CHARLES PARIS felt numb, almost detached. His mind wasn’t working properly. Ideas floated there loosely, unable or perhaps unwilling to make connections.
He forced himself to go closer to the body. He registered that the spattered blood was still bright red and shiny. It had only just stopped flowing, and had not yet begun to dry and turn brown.
With an even greater effort he leant forward to touch the flesh of Greg Marchmont’s hand. It was warm. The sergeant had not been long dead.
Then he noticed on the floor a sheet torn from a notebook. On it were scrawled the words:
‘I’M SORRY. I THOUGHT I COULD COPE WITH EVERYTHING, BUT WHEN IT CAME DOWN TO IT, I JUST COULDN’T STAND THE PRESSURE’
There was no means of knowing whether the lack of full stop after the last word was just carelessness or whether the message was incomplete. The dutiful use of punctuation in the rest of the message might point to the second conclusion.
Charles Paris backed away. Ring the police. Dial 999 and get the message across. That was the only coherent thought crystallising in his mind.
He could make the call from where he was. Use Marchmont’s phone and then get the hell out of the place. He tried to remember how much Bell’s he’d got back at Hereford Road. He was going to need a lot to anaesthetise him that night.
Charles Paris looked at his watch, wondering if he might still find an off-licence open. Twenty-seven minutes past ten. The transmission of Public Enemies had finished less than half an hour before. It felt so long ago it could have happened in a previous incarnation.
He moved automatically out of the bathroom, averting his eyes from the corpse, through the hall and back into the sitting room.
He approached the telephone, then hesitated. Was it sensible to make the call from there or might that link him to the place?
Fingerprints. God, his fingerprints were already on the door handles, possibly on the drawers and the papers he had picked up.
A dull panic made its slow progress through him. He was still too traumatised to feel anything stronger.
And with the panic came a new thought, a thought that started as a tiny inkling but quickly grew to a hideous certainty. Maybe Marchmont’s message had been unfinished. Maybe it was missing the word ‘COOKER’.
Zombie-like, almost in slow motion, as in one of those dreams where you run hopelessly through sand, Charles Paris moved towards the gas rings. He took a handkerchief out of his pocket and wrapped it loosely round the handles of the pressure cooker. Feeling their outlines through the cloth, he eased them apart. He closed his hand round the lid handle and lifted it up.
His intuition was confirmed. In the dry interior of the pressure cooker was a human head.
Mercifully, the eyes were closed, but the shock that ripped through Charles was still intense.
It wasn’t the shock, though, of seeing the face of the man he was employed to resemble.
Though discoloured and a little battered, the features were easily recognisable.
The head belonged to Ted Faraday.