You go to the kitchen. Maybe you’re not yet worried – but, no, you probably are. You’ve made a mistake allowing a potential threat into your home, but you haven’t revealed your fear. You’re tamping it down because as soon as it’s sensed, action will be taken against you. You have to act normal until an opportunity presents itself to strike and defend yourself.
You make that opportunity.
Let’s say that you threw the contents of the coffee pot, and you must have hit your target because you bought yourself enough time to get to your car, but not enough to escape. Scalding coffee, probably to the face. Painful. Incapacitating. But you still didn’t manage to get away. Not just one attacker, then, but two or more. No, just two: if there were three, you would never have made it so far.
Eldritch & Associates had obtained a copy of the medical examiner’s report on Barbara Kelly. It revealed, in addition to the various cuts on her body, a wound to her cheek that appeared to be the result of a bite. Human flesh was a notoriously undependable substance for the recording of bite marks. The reliability of the bite mark record could be affected by the status of the tissue under analysis, the time elapsed between the bite and the creation of an impression, the condition of the skin damaged by the bite pressure and the reaction of the surrounding tissue to it, the size of the wound, and the clearness of the marks. The fact that Kelly’s face had been badly scorched by heat caused further difficulties, and meant that there was no possibility of obtaining DNA samples from saliva, or even of making a reasonable comparison based on dental analysis should a suspect be found. What was interesting, though, was the fact that the bite radius was comparatively small, with the first premolars and second premolars absent from both the upper and lower jaws.
Barbara Kelly, it seemed, had been bitten by a child shortly before she died.
The likelihood of a woman being present increased. Yes, it was possible that Kelly might have admitted a man with a young child, but why not take the next logical step and disarm her entirely with a woman and a child?
Why would a child bite a woman?
Because you threatened, or actively hurt, its mother.
That was how you got away, thought the Collector. You used something in the kitchen, in all likelihood the coffee pot, to attack the mother, then ran. It was the child that came after you, distracting you for long enough to allow the woman to recover and drag you back inside. Well done. You must have come close to surviving.
The Collector thought that he might have been quite interested to meet Barbara Kelly. Of course, his interest would have been both personal and professional. If, as he believed, she was responsible for the corruption of so many souls, then he would have been forced to take a blade to her, but he admired her for the battle that she had put up at the end of her life. He knew many people labored under the illusion that they would fight to stay alive under such circumstances, but he had ended too many lives himself to believe that such responses were not the rule, but the exception. Most went to their deaths without a struggle, frozen by shock and incomprehension.
He wondered what she had told them at the end. That was the other thing: nobody resisted torture. Everybody broke. It was nothing to be ashamed of. The difficulty for the torturer lay in figuring out the truth of what one was being told. Scourge a man for long enough, and if you ask him to tell you that the sky is pink and the moon is purple, that day is night and night is day, he will swear to it on the lives of his wife and children. The trick in the early stages was to cause just enough pain, and to ask questions to which the answers were already known, or were easily verifiable. Every study required a baseline.
So what did she have to tell? Well, she had promised in her letter that there were more names to be given, and she had more information to provide, but the kind of people who would inflict that level of pain on another human being and then leave her to burn were hardly on the side of the angels and were therefore unlikely to be sufficiently interested in the identities of those like themselves to kill for them. No, they would be more interested in curbing the supply of such information. They would want to know whom she had approached, and what she had already given them, and she would have told them because the pain would have been too much for her. Her killers now knew, therefore, that Eldritch & Associates had been provided with a list of names. They might move against Eldritch, which would be unwise, or they might seek to limit the damage caused through other means, perhaps by silencing those on that particular list.
Then there was the small matter of who else might have been approached by this woman. There were few candidates who could be trusted enough. In fact, the Collector could think of only one.
But then, the old Jew could take care of himself.
The Collector finished his cigarette and carefully doused the tip in a pool of water before slipping the butt into the pocket of his black coat. The Collector regularly wore a coat, regardless of the weather. Excesses of heat or cold had little effect on him, and anyway, a man always had need of pockets: for cigarettes, a wallet, a lighter, and an assortment of blades. He looked to the north, where Eldritch was probably still sitting in his office, poring over papers. The thought brought him pleasure, even though they had argued earlier that day, and Eldritch and the Collector rarely exchanged a harsh word. On this occasion, the Collector reflected, it was a matter of conflicting philosophies, a belief in preventive measures coming up against the lawyer’s requirement for evidential proof of the commission of a crime. In the end, though, it would come down to the blade, for the man with the blade always has the final word.
In his office, a banker’s lamp casting soft light across his desk, Eldritch looked up from the list of names as though sensing the thoughts of the other. He and the Collector were almost a single entity, which made their earlier disagreement all the more difficult. Files of varying sizes on most of the individuals named on the list rested by his right hand. All were compromised, but fatally so? Eldritch was uncertain. He approved of the final sanction being used in only the most extreme of cases, and his view was that none of these individuals unconditionally qualified for the Collector’s attentions. But he also acknowledged that, like loaded guns or honed blades, they had the potential to do great harm, and it could be argued that some, by their actions, had already committed serious sins. The question remained, though: was their potential to do harm, as yet unrealized in most cases, justification for taking their lives? For Eldritch, the answer was ‘no’, but for the Collector the answer was ‘yes’.
A compromise of sorts had been reached. One name was chosen, the individual whom Eldritch regarded as the most distasteful. The Collector would talk with him, and a decision would follow. Meanwhile, the problem of the final name remained, the only name typed in red.
‘Charlie Parker,’ whispered the old lawyer. ‘What have you done?’