Desecration (14 page)

She was mainly out of shot then but Jamie watched the movements of Neville’s hands, clearly pulling up her short dress. He clambered onto her, fumbled with his hands and then began a thrusting motion, the camera shot obscured by how close he was to it.
 

 
“I think it’s clear what he’s doing,” Jamie snapped. “This is evidence of rape, since her statement says that she remembers none of this. It’s clearly not consensual.”
 

They watched as Neville knelt up and the scene changed as he maneuvered Mimi’s legs, moving a slim stiletto heeled foot across his body. He reached forward, his body jerking a little with exertion, although he seemed to be doing whatever it was with some care. Presumably he didn’t want to leave marks on her skin. Jamie leaned closer to the screen to see what he was doing, and then realized with a jolt of anger.
 

“Bastard. He’s turning her over.” Jamie started to rap her fingers on the table, a staccato beat that sped up as Neville reached his climax, his face reddening as he panted on top of the prone girl. Jamie hated to watch the rape, but she felt that witnessing the crime was part of her responsibility. The anger she felt for Mimi’s abuse heaped upon her pent up rage and she felt her blood pressure rising. As much as the police could hack away at the darkness, inching their way forward and bringing light to the city, behind them the shadows reformed and evil flourished in the cracks. “Can you get this to the officers working with Mimi, and I want a statement from Lord Neville.”

“Sure thing,” Missinghall said. “But this alibis Mascuria and Christopher Neville for Jenna’s murder. Can we eliminate them from that investigation?”

Jamie shook her head. “Not yet. I’m sure there’s more to this. Let me sort out the warrant for Mascuria’s computer and then I’ve got to meet a source back at the Hunterian. If we can get the paperwork sorted on this, we can arrest the pair of them by the end of the day. I’m sure that will result in new leads for the inquiry.”

Back at her desk, Jamie was soon lost in the minutiae of paperwork for the warrant. It was a thankless, but important, part of any investigation and as much as she preferred the more active side of a case, it would give her great satisfaction to be able to bring Mascuria and Neville in.
 

Minutes after Jamie had logged the meeting with Mascuria and the request for a warrant up to the SIO, the door of the Incident Room opened and Detective Superintendent Dale Cameron walked in.
 

“DS Brooke,” he called, his voice authoritative. “My office, please.”

The room quietened slightly until he turned and left again, not waiting for her to follow. Jamie stood, wondering why her superior had made such a public scene. She went to his office and shut the door behind her.
 

“Sir. You got my update?”
 

Cameron stood behind his desk, looking down at Jamie, his patrician features composed. Jamie had been expecting praise at the new evidence, but his imperious tone suggested something quite different.
 

“Yes, and it disturbs me. I’m expecting you to focus on finding Jenna Neville’s killer, not pursuing her grieving father for what was probably drunken consensual sex.”
 

Jamie was stunned enough to stand in silence for a moment. There’s no way that Cameron could have watched the video yet, so it could only mean one thing. She thought back to the photo of him in the Nevilles’ hallway, the impossibility of moving on this quickly without his go ahead.
 

“But, Sir …” she started.
 

“But nothing, Jamie.” Cameron sat down behind his desk and Jamie felt like a child summoned to the headmaster. “Seriously, haven’t you got enough on your plate with the murder investigation without heading down some sexual assault rabbit hole that has no chance of getting any further?”

“I can …”
 

“I don’t want to hear any more,” Cameron interrupted, his hand held up to stop her. “I’ll assign another team to investigate the sexual assault claims, but you need to focus on Jenna Neville’s murder. The press are having a field day with our lack of progress. What about that Day-Conti, her boyfriend?”

“He’s still a person of interest, but there’s no evidence against him Sir, although we’re still verifying his alibi at the nightclub. I do have some other interviews lined up today.” Jamie decided to omit the detail that one of those was Esther Neville. If Cameron was compromised in some way, she needed time to collect all the evidence together.
   

“Continue with that then, but Jamie, I will not have you anywhere near Christopher Neville unless you have some evidence directly linking him to Jenna’s murder. I want the focus squarely on Day-Conti.”

Jamie nodded her assent, but her eyes were cold. With such friends in high places, she could see how Cameron had earned his Teflon stripes, and she wondered what other investigations he had an interest in. But for now, there was nothing she could do.

Chapter 12

Blake looked at his watch for the fourth time as he paced outside the Royal College of Surgeons. Some part of him hoped that Jamie wouldn’t turn up so he could go back to his research, but then he also felt she offered some kind of redemption, a way in which he could use his curse for good. The problem with being able to read the past was that you felt impotent and powerless, unable to change what had already happened. What good was an ability to see what had already failed, or died and rotted away? Perhaps this time, it would be different.
 

In preparation for today, he hadn’t drunk anything last night, even though he had craved oblivion. Alcohol deadened the visions, shaded their vivid color and rubbed over their raw power until they faded like a mirage, and he wanted to be fully open and alert today. He hadn’t read as deeply as this for a long time, and the possibilities both exhilarated and scared him.

He heard the roar of a motorcycle and a figure in black pulled up in front of him. He hadn’t expected Jamie to ride a bike, but somehow it fitted her independence and need to be apart from others. As she removed her helmet, Blake remembered how she had looked in his vision of tango and tried to fit it to this leather clad wraith, her face devoid of makeup, hair scraped back as if in punishment.
He realized that she had the face of a model, the kind who looked ugly in some shots and stunning in others, depending on the animation of her mouth, the look in her eyes or the way she held herself. At tango, she was a goddess, but right now Jamie’s face was hard and Blake imagined that was the look that made criminals wary.
 

“Morning,” she said, dismounting the bike. “Sorry I’m late. I had to see a man about a video.”
 

Blake could sense her anger, the vibrations of intense emotion emanating from her.
 

“We don’t have to do this now, you know,” he said. “Maybe another time would be better.”
 

Jamie shook her head. “If you’re ready, I really do want to know whether you can shed any more light on the case.” She smiled then, and he felt the shift in her, the way her attention could focus. He envied her ability to tune everything else out.
 

He nodded, pushing aside his own doubt. “Let’s do this then. I can’t promise anything but it’s worth a try.”
 

Jamie led the way into the museum, now cleaned of evidence but still closed to the public for a time out of respect for Jenna’s family. Blake
hesitated at the door, knowing that this place contained instruments of torture exhibited under the guise of the medical profession. There were saws that sliced bone from bodies, instruments to suck blood from flesh and knives to pare it away.
 

These were things he could not and did not want to touch, and he felt a wave of fear at being in such close proximity to them, a concern that he would be overwhelmed by visions of past horror. Blake took a deep breath, remembering his father’s curses that had called on Hell to visit him with all its spectacles of evil to drive him mad. He felt tendrils of it in the museum and a pain began to pulse in his temples. But he felt that he deserved to face whatever was here, and only by embracing the visions could he find something to help Jamie and the murder investigation.
 

Removing his gloves, Blake stepped over the threshold into the Museum. Immediately he saw a wooden table laid out with a full dissection of the veins and arteries of the human body. Blake put his hand out to steady himself against the wall as a wave of bloody film swept across his eyes. He tasted a metallic tang and nausea made his head spin. He fell to his knees, hands clutched to his chest as he hyperventilated, shuddering, heart pounding. He had glimpsed the dissection beginning when the victim was still alive. In the vision, Blake saw the patient made anonymous by a hood, so the anatomist could focus on the pathology, eliminating the irrelevant human from the frame of the medically interesting, even as the body shuddered under the scalpel.
 

"Are you okay, Blake?” Jamie bent to him, her hand shaking his shoulder. “Blake …”

This place was a museum of abomination. There was an ancient evil here, layered over centuries, and the deaths of many lay just under the surface of its gleaming exterior, clawing for release. Blake tried to regulate his vision, limiting the amount of sensation he was taking in at once and, as his breathing returned to something resembling normal, he tried to compartmentalize the complex web of emotion.
 

“I’m OK,” he whispered, getting up slowly, making sure not to touch Jamie with his bare hands. He didn’t want her energy swirling in this maelstrom as well, for she was alive and vibrant, her colors bold and bright. He needed to feel the edges of the palette of gray, where ghosts lingered, trapped by attachment to pieces of their unburied selves. “I need to establish a baseline for the energy of the place and then try to sift through that for Jenna. Her resonance should be greater because it’s so recent.” He grimaced, unable to hide his mental pain at the sensations pressing in on him. “Just give me a few minutes.”
 

Jamie nodded, clearly worried about him but Blake knew she couldn’t understand what he was going through. He was sure that part of her still thought he was a charlatan, but right now it was all he could do to hold onto the reins of his sanity. He had to face the horror head on and ride the wave into the past, and he could only do that by forcing himself to delve into the darkness.
   

Blake turned to a wall of glass jars exhibiting a collection of fetal deformity. Bracing himself, he placed his bare hand on the surface, deliberately exposing himself to sensation, feeling the agony of those who had suffered. In one jar was a tiny figure, with perfect arms attached to a human torso. Its head was like a lizard, taut skin pulled back over a deformed skull, slitted eyes, flat features and a gaping hole where its mouth should have been, while its legs were fused into a tail. Blake read the label, Sirenomelus, the word haunting but sweet on the tongue. He imagined the creature swimming around in the afterlife and wondered whether there was a soul out there mourning the loss of such a body.
 

In another bell-jar was a baby, its hair seeming to wave in the preservative liquid, its ears perfect little shells, soft as only a newborn’s can be. But its face was a nightmare, with only a mouth and a gaping eye hole in its empty skull. The infant’s body had been hacked open, with only crude stitching holding the corpse together for the preservation jar. Blake couldn’t help but stare into the abyss of its eye, wondering at the horrors Nature could create and man could only imagine.
 

How could God allow these freaks to be born, he wondered.
Blake knew that a woman’s body would usually expel such damaged creatures, for Nature abhors malformation and human society keeps such things hidden. In times past, midwives would have been the bearers of such monsters and only some grew to adulthood, abused freaks. Now he could hear the screams of these drowned nightmares, their cries muffled by the thick preservative their bodies floated in.
 

In another jar, twins were joined by the face and chest and Blake’s thoughts flashed to Mengele’s lab. There was a macabre beauty in their perfect bodies with no faces, just a freakish pile of limbs without movement. Next to the jars lay delivery tools, a brutal pair of spiked forceps and a cranioclast, used for cutting or crushing the skull of the baby’s head in order to wrench it from the mother. Blake shuddered and turned away from the violent images that flooded his mind, almost on the edge of what he could bear. But he knew he would soon reach the place when his brain was overwhelmed, fear spiked and then cool, calm would descend. He just needed to push his mind a little further.
 

He turned to a cabinet of diseased limbs and felt the resonance of disembodied flesh, some kind of muscle memory remaining in them, a persistent electrical impulse. Just as people with amputations felt an itch in a phantom limb, so the appendages themselves emanated a kind of psychical scratching as they were divested of the body that gave them life.

Blake walked on through the displays to a gallery of artwork. He stopped by a selection of repulsive images, sexualizing these human monsters into forbidden pleasure tinged with insanity. In one photograph a little girl, curls around her chubby shoulders, turned with an accusatory, feral glare. She crouched on deformed femurs, clutching at cloth with tight fists, as her over developed sex was exposed to the glare of the camera.
 

In another, a naked young woman stood, stomach bulging, her hair done up in a complicated style, topped by a bow. Between her splayed legs emerged a third leg, angled into the air from the knee, an impossible limb. It looked as if something had been thrust up into the girl but the leg was part of a parasitic twin that had grown inside her body. All three legs wore the same boots with long white socks. Blake couldn’t help but look at it more closely, and read the label, ‘Dipygus tripus, parasitic twin. Blanche Dumas/Dupont’. The name served to humanize the girl but he wondered what kind of life she had been able to have, or whether it had been one of constant abuse from the people making money from her deformity.