Death Trance (12 page)

'Would you care for a little luncheon, sir? You really ought to eat something.’

'Yes, I'll have something light,’ Randolph answered. Suzie's telephone call had made him feel optimistic again, raised his spirits in the same way that Dr Ambara's explanation of death and reincarnation had. There was a rational part of Randolph's mind that told him that Dr Ambara's beliefs about souls and spirits might be utter nonsense and that even if they were not, they might not apply to Western people. Did the Hindu gods answer Christian prayers? Dr Ambara could well be nothing more than a religious eccentric, a mischievous charlatan or an out-and-out fanatic. But Randolph's wife and children had been snatched away from him so abruptly and so violently that he was prepared to accept any means of getting in touch with them, if only to bid them good-bye.

Dr Ambara had assured him that spirits pass out of the body and into heaven, in preparation for being born again. Dr Ambara had said that it was possible to contact these spirits, even possible to see them and talk to them; and because Randolph could not bring himself to believe that Marmie and the children had been totally eliminated, he had to believe - wanted to believe - in Dr Ambara.

He ate his lunch on the patio outside the library where a warm May breeze played with the fringes of the awnings. A little smoked chicken cut into thin, appetizing slices, a little green salad, a glass of dry white wine.

Charles came out to pour him some more wine and said, 'Whatever you want, Mr Clare, all you have to do is ask.’

Randolph smiled and said, 'Thank you, Charles, that's appreciated.’

Had Charles been less reserved, Randolph would have taken his hand. But Charles believed in formality and the proper observance of social distances, and Randolph knew he would have only succeeded in embarrassing him.

At two o'clock that afternoon, two officers from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police arrived at Clare Castle in a rented Ford Granada. Charles showed them through to the garden and they came out onto the patio shading their eyes against the sun, awkwardly holding their hats and their briefcases. Charles said to Randolph, 'Police officers, Mr Clare, from Quebec.’

The older of the two policemen came forward and held out his hand. 'Inspector Dulac, sir. We were told by the Mount Moriah Clinic that you were here. The clinical director explained that you had decided to discharge yourself. This is my colleague. Sergeant Allinson.’

'Please sit down,’ Randolph said, aware that he sounded vague.

The two policemen sat uncomfortably in the striped canvas chairs Randolph offered them. Inspector Dulac was well into his fifties, with silver hair that was short and severely cut and a heavy, square face, very French. Sergeant Allinson had a narrow head, wavy brown hair and a large Roman nose beaded with perspiration. Both men wore grey suits, long-sleeved shirts, and neckties. Neither had come dressed for a humid Mississippi summer.

'You will forgive us for calling on you without a proper appointment,’ said Inspector Dulac with a strong Quebecois accent. 'We had expected you to be lying in your hospital bed, you see, a captive audience.’

Sergeant Allinson nodded in agreement, lifted his brown leather briefcase to his knees and began to poke around inside it.

'First of all, it is my duty to offer you the condolences of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police,’ Inspector Dulac said. 'What happened to your wife and children was terrible and tragic, and I want to reassure you that we are making extraordinary efforts to capture the perpetrators. You will understand, I hope, the painful necessity for this visit. We need all the information we can possibly procure.’

'I understand,’ Randolph said hoarsely. Then, noticing Charles standing on the other side of the patio, he asked, 'Would you care for a drink? Fruit punch maybe, or lemonade? It's pretty damned hot.’

'I think a lemonade would be welcome,’ said Inspector Dulac. Sergeant Allinson nodded. 'Yes, a lemonade.’

Inspector Dulac held out his left hand and Sergeant Allinson passed him a thick sheaf of papers. 'From experience,’ he said, 'I am anticipating that you will wish to know in considerable detail how your family died. If you do not, please tell me, but usually the process of healing the mind cannot begin until the event is fully understood.’

'Yes,’ Randolph said. He picked up his sunglasses from the wicker table beside him and put them on.

Inspector Dulac said, 'What I will tell you about it will be most painful to you because the crime was very brutal and apparently without motive. It is always easier to accept brutality when one knows why it was used; if it was out of rage, perhaps, or for robbery, or for lust, or for revenge. But so far it appears that this was a multiple homicide that was perpetrated for no coherent reason whatever. I will upset you, I have no doubt of that. But you seem to me to be the kind of man who has to know everything before he can come to terms with his distress. It is always the unanswered questions that cause the most pain.’

He picked up the top sheet of paper and began to recite to Randolph the plain facts of the tragedy as if he were reading his evidence in court. Randolph listened, and as he did, he grew colder and colder; it was as if the sun had died out, the wind had swung around to the northeast and the world had rolled over on its axis.

'On the morning of May tenth, nineteen eighty-four, at approximately six twenty-five, Mr Leonard Dolan was fishing in his boat off the southeast shore of Lac aux Ecorces when his outboard motor failed. He decided to row to shore and seek assistance at the lodging known as Clare Cabin. On reaching the structure, he discovered that the front door had been smashed off its hinges; upon approaching more closely, he found that the living room was in violent disarray and that the walls and the rugs were heavily bloodstained. Entering the living room, he saw the dead bodies of the Clare family: John Clare, fifteen years old, who had been shot in the abdomen at close range with a twelve-gauge shotgun; Mark Clare, eleven years old, who had been decapitated by a woodsman's axe; Mrs Marmie Clare, forty-three, and her daughter Melissa Clare, thirteen, who were bound together with cords and hanging by their necks from the ceiling beams with nooses fashioned of barbed wire. Mr Dolan found that the cabin's radio telephone had been deliberately put out of action, and so he rowed with some difficulty back to his fishing camp and called the police. Upon examination of the scene of the incident, it appeared that whoever had committed the homicides had forcefully gained access to the cabin with the same woodsman's axe later employed in the killing of Mark Clare. The perpetrators had killed the boys first; the coroner later established that their deaths had occurred between nine and ten o'clock on the evening of May ninth. The two females, however, had been taken to the main bedroom, where they had been bound together in the manner in which they were eventually discovered by Mr Dolan, and sexually assaulted. Both of them were raped repeatedly, and later examination of the semen ejaculated by their attackers established that there were four different men involved in the rape. The females had been hung and strangulated early the following morning, probably less than an hour before Mr Dolan approached the cabin. A twenty-two rifle was found in the living room with a jammed magazine, indicating that the members of the Clare family had attempted to protect themselves against assault. Fingerprints and shoe prints, as well as hair, skin, fiber and semen samples, are being forensically examined at the headquarters of the RCMP in Ottawa, and preliminary results have already been forwarded to the FBI in Washington.’

Inspector Dulac lowered the hand that had been shielding his eyes from the sun. He watched Randolph carefully, as if Randolph might be a young son of his who had just learned to ride a bicycle.

'Do you want any more?’ he asked. 'That's just the resume.’

'I think, for the time being, that's sufficient,’ Randolph told him, with intense self-control.

'Do you wish to ask any questions?’

Randolph swallowed and thought for a moment. Then he asked, 'Did nobody see them? The men who did it?’

'There were no witnesses. The footprints suggest that the men landed by boat or dinghy just out of sight of the cabin, around the headland, and then made their way up to the cabin by walking through the woods.’

Sergeant Allinson put in, 'This of course suggests that the attack was not spontaneous. The men knew where the cabin was and they approached it with the deliberate intention of breaking in. They were not just passing fishermen who took it into their heads to butcher your family.’

Inspector Dulac straightened his papers and said to Randolph, 'You might care to make out a list of all those people you can think of who might dislike you sufficiently to have contemplated such an act.’

'Nobody dislikes me like that,’ Randolph said in a hollow voice. 'Not like that.’

Inspector Dulac said, 'I have the official police photographs. If you wish to see them, you may. I must warn you that they are very distressing. But they will be produced in court when these men are eventually brought to justice and it is probably better that you see them now rather than later, if you are going to see them at all.’

Randolph said, 'Very well.’

Sergeant Allinson passed him a brown cardboard-backed envelope marked with the crest of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. Randolph waited for a moment or two, then took off his sunglasses and tugged out a dozen eight-by-ten colour prints. For some reason he had been expecting the photographs to be in black and white. Maybe it was all those old gangster movies he had watched when he was a kid, blood spattered blackly on light grey suits, flashbulbs flaring white. It seemed to him as if only fairgrounds and pretty girls and favourite pets should be photographed in colour. Dead bodies should be monochromatic, like nightmares.

He could hardly recognize John. The whole of John's stomach looked as if it had been ground up like dark red hamburger meat, and his face was puffy and swollen. Mark looked more normal and natural until Randolph realized that what he had taken for Mark's chest and shoulders were two discarded cushions and that what he was actually looking at was Mark's severed head. It was so shocking that it was almost ridiculous.
How could that be my son? How could either of these corpses be my sons?
But when he reached the photographs of Marmie and Issa, he began to weep because suddenly the picture was complete; suddenly the full extent of Mr Dolan's terrible discovery became clear to him; suddenly he could imagine what it must have been like. Bruised, naked bodies. Chins jerked upward by tangled barbed wire. Blood, tousled hair and eyes like the eyes of unfeathered birds that have fallen from their nest.

'Are you all right, Mr Clare?’ Inspector Dulac asked, leaning forward and taking the photographs.

Randolph swallowed, wiped his eyes and said, ‘I’ll get over it in time. I just couldn't imagine how terrible it was, that's all. I'm glad you showed me.’

'It is not my invariable policy,’ Inspector Dulac said, 'but I believed that you could cope with it, and I think it is important for you to understand.’

'What can I tell you?’ Randolph asked.

'Is there anything you
wish
to tell me?’

Randolph said, ‘They're dead, aren't they, all of them?’

Inspector Dulac knew that this question was not absurd.

It sometimes took the relatives of murder victims months, even years, to come to terms with the idea that their loved ones were actually dead and not simply missing, or hiding.

He said, 'Yes, Mr Clare, they're dead.’

'Do you believe in reincarnation, Inspector?’

'Reincarnation? No, sir, I regret that I don't. I have to be truthful with you. Perhaps we would feel better about our grief if indeed we did believe in reincarnation, if we had some indisputable proof that death is not really the end. But, unfortunately, nobody can say that it is true.’

Randolph sat in silence, his head bowed, for almost a minute. Inspector Dulac did not attempt to intrude on his thoughts. Eventually, however, Randolph raised his head and said, 'Will you catch them, do you think, the men who did it?’

'I believe so, given time,’ said Inspector Dulac.

'And how will they be punished?’

'Not in the way you would like to see them punished, perhaps. There is no death penalty in Quebec. But according to the law, yes, they will be punished very severely.’

Randolph stood up and looked out over the garden, his arms clutched around himself as if he were cold. 'Marmie would have loved a day like this,’ he said as though talking to himself. 'May, the Cotton Carnival, the Beale Street Music Festival, the barbecue contest. She loved it all. And especially the garden.’

He turned around to face Inspector Dulac and said bluntly, 'You didn't come around here because you thought
I
had anything to do with killing her, did you?’

Inspector Dulac smiled and shook his head. 'No, Mr. Clare, I didn't. The husband is often a prime suspect, of course, in cases of domestic homicide. But this is only because crime statistics tell us that seventy-five per cent of homicides are committed by people who are known to the victim and that of this seventy-five per cent, nearly eighty per cent are committed by spouses or lovers or close relatives. I am obliged to interview you, not because I believe for one single second that it was you who killed your family, but because statistics say that you are more likely than anybody else to have killed them.’