Erasing Memory (4 page)

He opened the window by the bed so he could hear the birds calling as he fell asleep. Lying on his side, staring at the sky above the garden, MacNeice looked for patterns in the clouds going by. When he was eight, or maybe twenty, he’d imagined clouds as forms swimming in a superior sea while he, and everyone and everything he knew on earth, existed on the bottom of this ethereal ocean. He wondered how many people had fantasized in the same way about clouds.

As exhausted as he was, his eyes refused to close, and images of the girl back at the beach house seemed safer to him than everything he feared in sleep. Panic hit him—he’d left the camera in the car—and he bolted out of bed, reeling slightly from grappa and fatigue, and ricocheted out the bedroom door and down the hall. Grabbing his keys, he opened the front door to full-on sunshine and realized he was wearing only the
T-shirt he slept in. Ducking like a freshman sneaking out of the girls’ dorm at dawn, he made his way to the passenger-side window—the camera wasn’t there. Then he remembered that he’d dropped it beside his computer, and he rushed back inside, feeling foolish.

He went to the Mac and pushed the flat silver button, and in the promising blue light of the screen, took the firewire from the drawer. He loaded the images from the long night onto the computer, hit print, and then realized there were several still in the camera that he’d taken on a trip earlier in the year to visit Kate’s mother, Jo, in Suffolk, and downloaded them too. He hadn’t looked at them since, but he took the time now. He’d borrowed his mother-in-law’s car to go off to Butley Low Road, where Kate had once taken him to see the colonnade of ancient beech trees that lined the road. The trunks bore scars dating back three hundred years, telling brief tales of love certainly, but also of the sea, of beautiful women and sailing ships, or just initials or the year. These were surface scratches, tattoos that didn’t impede the health of the tree any more than the gouges on the sides of a whale appear to shorten its life. Each trunk, like a fingerprint, was unlike any other. The trees showed where people had passed, recording their passions and failures to be viewed from the safe vantage of years.

MacNeice knew about passing—it was part of the job—and though he had put away most of the evidence of Kate’s passing, he knew on which shelf it lived. He’d made certain it was in a place he had no need to visit from day to day, so he wouldn’t make the mistake of stumbling upon it while looking for something else.

The photo albums, bound by cloth and wire against decay, were gathering dust on top of the bookcase. Tucked into one
was a legal-size creamy vinyl zipped envelope with
FARNHAM FUNERAL HOME
on it in gold letters, which contained all the formal words spoken at her service by friends and family—but not by him. The funeral director had handed it to him, saying, “Mr. MacNeice, you may not want to look at these now perhaps, but with God’s help, I believe someday you will.”
Not fucking likely
was what he’d wanted to say, but instead he’d simply thanked the man. If God or the vinyl envelope was calling, he could not, or would not, hear.

The mechanical wheezing of the printer—four tiny jets of ink painting pictures of a snapshot—stopped. Its miniature wheels kept spinning for a moment, cleaning the heads, and then it was silent.

W
HEN
M
AC
N
EICE AWOKE
, twilight was coming on. Shreds of cirrus clouds edged in burnt orange were racing across the sky. He recalled loading the images from the scene onto the computer but not actually seeing them, and he couldn’t remember falling asleep. Closing his eyes again, however, he could see the one photo he hadn’t taken—a beautiful woman’s hand suspended above the arm of a Seabreeze. He threw off the duvet and swung himself around to sit on the side of the bed.

The clock radio read 9:30 p.m.—Swetsky would already be back on the job. He hated that he’d slept through his entire shift.

By 10:21 MacNeice was in the car on Mountain Road, feeling strange to be dressed for work and heading to the morgue. He turned on the radio and put out a call for Swetsky. Several minutes later the big, brusque detective barked, “MacNeice, are you cruising for my job or what?”

“No, Swets, I just thought I’d come out and see what the nightlife is like. How far have we gotten with this?”

“It was like you said—the place had been swept before we got there. Not a speck of dust on any of the surfaces in the kitchen, bedroom, living room or toilet. A cleaning rag under the sink was still damp. There was a small pool of water in the kitchen sink—the taps aren’t leaky, so something had been poured into it. The nerds found patterns on the floor consistent with a vacuum cleaner, but the vacuum cleaner was missing. It pissed them off that we’d been walking around ‘naked’—that’s a quote.”

“Yes, well, that was a mistake. Tell you the truth, Swets, I didn’t think of that till I was down on the beach.… What else?”

“We’re pulling up the plumbing as I’m talking to you. Also, up the road about sixty yards, in the bush, Williams found a broken Champagne bottle. Several feet away were two shattered long-stem glasses—I think a sophisticated guy like you calls them flutes. They’re with Forensics now. Oh, and apparently there was a drop or two of bubbly left in the bottom of the bottle.”

“Anything more on the girl?”

“Not yet.”

“Betty find out what I asked her?”

“Dunno. Whadya ask her?”

“To dig up photos of the graduating classes or debut performances of young violinists.”

“Nope, haven’t heard anything. But I can tell you something interesting.”

“What’s that?”

“It looks like nobody, and I mean nobody, has ever lived in that cottage. There’s very little shit in that tank.”

“I don’t know what to make of that.”

“Me neither. The cottage is at least a few years old, wouldnya think?”

“Judging by the garden and the weathering of the breezeway and balcony posts, yes, I would think. But remember the garage? Nothing had ever been parked in that space.”

“I thought you didn’t hear me say that, Mac.”

“I always hear you.”

“Yeah, anyways, where are you headed now?”

“I’m going over to see the pathologist.”

“Surprised she’s still there at this time of night.”

“So was I. Said she’d hang in for me though. Is Forensics done yet?”

“They’re still upstairs. No idea what they’re doing. They’re up there with their lights and gizmos and shit while we’re down here opening up an empty crapper. Have you considered it might be suicide?”

“I’m certain it wasn’t.”

“How come?”

“For starters, a suicidal girl doesn’t lie down on her purse. She doesn’t arrange her body artfully over a record player and turn on the machine. And she doesn’t float to the floor without leaving a footprint anywhere. I mean, she can’t sweep the room after she’s dead.”

“Right.”

“Call me if something breaks tonight. And I’ll do the same for you tomorrow.”

“I don’t mind waking you up, you sleepless fucker, but when I get off here, the last thing I wanna hear is this shit. They don’t pay us for 24/7. I’ll hear soon enough.”

“Later, Swets.”

“Later, brother.”

—

W
ALKING ALONG THE
subterranean corridor from one pool of fluorescent light to the next, MacNeice felt slightly claustrophobic. The glossy white concrete walls and grey tiled floor that led to the autopsy room made for as unforgiving a space as any he knew. He tried deep breathing, but the more he thought about breathing the harder it was to breathe, and of course there was that awful resident smell that clung to the clothes and in the nostrils and hair of everyone who spent more than an hour in this place. He paused for a moment before pushing the stainless swinging door, pulling his sleeve down so he didn’t have to touch it with his hand.

The pathologist’s assistant, wearing calf-high rubber boots and an apron like a fishmonger’s, was hosing down the tiled floor. He looked up at MacNeice, nodded slightly and directed the hose away from the entrance. The stainless table was clean, thank God, and the body on the gurney next to it was covered by an opaque white plastic sheet. The pathologist, Mary Richardson, a tall, slim British woman in her late forties, was writing something on her clipboard. After checking her watch and marking down the time, she glanced over at MacNeice.

“Is that the young woman from the beach house?”

“Yes, it is. I’ve had a first look. I’m just making some notes before we put her away for the night.”

“How did she die?”

“A needle in the ear. It broke through the canal into her brain, filling her temporal lobe with acid,” the assistant interrupted. He could never resist the gory details, and the pathologist took on a look of resigned familiarity—like a mother listening to her son being rude at the dinner table.

Wedging his squeegee handle into the valley of plastic sheeting between the girl’s feet, he pointed to his left ear. “The needle was eighteen gauge and at least three and a half to four inches long. Whoever did it had to puncture the tympanic membrane”—he motioned with his index finger, a sharp jab that made MacNeice flinch. “That’s poetic, I think. The killer took out her eardrum first. Then he had a choice: go down the Eustachian tube or up slightly to the cochlear organ. Either way he’d have to punch through bone to enter the skull. He took the Eustachian route.” Again he jabbed at his ear, and this time his head recoiled as if it had taken a shot. “Once inside the temporal lobe, he squeezed the syringe, and the rest … Well, sulphuric acid’s like shoving a hungry rat into a bucket of burger meat—the rat keeps right on eating.”

“Junior, that’s enough.” Richardson looked over at MacNeice, who was paler than when he had arrived, then shot a stern glance at her assistant, who nodded several times, picked up the squeegee and returned to his cleaning.

“Jesus Christ,” MacNeice said. “Sulphuric acid—you mean the same as in a car battery?”

“Exactly. Garden-variety battery acid,” Richardson said. “The likelihood is she didn’t feel a thing; she’d been knocked out with something. Hopefully we’ll find some residue in the Champagne glass or the bottle—they’re with the toxicologist. But there’s something else.…”

“What else could there be?”

“The diameter of the needle would suggest a veterinarian more than a medical doctor, but he or she knew exactly where to insert it. Not one false start, no torn tissue other than along the track of the needle.”

“Who do you think would know how to do that so precisely, other than a doctor?”

“Certainly not a GP, and in truth, I don’t believe a vet. Even very few neurosurgeons would know how to hit this target as precisely—there’s no reason to go into a brain that way other than homicide. Whoever did this has had practice, and I’d start there. Check and see if anyone else has had a brain melted by acid.”

“Why didn’t I see any blood? Wouldn’t it have come back out the ear canal?”

She reached over to a rolling table and picked up a small steel object, examining it over her glasses. “It’s brilliant, in a sick way,” she said. “This is, in effect, an earplug. If it had any other function I cannot imagine what that would be. Once we pulled it out—you wouldn’t have been able to spot it, Mac, the way it was placed—the ooze started, like pulling a finger out of a very nasty hole in a dyke. It was a first for both of us.”

She was looking in the direction of her assistant, who was now leaning on his long-handled squeegee. Both sides of his mouth were curved down, but his eyes were smiling—he enjoyed grossing out cops.

“If you’d opened her eyelids,” the young man volunteered, “the whites of her eyes would have been slightly grey, but by the time we got her, they were black. This is some new territory we’ve entered here.”

The pathologist had lifted the plastic sheet and was looking down with disbelief and maybe even wonder. Fortunately for MacNeice, she’d only lifted it on her side. He had no interest in seeing what had happened to the girl since the cottage.

“But wouldn’t the killer
have
to be a medical guy?”

“Not necessarily,” she replied. “He—and I’m almost certain
it’s a he, as I don’t believe a woman would have the strength in her hand and arm to be so precise with the insertion—could be a watchmaker or a diamond cutter. This was precision work, and when I think about it, it doesn’t strike me as medical. And more to the point, Mac, a doc would have dozens of ways to kill her—a needle up the nose to the brain, for instance. No, this was deliberately, diabolically elegant. The acid took out the temporal lobe, then it ate through the midbrain, and that took out the heart and pretty much everything else. The heart stopped pumping in seconds, but the acid just kept going. If you had arrived an hour or two later, the acid would have been on the outside as well. She would have dissolved before your eyes.” Richardson lowered the sheet.

“Rats in a bucket. We’ve flushed most of the acid out, but it’ll continue to eat away at her,” the assistant said.

MacNeice couldn’t bear to look at him. “Any idea of the kind of syringe?”

“Not yet,” Richardson said, “but I can tell you the acid would have dissolved anything plastic, so it must have been glass or stainless steel. Secondly, the amount of acid injected is more than most syringes would hold, and he couldn’t have changed cylinders easily without wriggling the shaft. The shaft went in, it stayed in and then it came out. One deft move—no hurry and no hesitation whatsoever.”

“Is there any medical application for a syringe like that?”

“No. This was a custom instrument with no other use for human or animal. It’s hard to believe the damage done. Even when she arrived here, she looked like she’d just fallen off to sleep.”

MacNeice said, “That was the plan, I guess. Laying her on the floor, starting the record player, placing her hand just above
the turntable—and he knows we’re all playing our part now. It’s theatre.” He turned towards the door, determined to get away from the smells, the stainless steel, the lighting and the constant dripping of—what? He didn’t want to know. But then he paused and turned back to her. “Why the temporal lobe? I mean, why would he take out the temporal lobe? Why not the heart?”