The Devil's Feather

EPILOGUE

THERE’S LITTLE ELSE to tell. A few days after Dan returned to Iraq, part of an arm washed up on rocks about fifteen miles down the coast. It was spotted by a group of fishermen on their way home from catching mackerel. Enough of a fingerprint was retrieved to link the remains to MacKenzie, and a DNA test, using saliva from a glass in my parents’ flat, confirmed the indentification.

There was some debate about how the arm had become detached from the rest of the body, and why it had survived relatively intact after a long immersion in water. It appeared to have been wrenched apart at the elbow but there were no obvious marks on the skin to show how that could have happened, although it was noted that three of the fingerbones were broken. There was talk of shark attacks but they weren’t taken seriously. The benign coastal waters of the west country were occasionally home to plankton-eating basking sharks, but not to man-eaters.

Police divers explored the sea bed for several hundred metres around the rocks, also a couple of areas to the west where experts on tidal-drift suggested MacKenzie might have gone in, but nothing else was found. Jess, Peter and I were asked to attend a rather bizarre inquest, where the arm was pronounced dead from misadventure-along with a presumption that the remainder of the body had died similarly-and both Alan and Bagley closed their files.

There were several column inches in the press, detailing what was known of MacKenzie, but the full story was never revealed. Bagley was satisfied with a verdict of misadventure-any man who was watching his back for a police pursuit could easily lose his footing on the cliffs in the dark-but Alan wouldn’t commit himself. As he said, there was nothing to be learnt from a forearm except the name of the owner and the fact that he was probably dead.

“Isn’t that what you wanted?” I asked. “Confirmation.” He, too, had attended the inquest, and I’d abandoned Jess and Peter to take him to a tea shop near the Coroner’s Court in Blandford Forum.

Alan nodded. “But I’ll always be curious, Connie. It may be coincidence that he died of drowning after fending off a dog and machete attack…but there’s an interesting symmetry to it.” He stirred his tea. “Even his arm was detached in the same place that the prostitute’s was broken in Freetown.”

“It wasn’t a machete,” I corrected amiably. “It was an axe.”

“Near enough.”

We were sitting opposite each other and I examined his face to see how serious he was. “I don’t believe in an eye for an eye, Alan. It’s a crazy form of justice. In any case, if I’d wanted the perfect revenge, I’d have kept MacKenzie in a crate for three days.”

His eyes creased attractively. “It crossed my mind.”

I laughed. “Bagley would have found him. There wasn’t an inch of Barton House that wasn’t searched at least twice.”

“Mmm.”

“You don’t really think I’d do something like that, do you?”

“Why not? He was a killer. A sadist. He liked hurting people. He boasted about what he’d done to your father…humiliated your friend and killed her dog. You’re good at hiding your feelings, Connie. You have a brain…and you have courage. Why wouldn’t you kill him if you had the chance?”

“It would make me no better than MacKenzie.”

Alan took a sip from his teacup and eyed me over the rim. “Do you know Friedrich Nietzsche’s quote about being corrupted by evil? I have it pinned to a board above my desk. Simplified, it says: ‘When you fight with monsters take care not to become one yourself.’ It’s a warning to all policemen.”

I nodded. “It goes on: ‘If you stare too long into the abyss, the abyss stares back at you.’ How would you simplify that?”

“You tell me.”

“When you’re teetering on the brink, step back.”

“And did you?”

“Of course,” I said, offering him a biscuit. “But MacKenzie didn’t. He fell in.”