“That might flush him out,” agreed Copperwaite.
“Or send him packing,” suggested Sharpe.
Jessica looked into his eyes. “Either way, don't you think people should be forewarned? If there's anyone out there who knows anything about this branding for instance, it could lead to a break in the case. As it is, you have no suspects and no direction. Sometimes you need to manufacture a direction.”
NINE
The hungry sheep look up, and are not fed, But swoln with wind and the rank mist they draw, Rot inwardly and foul contagion spread…
While at Groton's Pub, Sharpe's beeper hailed him, and after making a phone call, he returned to the table with a grim look in his eye. “Afraid Stuart, Jessica,… before anything regarding the crucifixion deaths and the fact the victims had all been branded can be released to the press, another body, in the same condition, awaits us at the Serpentine.”
“The Serpentine?” asked Jessica.
“A large lake, rather serpentine in form, if one uses imagination, bordering Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens,” replied Copperwaite, placing a polite hand over his gaping, yawning mouth. “Rather a distance from the other bodies, wouldn't you say, Richard?”
But Sharpe's mind was elsewhere. He hardly heard a word.
“Ahh, of course,” Copperwaite's light came on. “Not bloody far from where your ex and your children live, is it, Richard?” asked Copperwaite, knowing the answer.
“Let's get over there.”
The ride to Hyde Park felt like a funeral procession marked by extraordinary solemnity. Sharpe brooded, looking like one of the ancient gargoyles atop so many London cathedrals. Obviously, the Crucifier had struck too close to home for Sharpe's comfort. Jessica followed Stuart Copperwaite's lead, Copperwaite appearing to respect his elder partner's need for silence.
“Body's been snatched from the water. No telling how much evidence has gone lost before we were notified,” Sharpe finally said, breaking the quiet. “First thing you'll want to examine, Doctor, are the wounds to the extremities and the tongue, of course.”
“I'll have a look, of course,” she replied.
“And if it's the same, we'll know that much.”
“And if it's not?” asked Copperwaite.
“Then we'll have a bloody copycat killer to add to the mix, now won't we?” Sharpe's response came terse and angry.
Silence once again ruled the rest of the trip.
On aniving at Hyde Park, they turned off Baywater Road and cruised through Westbourne Gate onto West Carriage Drive which led them to water's edge at the Serpentine Bridge. Again, the body had been discovered washed up below a large bridge over a sizable body of water. A psychic could make hay with this repeated scenario, Jessica thought, as psychics invariably told authorities to “look for the body to be located near a large body of water, possibly near a bridge.”
It so often became true because it was true to begin with; many a killer wished to wash his hands of the deed, and what better way than in a lake, at a river's edge or some other body of water.
When they came on the body, they found some ten or more men standing about in various poses ranging from awkwardness to confusion. Two of the men, hair and clothing drenched from having dragged the body out of the Serpentine, looked up at them as they approached, Jessica with her black valise in hand. She'd dragged it all about London in what Sharpe called his boot, the trunk of his car, and now she must utilize its contents.
“Stand back, all you chaps,” Richard directed the others. “Dr. Coran here is a forensics expert. She'll have a look at the victim now. Stand aside, please.” Jessica appreciated his choreographing of the moment, taking charge as Otto Boutine, her FBI mentor, would have done were he alive and standing alongside her.
Jessica immediately saw that the nude victim was female. “Another A.N. Other,” she heard someone say. Like the other victims, this one was up in years, perhaps forty-five, perhaps more. Impossible to be absolute at this point, but Jessica saw the specificity of the wounds to feet and hands, the work of large spikes.
Copperwaite, swallowing a gasp, exclaimed, “It's another one crucified, all right. Look at the wounds to the hands and feet.”
Jessica and Sharpe had already seen and deduced the evidence of crucifixion. Like Sharpe, she suspected a copycat, this murder having come so soon on the heels of Burton's death. The only way to be certain lay beneath the victim's tongue.
She located a pair of tweezers from her black valise as a cricket clamored aboard the body and found its way across the woman's dead eyes, which stared blankly out at Jessica. She'd seen that same serenity about the features in both Coibby and Burton's faces. It was as if these deaths meant to defy her, as if their spirit remnants shunned her with a wry grin.
Jessica shooed off the cricket even as she pushed her disconcerting thoughts away, concentrating on struggling into her Latex gloves. Next she began fishing for the dead woman's tongue using the sort of prong-ended tweezers surgeons preferred. She yanked and pulled at the dead tongue, and brought it as far out as it would come, which in death was two to three times further than in life.
All about her, men looked on, all but two wondering what in God's name her interest in the dead woman's tongue could possibly be, except the eccentric fetish of yet another eccentric M.E.? Jessica felt their combined stares as a mix of both the curious and disgusted all at once.
“Give me a little light over here, will you?” she asked her Scotland Yard colleagues.
Copperwaite grabbed for his penlight and shone the beam down over Jessica's shoulder and onto the tongue held by the tweezers.
“Has she got it?” asked Copperwaite.
“Shhh!” cautioned Sharpe. “You'll tip off the lads.” He indicated the others, but it was too late. One asked, “Got it? Has she some sort of disease we should be knowing about, Inspector?”
“No, no!” assured Sharpe. “Nothing of that nature, I can assure you.”
“What then's with the tongue?”
“Dr. Coran examines every inch of the body,” he half-lied, leaving out the rest.
Sharpe leaned in now, and saw what Jessica and Copperwaite stared at. A branded tongue with the exact same words, Mihi beata mater, staring back at them.
“Poor woman,” moaned Jessica. “Such an awful way to die.”
“Amazes me how these fiends think of such grotesque methods of torture and debauchery,” Copperwaite bemoaned.
Sharpe asked the men standing about, “How was she found?”
“Facedown in the water, floating like a log.”
“She bloody looks at peace,” commented Copperwaite.
Jessica silently agreed with Stuart's assessment. The woman appeared restful, peaceful beside the lovely Lake Serpentine, and Sharpe appeared the agitated one. He began pacing in catlike circles before venturing off, down an incline toward the water and out of earshot.
“Sharpe's ex-wife, Clarisa, and his two young daughters, Milicent and Kimberly, live within sight of here, one of those lights up there.” Copperwaite pointed to the nearby buildings and windows that circled about Hyde Park and the gardens. Copperwaite volunteered more, seeing that Jessica remained interested. “Imagine, this killer has been walking the same paths, visiting the pond where his little girls play and wade. It's really almost too much for anyone, even a stalwart chap like Colonel Sharpe there.”
Jessica imagined the few short blocks that Sharpe could walk from here to see his two children. Those few blocks must seem a mere stone's throw from this bloody path taken by the Crucifier.
When Jessica had first met Sharpe, she could not have imagined him ever being anything but rocklike, unswerving, unshakable. Here he had definitely been shaken and shaken badly, given the proximity of the crime to the flat where his children lived and played. Sharpe's veneer had dropped and fear had replaced the inscrutable eyes, a fear of loss, a fear for the harm a maniac like the Crucifier could do to his children.