Delirium (London Psychic) (18 page)

"If it's such a good morning, how about unshackling me?" Blake tried.

Crowther smiled, his perfect teeth glistening. "It's actually a good morning for experimentation. For that, you need to remain restrained – for now." He licked his lips as he looked at Blake, as if about to swallow a tasty morsel of flesh. He pulled a plastic gown on over his white coat, the kind that would keep bodily fluids from staining his clothes, and then began to prep a syringe of pale green fluid.

"This will make you uncaring of shackles anyway, you'll be so lost in its embrace." Crowther tapped the syringe with a fingernail. "It's an amnesiac as well as – let's say, a mind relaxant. Something to deaden the prefrontal cortex, release the inhibitors to perception. You don't need drugs to see your visions, Blake, but this will intensify them, make them even more real. And whatever happens here, whatever horrors you experience, you'll only see them again in your nightmares." He hesitated a moment, his eyelids flickering. "Of course, some cannot separate the nightmare from reality but perhaps we can help you find some peace, Blake, some escape from the visions that torment you. But first, let's see how far they go."

Crowther advanced on the bed, and pushed the syringe into the cannula on Blake's shackled hand. Blake watched the green liquid as the plunger pushed it into his bloodstream. Part of him wanted to scream and jerk his body away, stop this drug from polluting him, but another side welcomed its embrace. For years he had wondered at his abilities. Perhaps this would help him push his ability to the limit and work out what it really was. If it didn't break his mind first.

Within a minute, the light in the room intensified. Blake could see every pore on Crowther's skin, every pixel of color in the man's heterochromic eyes. The sound of the air conditioner was heightened and he could hear his own heartbeat, steady and rhythmic. The overpowering smell of antiseptic made his nose wrinkle, and under it, he sensed a note of decay, a hint of something that had died here.

"Come and sit in the chair now. You'll find it very comfortable." Crowther unlocked the handcuffs and helped Blake from the bed into the reclining chair. A tiny part of Blake's mind saw a glimmer of escape, but it was smothered by a wonder of heightened sensation. What did his life matter when the world was so expansive, when he was just part of a grander whole? It was as if he had found his true place in the universe and he wanted to stay there forever.

Crowther rubbed a cold jelly on his shaven scalp and Blake shivered at the tendrils of pleasure that wound down his spine from the pressure. Crowther added a heavy mesh of electrodes in a skullcap. It seemed as if the world was in slow motion, and Blake felt anticipation rise in his belly at the thought of how his visions would be intensified. Crowther turned to the bench and opened a drawer. He pulled out a plain blue book, the edges worn.
 

"This is a family heirloom," he said, his fingers caressing the pages. "I know what it contains, but to prove the truth of your visions, I want you to tell me what you see."

Blake reached for the book, a tingling of expectancy in his scarred hands. He closed his eyes as he felt the weight of it in his palms and the veil of mist descended.
 

The smell of vomit and piss made him gag and Blake opened his eyes to find himself in a large room. A wooden apparatus was built around the walls and from it hung a chair. Strapped into the device was a young woman, her head lolling forward as she continued to puke and cough. Her clothes were dark with sweat, and between her legs, clear evidence that she had wet herself. Her hair was matted around her forehead, her eyes dull with pain. A man knelt next to her, lifting the woman's chin, making sure to avoid the mess around her mouth.
 

"Again," he said tersely, rising and walking away.

"No," she moaned. "Please, no."

From the side of the room, Blake heard a clack of gears and then the chair was raised. The woman lunged, trying to escape, but she was strapped firmly to it. The chair started to rotate, first in small circles and then it swung out as it revolved faster and faster.
 

"Another half an hour and she'll be a lot more docile," a voice behind him said.
 

Blake yanked his hand from the book, emerging once more into the pristine lab. He gasped, heart thumping at the peculiar torture of the woman and the implied threat of what awaited her afterward.
 

"What did you see?" Crowther asked, leaning close.
 

"Some kind of spinning device, a woman strapped into it." Crowther's smile was predatory, and Blake saw recognition in his eyes. "What is this book?"

"My ancestor, Bryan Crowther, was the surgeon at Bethlem Hospital between 1789 and 1815. The device you saw was known as rotational therapy, spinning the mad to induce vomiting, purging and vertigo. The book is his personal notebook of the experiments he did on the living – and the dead. Now, you must go back in. I want to know more."

Blake shook his head. "No, I don't want to see anything else."
 

He made to get up and Crowther moved swiftly, pushing him back down and using a strap to secure Blake's neck to the chair. Quickly, he secured Blake's hands to the arms and added a waist strap and ankle restraints.
 

"Then we'll just have to do this the hard way." Crowther placed the book under Blake's hand and wrapped a series of bandages around it, holding the pages against his bare skin. Blake fought the undertow of the visions, but the drug made his descent even faster. His eyelids flickered.
 

It was the smell of rotting flesh that greeted him this time, and Blake opened his eyes to find himself in a dark room lit only by a few candles. There were windows open to the night air but they did nothing to disguise the stench of the dead. A man was bent over a body on a gurney, focused on its head. With a knife, he cut around the forehead and peeled back the skin to reveal the skull. Blake sensed an echo of the anatomists he had encountered in the last case. He shuddered as the man picked up a saw and began to rasp the blade against the bone.
 

The man's breath was labored as he finished cutting through the skull and pried the bone cap off with a small flat bar, revealing the brain. With bare hands, he pulled the jelly-like organ out into a dish, cutting away the vessels that held it, and placed it on a wooden board. The man wiped his hands on his apron and scratched some notes into a book. He cut into the brain, picking up the chunks and examining them next to the candlelight. A smile twitched around his lips as he worked, and soon, the brain was reduced to mush on the bench. The man swept the pieces back into the dish, wiped his hands on a piece of linen next to the bench and walked to the next gurney. The body was covered with a sheet, only the head exposed, and Blake could see it was the young woman he had seen on the rotational device. The man picked up the knife and walked to the head of the gurney.
 

Suddenly, Blake saw the sheet twitch where the woman's fingers must be. The doctor stopped and pulled up the sheet, checking the straps around her wrists, making sure they were tight. He placed the knife down and returned to the bench, picking up the dirty strip of linen covered in pieces of brain. As the woman's eyes fluttered open, he wrapped the linen around her mouth as a gag. She moaned, an animal sound of terror.

"Don't struggle, my dear," the man whispered, as he picked up the knife again. "You'll be far more useful this way."

Blake tried to pull away from the vision, tried to drop through the veils of consciousness. He didn't want to watch this atrocity, but as the doctor began to cut across the woman's face, he realized his hand was strapped to the book. He couldn't leave until Crowther allowed him to, he had to bear witness. As the doctor picked up the saw, Blake felt a scream rise up within him.

The gallery was tucked into one of the hidden squares in the warren of back streets within the City of London. As she walked, Jamie tried to put Blake out of her mind in order to focus on the case. She still hadn't heard from him and she was worried, but then he was probably just curled up somewhere with a shocking hangover. Maybe someone lay by his side, and she definitely didn't want to dwell on that thought. He would answer his phone when he was ready, and she had enough to deal with right now. The murder at the cathedral was now complicated by the drugged wine and the motive for the murder of the Canon was clearly bound up in the hallucinogenic experience. But what was the point of sending those people mad? Now there was another murder, and the pressure to find a viable suspect was intense.
   

Morning commuters rushed past, most not even glancing at the police presence and crime-scene tape. Jamie wondered what could penetrate the armor of self-protection that Londoners assumed about them like a cloak. To survive here, city dwellers needed to let the news roll off their backs, remaining impervious despite the proximity of disaster. Selective perception was the only way to avoid going completely crazy with worry.

Missinghall munched on his second cheese and ham croissant, brushing crumbs from his suit jacket as they walked towards the cordoned-off area.
 

"Posh place," he said. "Guess this lot can afford this sorta thing."

"Art not your bag, Al?"

Missinghall smiled broadly. "Only the kind on a beer label."

His humor soon dimmed as they approached the crime scene. They suited up in protective clothing and signed into the log, checking the protocol with officers present. They walked into the glass-fronted gallery to see a few large canvases, all modern art, completely bereft of any realism. Exactly the kind of work that would sell in this area, Jamie thought, for anyone could project their own interpretation onto the canvas. The city thrived on the scramble for personal success, and art was still a reflection of wealth, even in these days of supposed austerity. Perhaps especially now.
 

Jamie smelled the body before they saw it, resonant of roasted pork and not unpleasant if you didn't know what it implied. They walked into the back room of the gallery where forensic pathologist Mike Skinner was still processing what he could of the body in situ.

A man was firmly tied to a sturdy chair, in a straitjacket with crossed arms strapped to the opposite sides. Next to the chair was a black box with leads that connected to electrodes on the man's closely shaven scalp. There were burns on either side of his head, the source of the roasted-meat smell in the air. Blood had dried around his mouth and there were spots of burgundy on the straitjacket.

Skinner lifted his head from the examination, seeing Jamie and Missinghall.

"The body was discovered by the gallery owner's assistant when she came in this morning to open up. The deceased is Arthur Tindale, owner of the gallery." Not known for his small talk, Skinner's tone was efficient and to the point. "I'll need to check for certain at the lab, but I'd say cause of death was electrocution." Skinner gestured to the box next to the chair. "This is an old device, originally used in electroshock therapy for mental illness, but the safety levels have been altered to produce a deadly voltage." Skinner shook his head. "It wasn't a quick death." He pointed to the mouth of the victim. "The blood is from where he bit his tongue during the shocks. This man was tortured with smaller doses before the voltage was taken up so high that his heart stopped."

Electroconvulsive Therapy (ECT) had been used to treat severe depression, mania and schizophrenia since the 1940s. Jamie knew that these days it was delivered with muscle relaxants, but that there was still possible memory loss and other side effects. Despite claims of medical efficacy for major depression, the public impression was tainted by visions of death-row inmates in the electric chair and portrayals in films and literature. Indeed, Ernest Hemingway had committed suicide shortly after receiving ECT, his famous description of the experience: "It was a brilliant cure but we lost the patient." This murder was about madness yet again, Jamie thought, but what was the gallery owner's connection with Monro, or the Canon at the cathedral?

"Three makes a serial killer," Missinghall said quietly, with an inappropriate tinge of excitement in his voice. Serial killers were rare, despite the intensity of media and myriad fictional characters, and they had never had a case on their team. Jamie shook her head.
 

"I don't think we should go down that path yet, because of the media hype it will create. There's a connection between these murders, for sure. But they aren't random, and these deaths seem to be personal, so I don't think the general public is at risk. The question must be whether the murderer is finished yet, and what Arthur Tindale did to be targeted."

One of the Scene of Crime Officers dusted the electroshock machine for prints, but Jamie suspected the scene would be as clean as the Imperial War Museum and the crypt of St Paul's.
 

"You can get those machines on eBay," Missinghall said, looking up from his smartphone. "Maybe we can track down someone who bought one recently."

Jamie nodded. "Definitely worth following up." She walked over to the desk now that the SOCOs had finished processing it. "And we need to know what Tindale's link with madness was. Can you get something on his background, Al?"
 

Missinghall nodded and turned away to start making calls. Jamie looked down at the papers strewn on the desk, not touching anything, just processing Arthur Tindale's personal space. It was chaotic, but clearly organized in his own particular way. This was a man who actively ran his business, and who cared about the art he chose for his space, not just the income it brought.
 

There was a mockup of a brochure on the top of one of the piles, and the striking front image caught Jamie's eye. It showed a giant skull, bisected so the viewer could see into compartments that made up the interior of the brain. Jamie bent to look closer at the incredible detail of each mini tableau. In one cell, a woman was gagged and tied to a pole as a man whipped her back, blood pooling at her feet. In another, a tiny girl was trapped inside a spiky horse chestnut, but the spines pointed inwards, piercing her body and holding her prisoner, each movement ripping open her bare flesh. Yet another compartment showed a sickly, albino rat cowering in a dark corner, baring its teeth. There was a man strapped to a conveyor belt heading for a crushing set of rollers. The same figure beat on the glass walls of a test tube as giant scientists hovered, ready to pour a vial of pale green liquid over their subject. Creatures crawled around the edges of the painting, some recognizable as worms and lizards, but others fantastical nightmares, chimaeras of horror, and each was biting at the skull, trying to burrow inside.