Thorn In My Side (9 page)

Still not over
her bitter divorce, it was rumoured she hated anything in trousers.
She did, however, possess a sense of humour and had that rare
ability to be able to laugh at herself – most of the time. Lately,
even that seemed to have deserted her.

She heard the
brief knock, then the door creaking open, and glanced round,
annoyed that her concentration had been broken. She frowned at the
tall, handsome, dark-haired man who walked in.

'Hello.
Detective Inspector Mike Yorke,' Mike said, moving quickly forward
with his hand stretched out to shake hers. 'You must be the lovely
Jill Paterson I’ve heard so much about.'

Please,
she thought, but said a confident, 'Yes,' as she held her gloved
hand out, palm up.

She’d heard
about Michael Yorke, and on first glance most of what she’d heard
was true.
He’s certainly a looker, but is he the good,
decent bloke they say he is? One thing for sure, he’s
certainly
full of himself.

Anyhow, she
strongly doubted that he was as good as people said
. None of
them ever are. Scratch the surface and men are all
the same.
Three meals a day, a shag when it suits them, and that’s only if
any of the rest aren’t available.

When she’d
found out that her ex-husband had a veritable harem, it had broken
her. It had taken her cousin Billy to take control and pick up the
pieces. He’d suggested the move north and so far she loved it. The
island was fantastic, so much history, and the locals were all very
friendly.

'Oh, right,'
Mike said, taking in the gloves. He dropped his hand and moved to
the far side of the table. Looking down at the body, he slowly
shook his head. A pretty girl, her black hair resting on her
shoulders emphasizing her paleness. He guessed early twenties, and
wondered what her story was.
Too young though
, he thought,
whatever it was, far too young. Dead before the poor soul’s
even
had a chance to live.

'Can you tell
me how?' he queried, looking for any marks, bruises, knife wounds,
but could see nothing. Her throat was clear, so she definitely
hadn’t been strangled. In fact she looked nothing more than as if
she was peacefully asleep, though her lips seemed to be stretched
into a tight grimace. Puzzled, he swung his head to Jill.

She turned to a
drawer in the long wall cupboard behind her and pulled out a pair
of opaque rubber gloves. Handing them to Mike she said, 'Put them
on, and help me turn her over.'

Doing as he was
told, with a slight lift of his eyebrows, Mike put the gloves on,
and together they turned the dead girl onto her stomach.

'You’ve done
this before?' Jill asked, though it was more of a statement than a
question. In her experience most of the coppers would look but
didn’t like to touch.

'Once or
twice.' Mike replied, wondering why she was such a prickly pear
.
The gossip is that she’s a man-hater. There has to be a reason,
she’s a damn good-looking woman.

He turned his
attention to the corpse. 'Oh, Christ.'

'Hu, sort
of.'

'What do you
mean, sort of?' Mike practically whispered, unable to take his eyes
off the horrendous mess in front of him. He had never in all his
working life as a police officer seen anything like it. Bodies
pulled out of the water after a week slow-waltzing with a dozen
crabs didn’t come close.

'The poor
girl’s been scourged.' Jill pointed to the bruised wrists. 'Some
incredibly depraved, evil thug has hung her up by her wrists to a
post or wall. Then whipped her from the top of her arms, down her
shoulders and back.' Slowly Mike’s eyes followed the pointing
finger. 'Across her buttocks, then down the back of her legs and
calves and carried on all the way down to her heels.'

After a
moment’s silence contemplating what the poor young woman on the
slab must have gone through, though he was hard pushed to even try
to imagine it, he said, 'What are these?' Mike pointed to one of
the many two-inch-long white ribbons of flesh hanging just about
everywhere.

'Muscle.'

He’d
half-guessed that’s what they were, and had the crazy thought that
no way could she be comfortable lying on that mess.

He looked up at
Jill. 'What sort of madman would do such a thing? The agony she
must have gone through… It’s… It’s so, so friggin’ well
unbelievable.' He shook his head in angry bewilderment, shuddering
at the thought of the poor woman writhing in pain. Gritting his
teeth, he silently vowed to drag whoever was responsible to the
real justice he deserved, and not just a slap on the wrist, and a
few years behind bars in a cushy jail.

'I don’t
think,' Jill said after a moment, 'that the scourging is what
killed her. In fact she may have been – actually, the more I think
about it, she probably was -- dead after the first lash.'

Mike gave her a
puzzled frown. 'So what?'

Jill looked
steadily at him for a moment, took a deep breath, then went on.
'When the body first arrived here, her front was covered in blood,
even though as you’ve seen, there’s no wounds at all on the front
of her body. If the blood flowed from the back of her, there would
have been flow lines, but the blood was evenly spaced from her
scalp down… It’s my opinion that she bled out of her sweat
glands.'

'What?' Mike
looked at Jill with disbelief. 'Surely that’s impossible.'

'No, it’s
called hemathidrosis. I was puzzled for a while until I remembered
reading about it.'

'Hema
what?'

'Hemathidrosis.
There’s only about a dozen recorded cases, and it’s only seen in
someone who has under gone absolute tremendous stress and agony. In
hemathidrosis a person actually bleeds from every sweat gland in
their body.'

Mike was quiet
for a long moment, visualizing what must have happened. 'So what
would you say she exactly died from – the scourging, or the
hema-what’s-it?'

'Fright. Pure
utter fright.'

Mike digested
this, vowing even harder to find the monster responsible for this
atrocity. 'OK, then, is there anything else you’ve found out?'

'I’m not
finished yet.' She looked at him, her green eyes unblinking,
leaving it up to him when he wanted to come back.

'Tomorrow?' he
questioned with a raised eyebrow. 'Will that be all right?'

She nodded,
then turned to one of the drawers in her wall cupboards, dismissing
him.

Mike raised his
eyebrows, OK, it was her domain. He wanted to get started on the
boyfriend as soon as possible anyhow. 'Oh, the girl’s family are
coming up to give a formal identification, some time this
afternoon, if that’s all right with you?' he asked, but thought,
damn tough if it isn’t.

She shrugged.
Without turning round, she said, 'I’m not going anywhere.'

'Bye then.'

Covering the
body up, she muttered something that could have been goodbye, or
might just as easily have been
, fuck off.
Judging by her
attitude, Mike wouldn’t have been the least bit surprised if it was
the latter.

He shrugged,
and with a small smile turned and left her to her own devices.

Outside, Mike
found Smiler sitting on the wall, his hands under his thighs, and
his legs swinging. Tiny’s lead was hooked onto Smiler’s right foot.
Sitting down next to him, and ignoring the enquiring look from the
WPC in the waiting patrol car, Mike waited for the inevitable
question. He didn’t have long to wait.

'She’s got
black hair, hasn’t she?'

Staring at the
police car, Mike sighed, then turned to Smiler. 'Yes, she’s got
black hair. But answer this one, if you’re so clever -- how did she
die?'

'Judging by the
amount of blood that I saw, she must have bled to death.' Smiler
nodded his head with conviction, then looked grim-faced at
Mike.

Mike was quiet
for a moment, digesting what Smiler had said about the girl
bleeding to death, which was in fact basically what had happened.
Then he came back with, 'Well, there you go, then, Smiler. Most
people who are murdered, unless poisoned or strangled, do bleed to
bloody death.'

'So there was a
lot of blood? More than normal, would you say, Mike?'

'I suppose so…'
He glanced back at Smiler, sighed, then said, 'Give me one of your
fags.' Mike smoked rarely, so rarely he never thought about buying
any, just borrowed the odd one now and then. Smiler handed him a
cigarette along with his lighter, and waited patiently until Mike
said, after lighting up and taking a deep draw, 'The poor woman was
scourged. '

Smiler looked
at Mike with horror. For a while he just stared at him, then he
said in a hushed voice, 'Do you know exactly what happens when
someone is scourged? Do you, Mike? Do you really know?'

'Well, after
the friggin’ mess I’ve just seen, you can guarantee I have some
idea. But I bet you can fill in the blanks.'

Taking that as
an invitation, Smiler went on, 'Historically a scourging consists
of thirty-nine lashes with a wooden-handled whip of about eighteen
inches long, with nine leather thongs about six to seven feet long.
At the end of each thong is a piece of lead shot, and attached to
the lead shot are pieces of sheep or cattle bone. The idea behind
this is that the lasher, snapping his wrist in a certain way,
causes the weight of the lead shot to dig into the flesh, while the
sheep bone digs in under the surface, and literally lifts small
shards of skeletal muscle about two inches long.'

In his mind’s
eye, Mike saw the ribbons of white muscle hanging from the girl’s
body. 'Oh, my God.' He actually felt sick. He shook his head as he
puffed air out of his cheeks.

'Well, yes,
because in the Bible it states that Christ was scourged. Then he
bled through his sweat glands as he carried his cross.'

'Hmm. That’s
what she meant.'

'What?’

'Never mind.'
Mike looked at Smiler, at his under-developed body that had, in the
last few months, definitely put some weight on. But he still had
the body of a scrawny twelve-year-old, and Mike wondered just how
much knowledge was in that head of his. Sometimes it was like
listening to a college professor spouting off about his favourite
subject. Smiler repeated word for word everything he’d read, and
rarely in the voice of a seventeen-year-old street kid.

Smiler nodded
solemnly at Mike.

After a moment,
Mike said, 'You sure you’re not a fifty-year-old dwarf?'

Smiler laughed,
a rare event that brought a smile to Mike’s face.

'Come on,
sunshine. Let’s get you sorted. You have yet to meet the great, the
funny, the fantastic Aunt May. '

'Are you sure
she knows I’m coming?' Smiler asked, the smile gone and a hint of
nervousness in his voice. He was never keen to meet new people. He
could often see the horror on their faces when they looked at
him.

'Told you, I
phoned her. She’s looking forward to meeting you. She’ll be cooking
something special. Not that everything isn’t special, she’s a great
cook… And I think you’ll love the island. Now come on. I’ve got
stuff to be getting on with.'

They got into
the car, unaware that they were being watched, although Smiler
shivered and gave Mike an odd look that he missed entirely. He was
too busy flirting with the blonde WPC.

About the time
Mike and Smiler were heading towards Holy Island, a meeting was
taking place in London. In a high-rise apartment on Canary Wharf,
eight men sat around a table. Two European princes, an American
military leader, a Russian billionaire – though they were all
billionaires in their own right – a French count, a Swiss banker,
an African leader and an English nobleman.

The apartment
was luxurious in the extreme; dealing in flesh paid highly indeed.
Cream carpets so thick that you sank into them with each step,
cream walls hung with colourful paintings by old masters that most
of the world didn’t even know existed. It suited these men to carry
on the rumour they had started many years ago, that the Vatican had
it all.

Cut-glass
ornaments in blood red were scattered around the room. Three
Jacuzzis, two hot tubs on the verandas, stocked with everything a
man could want. Here you were waited on by slaves, willing and
unwilling – the unwilling beaten into submission, then plied with
drugs to make them as complacent as the willing.

The apartment
belonged to the English man, the earl. James Henry Simmonds was
tall, slim, fair-haired and utterly charming when he needed to be.
But tonight was not one of those occasions. Tonight he was with his
own kind, brothers in spirit if not blood. He swallowed the remains
of a rich old brandy, put the glass on the table, took a deep
breath, and, interrupting everyone, said in a loud voice, 'He has
to go, or he’ll bring us all down. Can’t you all see this?'

Getting the
attention he wanted as everyone paused and looked at him, he went
on. 'Times change, but some of us stubbornly refuse to adapt.' He
glared vehemently at the Russian when he said this. 'We knew a long
time ago that this day would come, and now that it has you all sit
there like fucking old men dithering about what to do.'

Kirill Tarasov
glared back, his thick lips curled into a snarl. 'When you decided
to call an emergency meeting, I did not know it was to condemn one
of our own.'

'I agree,
though. He’s lost it.' They all turned to look at the American, as
he went on in his high-pitched voice, 'And we have to think of our
own safety. Strange events, these. They may have been predicted,
but none could see the true scope of things.' The American, a
small, squat man with a bald head and the innocent sounding name of
Billy Slone, nodded slowly. As well as his military status, the
Slone family looked after the pharmaceutical side, investing
millions to make billions, legal drugs which cured one ailment but
caused three others, which needed more medication and on and on.
Their research had come up with the latest illegal drugs to hit the
streets as well as being responsible for what was already out
there.