Walkers (2 page)

‘Walking, that’s all. Thinking.’

‘You had a row with your parents?’

‘My parents are dead . I live with
my grandparents.’

‘You had a row with them?’

‘ I just went for a walk, that’ s
all.’

Lieutenant Ortega worried something
out from between his front teeth with his thumbnail. Then he sucked at his
teeth, and said, ‘Okay. I want you all to make statements to my officers here;
full statements: how you found this dead person here, everything.’

‘Straightforward drowning,’
Detective Morris repeated.

At that moment, two more cars
arrived on the beach, a dilapidated Buick Regal and an olive-drab station-wagon
from the coroner’s department.

‘Ah, the photographer,’ said
Lieutenant Ortega, rubbing his hands together. ‘And the medical examiner, too,
remarkably prompt for a change.’

The photographer was a dour young
man with a monk-like tonsure and a repetitive sniff. He began work straight
away, laying out measurement markers and then photographing the young woman’s
body from all sides. The medical examiner, a short bull-necked man in a loud
black-and-white hound’s-tooth sports jacket, whistled tunelessly between his
teeth while he waited for the photographer to finish.

‘Straightforward drowning, what do
you think?’ Detective Morris asked him.

The medical examiner stared at him.
‘Do
you
want to do the post mortem,
or are you going to leave it to me?’

Detective Morris gave him a hesitant
grin. ‘No, sir, you go right ahead.’

‘Can we turn her over now?’ asked
Lieutenant Ortega. ‘I’d like to see what she looks like.’

The medical examiner didn’t answer
him, but carefully brushed the sand away from the dead girl’s shoulders, and
ran his hands down the length of her bare back. He stood up straight, and
frowned, and then he looked out along the beach.

‘Do any of you know this beach at
all well?’ he asked, thoughtfully.

‘Yes, sir,’ said Detective Morris.
‘I’ve lived here just about all of my life.’

‘Have you attended drownings here
before?’

‘Five or six.’

‘Can you recall how far up the beach
those other five or six bodies were discovered?’ the medical examiner asked
him.

Detective Morris looked puzzled. ‘On
the waterline, I guess, just like this one.’

‘You take a look at that washed-up
weed and that other debris,’ the medical examiner told him. ‘See where it lies.
Most of it’s lighter than a body, and far less bulky; yet it’s way down the
beach by comparison.’

Lieutenant Ortega came forward and
looked down at the body uneasily. ‘So what do you infer from that?’ he asked
the medical examiner.

‘I don’t know, I’m just making an
observation,’ the medical examiner replied.

‘You .observe that the body is lying
further up the beach than the seaweed and the logs and the other trash?’

‘That’s correct.’

Lieutenant Ortega sucked at his
teeth again. His earlier efforts obviously hadn’t succeeded in dislodging the
fragment of food that was worrying him. ‘You observe that the body is lying
further up the beach than the seaweed and the other trash, and from this
observation you conclude that the girl was not drowned at all, but that she
died in some other way and was left on the beach, either by accident, or with
the deliberate intention of making it appear as if she had drowned?’

‘You said it, not me,’ replied the
medical examiner, palpating the dead girl’s right leg, and watching to see what
finger-marks he made. He snapped his fingers and one of the gum-chewing medics
brought him his alloy medical-case, and opened it up for him. He rummaged
around inside it until he found his thermometer, which he lubricated, and then
unceremoniously inserted into the body’s anus. ‘If she’s been floating around
in the ocean all night, the probability is that her body temperature will be
far lower than if she’s been lying on the beach. That will depend when she
died, of course; but this beach is pretty well crowded right up until sundown,
isn’t that true?’

‘Yes, sir,’ Detective Morris agreed.
‘Sometimes well after sundown, too, when the kids have cookouts.’

The medical examiner waited
patiently for the girl’s body temperature to have its effect on the mercury in
his thermometer. Meanwhile he looked up at Henry and Gil and Susan, and said,
‘Who are these people? Gawkers, or what?’

‘These people found the body,’ said
Lieutenant Ortega.

The medical examiner asked Henry,
‘Ever see anybody dead on this beach before?’

Henry shook his head.

‘Fine way to start the day, finding
a body,’ the medical examiner remarked, as casually as if he were discussing
the weather. He withdrew his thermometer and frowned at it carefully. ‘
Sixty-one degrees.’

‘And what does that mean?’ asked
Lieutenant Ortega.

‘It means that the temperature
inside the body is sixty-one degrees,’ said the medical examiner.

‘But what do you conclude?’

‘Conclude? I don’t conclude
anything. It’s up to you to make the conclusions. But you could take into
consideration the fact that the air temperature here is something like
fifty-five or fifty-six degrees, and that the ocean temperature is something
like forty-two to forty-eight degrees.’

‘So, if the body had been floating
in the water all night, her body temperature would have been lower than
sixty-one degrees?’ said Lieutenant Ortega.

‘Possibly,’ the medical examiner
replied.

Lieutenant Ortega let out another of
his short, testy breaths. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘Now can we turn her over?’

The medical examiner stood up, and
fastidiously brushed the sand from the knees of his pants. As he did so, the
two medics came forward, and positioned themselves on either side of the body.
Henry, watching, was gripped by an irrational feeling of dread, and he had the
strongest urge to turn and look the other way. Somehow, however, he found that
he couldn’t, that he had to watch. Otherwise the girl on the beach would remain
faceless forever, and when he dreamed about her at night, which he inevitably
would, he would see nothing but that mermaid hair, tangled with weed, and
nothing but that long pale back.

‘Be careful,’ the medical examiner
instructed the medics. ‘I don’t want any extra bruising.’

He came over and stood next to Henry
and Gil and Susan. ‘You didn’t touch her at all, or try to move her?’

Henry shook his head. ‘I don’t think
I would have had the nerve.’

Susan ventured, ‘Do you suppose that
somebody might have killed her? I mean, on purpose?’

The medical examiner pulled a face.
‘Girls of this age are always susceptible to being killed, either on purpose or
accidentally, or else through carelessness. Pretty girls especially. They have
more power than they know. Their youth and their looks give them power. The
trouble is, they never know how to use it. Not safely, anyway.’

With exaggerated care, the two
medics eased the girl’s body out of the sand, and then rolled her on to her
back.

Her arm fell against the wet beach
with a slapping sound and then one of the medics said, in a peculiar voice,
‘Jesus Christ.’

Henry stared, but at first he
couldn’t understand what he was staring at. The medical examiner moved forward
at once, and stood over the body, his face disassembled into no recognisable expression
at all. Fear? Horror? Fascination? The two medics took a step back, one of them
holding his hand over his mouth, and looking watery eyed. Lieutenant Ortega had
been standing with his back to the body, talking to Morris and Warburg; but
then Warburg nudged him and he turned around and saw what the girl really
looked like.

Her face was almost beautiful, in
spite of the fact that it had been swollen by the sea.

A classic blonde, with classic
American bone-structure, the sort of girl who could easily have found herself
an acting part in
Matt Houston
or
Magnum, P.I.
or even
Dynasty.
Wide shouldered, large
breasted; but beneath her ribcage the horror began. Henry suddenly understood
what he was looking at, and whispered, ‘Oh, God,’ and Susan buried her face in
her hands.

The girl’s abdomen had been
completely ripped out, from her ribs to her pelvis, and inside her abdominal
cavity scores of silvery-black eels were writhing; a tumultuous nest of
slithering creatures, twining and untwining themselves, blindly feeding on what
was left of the dead girl’s softer organs.

Gil turned away, buckled at the
knees, crouched on the sand, and retched. The uniformed policemen stared in
alarm and helplessness; even the photographer crossed himself. For minutes on
end, there was nothing that any of them could do but watch the knotted tangle
of eels as they heaved and twisted and wriggled, and the pale emotionless face
of the girl whose body they were slowly devouring.

The medical examiner turned to
Lieutenant Ortega with widened eyes. ‘Ever see anything like that,
ever!’

Lieutenant Ortega abruptly shook his
head.

‘Me neither,’ said the medical
examiner. Then he turned to the medics and said, ‘Get rid of those things.’

The medics looked unhappily down at
the body. ‘You mean . . .?’

‘Whatever they are, those eels.
Those snakes. Get them out of there.’

One of the medics picked up a stick
from the beach, and approached the body gingerly. He leaned forward, and
prodded the eels with the tip of it, just once.

Immediately, the eels wriggled and
twisted even more furiously, and the medic jumped back with a high-pitched
‘aah!’
of irrepressible disgust.

The medical examiner impatiently
took the stick away from him and circled around the body himself. While
everybody else watched him with flesh-crawling apprehension, he prodded the
eels two or three times, and each time they boiled in the dead girl’s stomach
with the same slippery fury. Suddenly, however, the medical examiner managed to
hook the end of the stick underneath one of them and flip it out on to the
beach.

The eel was almost three feet long,
with a flat chisel-shaped head and tiny blind eyes. It flapped and writhed on
the surface for a while; then it burrowed its head into the sand, and within
seconds it had disappeared, leaving nothing on the sand but a slight
indentation. Almost immediately, the remaining eels poured out of the dead
girl’s pelvis, and scattered in all directions, burying themselves deep into
the sand.

‘Catch one!’ the medical examiner
shouted, urgently.

One of the uniformed policemen
snatched at the tail of the last eel to disappear, and tugged at it furiously.

‘Give me a hand for Chrissake!’ he
gasped to his uniformed partner. His partner came hurrying across and gripped
the eel’s body nearer to the sand, and between them, cursing and grunting, they
gradually managed to drag the creature backwards out of the hole it had been
burrowing for itself.

As soon as its head was clear,
though, the eel lashed and looped and twisted wildly around in the air. Henry
saw its teeth flicker; and then it wriggled like a whip, and caught one of the
policemen directly in the face, clamping its jaws over his upper lip and part
of his nose.

The policeman shrieked out loud, and
snatched at the eel’s head, trying to prize its jaws apart. Henry watched in
horror as the man danced around the sand, the silvery-black eel wriggling from
his face like a carnival nose. Bright-red blood began to sprinkle all around
them.

Lieutenant Ortega dodged forward,
and seized the officer from behind, tripping him up so that they both fell
heavily on to the ground. The policeman was screaming wildly, and his legs were
jerking like an epileptic marionette. Lieutenant Ortega reached around to the
officer’s face, and clutched the eel right behind its chisel-shaped head,
squeezing the gills closed so that the creature would be unable to breathe.
Then he held up his free hand and yelled, ‘Knife, for God’s sake!’

The medical examiner dug hurriedly
into his pockets, and came up with a single-bladed clasp knife. Lieutenant
Ortega snatched it from him, and then cut into the welter of blood in front of
the policeman’s face. The policeman screamed again and again while Lieutenant
Ortega sawed through the eel’s body. The eel’s own blood spurted out dark, like
bile, and splattered all over Ortega’s hands and arms. Its tail lashed
furiously from side to side, right up until the last moment when Ortega cut its
spinal column, and flung its body across the sand. The headless body lay
twitching and jerking, and the medics cautiously stepped away from it.

The medical examiner knelt down on
the sand and examined the policeman closely.

The policeman was shivering and
trembling and Lieutenant Ortega was doing everything he could to soothe him.
The eel’s severed head was still gripping the policeman’s face, and when the
medical examiner quickly dabbed away the blood with cotton and distilled water,
he could see that the creature’s teeth had already detached half of the
policeman’s nostril and most of his upper lip. The eel’s jaw muscles showed no
signs of relaxing; it was plain that any attempt to pull its head away would
make the injury far more severe than it was already.