Warriors

CHAPTER 26

Pip Trimble trudged along snowbound Sidney Street, his large pointed ears glowing red with the cold. The old fellow was shivering badly, even though the sun was well up now, doing business at its old stand. Pip was astounded. He’d never seen a snowfall like this one, this late in the spring.

Pip was bound for the Porters’ Lodge at Sidney Sussex College. This was no mean feat on a snowy morning like this. The elderly gardener was trying to shield his face from the wind-driven sleet, not-so-artfully dodging the sheets of ice periodically sliding from the rooftops above, sharp ice particles glimmering in the air as they came crashing down.

Sidney, as his beloved college was commonly known, was the place he’d called home for all but ten of his seventy-five years. His kingdom was the college gardens, large and small, public and private… and some, even secret. Pip had spent the majority of his allotted hours on this earth inside walled gardens, with all the pleasures and limitations that implies.

Last night’s heavy snowfall had brought the ancient market town to a standstill. In the narrow streets, the white stuff was knee-deep, crusty on top, and bloody hard sledding for a man his age. Pip stuffed the oily paper bag containing bacon sandwiches and crisps inside his mac and slogged forward.

Taking daily breakfast to the boss, the college’s head porter, was perhaps a small tradition in a town so chockablock with them as Cambridge, but render unto Caesar, as they say. Old Bill Woolsey was a hard man but a fair one, and Pip had long ago come to consider Bill a friend rather than a superior.

“Morning, Pip,” the fellow said cheerfully to him as he pushed through the heavy wooden door and into the warmth. Dark warrens of old rooms, the traditional Porters’ Lodge at Cambridge is usually a beehive of noisy students milling about, crowding around freshly posted test scores, plucking their mail from the slots, or parking their bicycles at the door. Not this morning however.

Just Bill, alone, squatting before the crackling fire, throwing on another log.

Woolsey was burly, gruff, and ex-army like most of the head porters here at the university. He’d held sway over the Sidney lodge for nigh on thirty years now. The head porter at any college was a man traditionally held in high esteem, treated with great respect and even deference.

Pip placed the sodden bag on the deeply scarred wooden countertop and Woolsey, face alight, stood plucking out his breakfast, devouring it in two or three voracious bites.

“Morning yourself,” Pip said, chewing his own sandwich thoughtfully, his old bones grateful for the warmth of the fire. Bill eyed him sidewise, going over the day’s schedule of events, a list that included the Olympic torch relay along Sidney Street, pausing at Magdalene Bridge before lighting out for St. Ives, Huntingdon, and the Cambridgeshire countryside beyond.

“You remember when they shot that film here, Pip? Chariots of Fire? Well, they’re running another torch relay today. Street will be mobbed, all right.”

“Remember it? I was in it, by Jove! Sitting up on top of the garden wall, waving at the lads running by. My moment of bloody stardom, wasn’t it?”

Bill put the schedule down and stared at the old boy.

“Hell you doing out and about on such a bitter day, you old fool? Y’er a gardener, for God’s sake. Planning to pluck a few daisies and mow some grass, are you now, Pipper?”

“My favorite tree come down in the night, it did, sir. In the Master’s private garden. That lovely old cherry, she just couldn’t bear up under all that heavy wet snow, Bill. Saw the whole thing from me own window at dawn this morning. Broke me heart, it did. Unsightly, too.”

“Should have stayed in bed, Pip. Master’s eyes ain’t what they used to be, are they? Rheumy. I doubt he can even see that far from up in his rooms anymore. Besides, he ain’t set foot in that garden since the last century.”

“Well, I can see just fine and it’s my garden and it’s a bloody eyesore, that’s what it is, thank you very much, indeed.”

Pip secured an axe, a spade, and a hacksaw from his shed. Then he made his way through the labyrinth of twisting high-walled pathways until he reached his destination. The Master’s Garden. A weathered gothic arch set deep in an ancient dun-colored wall was mostly hidden behind thick black ivy. The door, too, was black with age. Removing a large brass key ring from his side pocket, he fumbled with ice-numb fingers for the proper key. His hands were shaking badly and he had a hard time getting the heavy bronze key into the lock.

He twisted the key and felt the tumblers tumble.

It was a very small garden, this one, perhaps thirty by forty feet. In summer it was a lovely green sanctuary and Pip frequently took his lunch there, enjoying the fruits of his labor, his back against the old cherry that stood no longer. He leaned his spade against the wall and slogged to the far corner where the tree had come down. He was just ten feet from his cherry when he stopped dead in his tracks. He had spied something protruding from the crusted top of the snow.

It was dead white and he’d almost missed it but for the first stroke of light to find the garden just then. He knelt down, wincing at the pain in his stiff joints, and peered at the thing sticking up about two inches above the snow. A fishy white thing, crisscrossed with faint pinkish depressions. What on earth? Thinking he’d pluck it from the snow for closer examination, he pinched it twixt two fingers and pulled, lightly at first, then with more effort.

It was frozen stiff and wouldn’t budge.

He bent forward and peered at the thing more closely, his curiosity growing by the second. When he realized what he was looking at, he gagged on the gorge rising in his throat and toppled over backward. Some long moments later, he blinked his watery eyes and realized he was staring up at the clear blue sky. Must have fainted dead away, he thought, turning his head so he could see the horrid, mutilated thing again.

It was a human thumb.

“Good god, man,” Woolsey said five minutes later.

He was prone on his stomach in the snow beside a kneeling Pip, breathing heavily, having come all the way from the lodge on the run when he got Pip’s call.

“It’s a bloody thumb!” said Bill.

“Right. A thumb. Like I said.”

“Show me the mortal man who could believe it, Pip? A thumb? In the Master’s Garden? Had to see it with my own eyes before I ring the Cambridge police, didn’t I?”

“Call ’em, now,” Pip said, unable to take his eyes off the offending frozen digit. He wanted it removed from his garden. Now.

Woolsey grunted, rolled over on his side, and pulled his mobile from his trouser pocket. “Cambridge,” was all the officer at the other end had to say.

After giving this underling a lengthy explanation of the extraordinary circumstances, Bill was finally put through to a Detective Inspector Cummings and was saying, “You heard me right, sir. A human thumb. Sticking out of the snow in the Master’s Garden here at Sidney. Frozen stiff and it’s not going anywhere, but I’d get your team over here on the double. Medical examiner, whoever. There is some… uh… mutilation involved.”

He rang off and looked at Pip. “On their way. Sounded excited to have reports on something besides some rowdy frosh pissed out of their gourds, actually. A human thumb, he says to me, you’re joking.”

“Think there’s a body attached to it?”

“You pulled on it, right? What happened?

“Stuck fast. To… whatever.”

“When was the last time you were here? In this garden, I mean.”

“Yesterday morning, raking. Nothing out of the ordinary.”

“So sometime between then and the snowfall last night. They’ll ask us that.”

“Right. Best keep our stories straight.”

“What?”

“Everyone’s a suspect, Bill.”

“You’re bloody joking, right?”

“Got you.” Pip laughed. He seldom got the drop on the boss.

“Bugger off, Trimble. They’ll find an empty bottle of Russian tap water with that body, I’ll wager.”

Pip hadn’t thought of that. A drunk? A man who had stumbled upon the garden by accident? No. But it was a good thought. Bill had been a military policeman in the British army. How his mind worked still, was Pip’s experience, a good bit of the copper still in him after all these years.

Detective Inspector Cummings had interviewed the two men separately in the small back room at the lodge. All business, polite but efficient he was, with a pair of unblinking, wide-set brown eyes behind steel-rimmed glasses, ramrod straight, proper copper posture. Pip and Woolsey told him everything they knew, which didn’t take long at all.

Now, back at scene of the crime, if that’s what it was, Pip and Woolsey were standing around stamping their frozen boots, watching the pathologist and his team lay out a grid of string surrounding the offending thumb. A police photographer had taken countless photos from every angle.

“Just like CSI,” Woolsey had muttered to him. Pip had no idea what CSI was, had never owned a telly, but he’d nodded affirmation. He found the whole police process fascinating. They were delicately inserting probes into the snow, fishing around for a corpse, he supposed.

Half an hour later they started digging in earnest.

Pip strained this way and that, trying to see. He couldn’t make out very much, as there were so many official people standing around the site. His bones ached with cold and he was longing for the warmth of the Porters’ Lodge but he stood fast. He wanted to see who had violated his garden for himself. Woolsey finally excused himself and lumbered off, claiming a full bladder but wanting the warmth of a shot of whiskey most likely.

Somewhere beyond the walls a cheer erupted for the lone runner with the torch.

Pip waited for an eternity.

“Christ Jesus.”

It was Cummings who’d said it.

The circle of men leaned forward and peered down at whatever it was beneath their feet. Three or four of them turned away and were sick in the snow.

“Mr. Trimble?” Cummings said, turning to catch his eye. “You’d better come take a look at this.”

There was a body, all right, and the sight of the dead man made Pip want to puke, too.

He was naked, faceup, and his entire torso, arms, legs, hands, and feet were crisscrossed with thin pink lines, tiny indentations in the flesh that made the dead man look like a large frozen ham bound up in a string mesh wrapper. Every square inch of skin was raised in fat goose bumps. His face was the worst, a mask of bone and black blood. His nose, lips, and eyelids were gone, as well as his ears. Like they’d been sliced off by whatever had made all the thin marks on the thin, albino white body, cutting into the skin — Pip felt his legs give way and collapsed down to his knees, his eyes never leaving the corpse.

All ten fingertips had been removed. Clean cuts, as if they been sliced off with a heavy pair of garden shears. Had he been alive for that?

Through the shroud of shock, Pip gradually became aware that someone was speaking in a dull monotone.

“Male. Asian. Bald. Age approximately seventy-five to eighty. Frozen before decomposition could occur. Cause and time of death unknown. Some lividity around the buttocks and shoulders. No gunshot wounds. Soft facial tissue missing due to mutilation—”

Pip sat back on his heels.

How could one human being wreak such horrors upon another?

He slowly got to his feet and walked back to his position beside the downed tree, shaking his head and muttering quietly to himself.

“This garden will never be mine again. No, no, it will be a bloody tourist attraction now, that’s what it will be, all right. The garden that sprouted a thumb, or some such nonsense. World famous. Like Downton Abbey.”