Silencing the Dead by Will Harker (ready to read books .TXT) 📗

gaze fall first on the table. Like a mockery of Tilda’s corpse, the wax doll was there, laying beside the crystal ball. It too was featureless. It too had been punctured over a dozen times. My eyes slipped back to the body for a second and to the long masonry nails that been driven through Tilda’s clothes and into her torso. A small comfort here—there appeared to be very little blood around those wounds, indicating they’d been inflicted after death.

“If you prick us, do we not bleed?” I murmured to myself.

A quotation I had heard just that morning, mangled by Darrel Everwood during his appearance on breakfast TV. Did that signify anything? I shook my head. There was something else about the phrase that niggled at me—something Tilda herself had once said. Not recently, but years ago. Again, I pictured her with my mother, sitting on their trailer steps, entertaining me with some gruesome tale.

I could worry at the memory later. Now I had to make the most of what time I had alone here. Returning my attention to the doll, I confirmed that all the wounds inflicted on Tilda had been foretold by the effigy. All except one, perhaps. The crystal ball was laying off-centre, the damask cloth pulled askew. No reason for the killer to do such a thing. And so Tilda must have grasped at the cloth as she fell, not onto her back as she was now positioned, but forwards. The stick she always carried in her right hand lay beside her. She would have been clutching it when attacked and so, if struck face-on, wouldn’t have been able to snatch at the cloth at all. That meant she had used her left hand and so must have been hit from behind.

Trying to move my feet as little as possible, I dropped to my haunches and craned my neck until I could make out the wound. The edge of it was just visible—a catastrophic shattering at the back of her skull. I let out a sigh and straightened up. In this hell, I would take that small comfort—she’d been struck hard, had in all likelihood felt little pain, and had died not long after hitting the floor. I could tell that from the relative lack of smearing in the blood around her. No last death rattle, no thrashing.

My guess was a hammer. Some blunt implement that had afterwards been used on her face before it was put to work driving the nails home. But this was not the only tool the killer had brought with them. After death, Tilda’s left hand had been almost severed at the wrist. Short, biting cuts by the look of the flesh, probably a hacksaw. Despite the precaution of hanging the sign outside, and most likely securing the ties as well, I wondered if the killer had grown anxious about being discovered and given up on this final piece of desecration. One thing they had made sure of, however, was to remove every tooth in Tilda’s head.

This was what I had guessed must also have happened to Genevieve Bell. The quickest and simplest method of identification of a badly mutilated corpse was to check dental records. The fact the police had been forced to resort to DNA analysis, probably from comparison with the follicle roots of stray hairs found on brushes and pillows at the victim’s property, meant that the murderer must have taken her teeth. In terms of trophies collected by serial killers, teeth were a classic. But was there more to it than that? Something tied into the ritualistic nature of these murders? My eyes strayed back to the doll and the biblical quotation affixed to its leg.

“Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live,” I said slowly. “If thy hand offends thee, cut it off. An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.”

But these weren’t the only biblical references that might be in play.

Tilda had died instantly. The gore around her was runoff from the terrible wounds inflicted post-mortem. So why was there blood-splatter across one of the tarot card enlargements hanging on the other side of the tent? Even the hammer blow that had felled her was unlikely to have caused a spray that reached the far wall. And so that red arc must have been made deliberately, the killer perhaps flicking the slick hammerhead against the card. Which meant the choice of card—The Fool—was significant because there were almost half a dozen hanging closer by.

The card depicted a leaping court jester in harlequin colours, a wand or sceptre in hand, bells dangling from his cockscomb hat.

“The foolish man built his house upon the sand,” I said, quoting the verse spoken to me not two hours ago by Christopher Cloade.

But the preacher hadn’t been the only one with a fool on his lips tonight. Dr Gillespie had accused Darrel Everwood of playing the fool. Gillespie, who viewed all believers as hapless buffoons.

Except wasn’t there something here that made a stranger like the preacher or the doctor seem unlikely? My attention returned to the stick lying beside the corpse. In life, Tilda had suffered almost crippling arthritis. She very rarely rose from her chair, always calling her customers inside with a croaky rasp. Yet she had been attacked from behind, which meant she must have struggled to the door and then turned to hobble back to her chair. She would only have endured this pain if she had wanted to greet her visitor personally, which ruled out someone like Gillespie or Cloade. Unless, of course, they had met before.

As my mum had once said about her old friend, Tilda Urnshaw was a close woman. Not even her nearest and dearest knew all her secrets. A vital attribute for a mystic.

But going back to the idea that Tilda had known her killer, there was one psychopath who, until a few months ago, had become a familiar face on the fair. A man who had often visited his