent as well. One weird thing about it is, it occurs naturally in humans. In our gastric acid.’
Strike sipped his beer, considering.
‘In the book, they pour vitriol on him.’
‘Vitriol’s sulphuric acid, and hydrochloric acid derives from it. Seriously corrosive to human tissue – as you saw.’
‘Where the hell did the killer get that amount of the stuff?’
‘Believe it or not, it looks like it was already in the house.’
‘Why the hell—?’
‘Still haven’t found anyone who can tell us. There were empty gallon containers on the kitchen floor, and dusty containers of the same description in a cupboard under the stairs, full of the stuff and unopened. They came from an industrial chemicals company in Birmingham. There were marks on the empty ones that looked as though they’d been made by gloved hands.’
‘Very interesting,’ said Strike, scratching his chin.
‘We’re still trying to check when and how they were bought.’
‘What about the blunt object that bashed his head in?’
‘There’s an old-fashioned doorstop in the studio – solid iron and shaped like one, with a handle: almost certainly that. It fits with the impression in his skull. That’s had hydrochloric acid poured all over it like nearly everything else.’
‘How’s time of death looking?’
‘Yeah, well, that’s the tricky bit. The entomologist won’t commit himself, says the condition of the corpse throws out all the usual calculations. The fumes from the hydrochloric acid alone would’ve kept insects away for a while, so you can’t date the death from infestation. No self-respecting blowfly wants to lay eggs in acid. We had a maggot or two on bits of the body that weren’t doused in the stuff, but the usual infestation didn’t occur.
‘Meanwhile, the heating in the house had been cranked right up, so the body might’ve rotted a bit faster than it would ordinarily have done in this weather. But the hydrochloric acid would’ve tended to mess with normal decomposition. Parts of him are burned to the bone.
‘The deciding factor would have been the guts, last meal and so on, but they’d been lifted clean out of the body. Looks like they left with the killer,’ said Anstis. ‘I’ve never heard of that being done before, have you? Pounds of raw intestine taken away.’
‘No,’ said Strike, ‘it’s a new one on me.’
‘Bottom line: forensics are refusing to commit themselves to a time frame except to say he’s been dead at least ten days. But I had a private word with Underhill, who’s the best of them, and he told me off the record that he thinks Quine’s been dead a good two weeks. He reckons, though, even when they’ve got everything in the evidence’ll still be equivocal enough to give defending counsel a lot to play with.’
‘What about pharmacology?’ asked Strike, his thoughts circling back to Quine’s bulk, the difficulty of handling a body that big.
‘Well, he might’ve been drugged,’ agreed Anstis. ‘We haven’t had blood results back yet and we’re analysing the contents of the bottles in the kitchen as well. But’ – he finished his beer and set down the glass with a flourish – ‘there’s another way he could’ve made things easy for a killer. Quine liked being tied up – sex games.’
‘How d’you know that?’
‘The girlfriend,’ said Anstis. ‘Kathryn Kent.’
‘You’ve already talked to her, have you?’
‘Yep,’ said Anstis. ‘We found a taxi driver who picked up Quine at nine o’clock on the fifth, a couple of streets away from his house, and dropped him in Lillie Road.’
‘Right by Stafford Cripps House,’ said Strike. ‘So he went straight from Leonora to the girlfriend?’
‘Well, no, he didn’t. Kent was away, staying with her dying sister, and we’ve got corroboration – she spent the night at the hospice. She says she hasn’t seen him for a month, but was surprisingly forthcoming on their sex life.’
‘Did you ask for details?’
‘I got the impression she thought we knew more than we did. They came pouring out without much prodding.’
‘Suggestive,’ said Strike. ‘She told me she’d never read Bombyx Mori—’
‘She told us that too.’