Arc lights made the earth-moving equipment seem like monsters from childhood nightmares. A local bobby led Wildeve and Troy between metal-toothed giants, around concrete columns, through a roofless pagan cathedral to the heart of the new technology: a scraped-clear circle of compacted clay by a wooden hut. By the time they got there Troy felt as though he’d arrived at a place of primitive sacrifice. Instead of Isaac and Abraham, they had a site foreman in a hard hat, a police sergeant in uniform, and a small figure kneeling next to a dark mass of tarpaulin, shirtsleeves rolled up, Homburg pushed back on his head. Kolankiewicz.
He turned as they approached. ‘You should be in bed,’ he said bluntly to Troy. ‘This bugger drag you out at crack of dawn just to look at a stiff?’
‘I’m happy to do it. I’m at my best in the mornings.’
‘I known you twenty-five years. You’re always crap in the mornings.’
‘Well, there’s nothing like a bang on the head to change the habit of a lifetime. Now, can we get on?’
Kolankiewicz stood up, hands caked in mud and cement and human gore. ‘It’s not a pretty one.’
‘Show me.’
Kolankiewicz whipped back the tarpaulin. It was Bosch-like – so many bodies were – large bits of flesh and bone set in concrete, hacked out and hacked up. Kolankiewicz had made an attempt to reassemble the body. Looking past the distortions created by the lumps of concrete, Troy could discern the outline of a human form. This was the body of a tall man, age indeterminable to Troy, who had had the misfortune to be decapitated and hacked limb from limb. There appeared to be no sign of the head.
‘How long?’
‘Impossible to say with any accuracy, but allowing for the good weather we’ve had recently and the state of decomposition, say thirty-two hours. Maybe forty-eight.’
Troy turned to the site foreman. ‘What can you tell us?’
The man tilted his hard hat up a little. Looked down at the corpse, drew breath and looked straight back at Troy. It was as though he found bodies on a daily basis. ‘We clad the supports with wooden shuttering. You can’t fill ‘em all at once or it takes too long to set and you get cracks. Takes four days to fill a support as big as this. Yesterday morning we poured concrete. But the boards split and we had to redo it tonight. When we knocked out the last day’s work we found this.’
‘In the top layer?’
‘Right. Top layer.’
‘That means the body was dumped yesterday?’
‘Had to be or it would have been further down and we’d never have spotted it. Site was empty last night.’
‘A night-watchman perhaps?’
‘Keeps the insurers happy. Most night-watchmen nod off before midnight. I’ve even known buggers get hired as watchmen who were deaf as bleedin’ doorposts.’
Troy and Kolankiewicz knelt down. Wildeve conspicuously kept his distance.
‘OK. Follow the bouncing ball. First no head.’
‘I had noticed.’
‘No hands.’
‘They don’t want him identified.’
‘They don’t call you smartyarse for nothing. But what I want you to see are the cuts and breaks. Look at the femur. The incision, if you can call it that, begins about half-way between the greater trochanter and the lateral epicondyle. It then careers raggedly-jaggedly to emerge an inch and a half lower on the inner side.’
‘So?’
‘Whoever did this knew nothing about anatomy.’
‘Do they ever?’
‘Some murderers, as well you know, have a precision that matches mine and a cunning that matches yours. This bloke is an amateur. He killed and then disposed of the body with whatever was handy. In this case I rather think some kind of mechanical saw.’
‘A chainsaw?’
‘If that is indeed the term, yes, a chainsaw.’
‘Good God. I hope he was dead when they did this to him.’
‘He was. Now . . .’ Kolankiewicz picked up his geologist’s hammer and chipped away at the cement casing on what Troy took to be a section of the humerus.
‘See. Same again. A quick, ragged cut at the deltoid tubercle. A neat butcher would joint the corpse – literally, by incisions at the joints. Anything else is messy, blood and bone fragments everywhere. If you ever find out where they did this, there’ll be more evidence than they could ever wash out or sweep up.’
‘Well, there are certain advantages to the chainsaw if you don’t mind mess. It’s quick. But it’s not for the squeamish.’
On cue they both turned to look at Wildeve. He was listening, and looking and not getting too close. He hadn’t spoken in a while.
‘Are you all right?’ said Troy.
‘Fine,’ Wildeve lied. ‘Just thinking.’
They turned back to the corpse. Kolankiewicz took up his hammer again and picked up a blob of cement about the size of a cricket ball. It cracked open like a walnut. He hacked away at the interior, picked up tweezers and teased the skin of a small, fleshy object away from the sides.
‘Greaseproof paper in my bag. Quick.’
Troy held out a strip and Kolankiewicz gently placed a severed penis on it.
‘Amazing,’ said Troy.
‘How so?’
‘It puts us into a different league. You chop off a bloke’s head and hands, and there is motive and purpose. Without them we stand next to no chance of identifying the body. Chopping this off serves no purpose. It’s . . . gratuitous.’
‘Barbaric would be my word.’
They stood again.
Wildeve moved closer. ‘What’s up?’
Troy acted on instinct. Put his hand over the penis. Spoke on instinct. ‘What were you thinking, Jack?’
‘That it might be Bernie Champion.’
‘It’s not.’
‘How can you be sure?’
‘How long’s Bernie been missing? Ten days? A fortnight?’
‘He need not necessarily have been dead all that time – if you’re going by the rate of decomposition.’
‘That’s a factor, but it’s not the clincher. Bernie Champion was Jewish. None of King Alf’s lieutenants were goy. House rule. Look at the cock.’
Troy held out the offended object on its strip of greaseproof paper. Mangled manhood. A two-inch squib, severed intact from the body – intact to the tip of its puckered akroposthion.
Wildeve went white. Looked at the fading moon and pinched the bridge of his nose. It was thirty seconds before he spoke. ‘Sorry. I was being dumb. I don’t suppose there’s such a thing as an uncircumcised Jew, is there?’
‘Not in Alf Marx’s gang, and not in Bernie Champion’s generation. I got invited to a couple of Brith Milahs in my time in Stepney. They’re loaded with symbolism. A boy is not quite a Jew until it’s done. I rather think the first test for joining Alf’s mob was to drop your trousers.’
‘Makes my blood run cold,’ said Jack.
In the presence of a body that had been totally dismembered, limb from limb, limb from torso, head from neck, cock from balls, this struck Troy as unnecessarily squeamish. But, then, Jack was famous for puking at the scene of crime. It was a minor blessing he hadn’t yet. But the day was young.
‘Oh,’ Kolankiewicz said, with an air of remembering something he had forgotten to mention, ‘there is one more thing you should know now.’
‘And?’ said Troy.
‘I examined the backside before you got here. The rectum is full of semen.’
Wildeve leaned over and vomited.