Warriors

CHAPTER 36

When Hawke, Halter, and Congreve had arrived at Cambridge four days earlier, after their meeting at Hawkesmoor, they crossed the narrow bridge spanning the river Cam and parked in Halter’s reserved space at Magdalene College. Space for automobiles was severely limited in narrow lanes of the old market town and only the highest of the high rated such a perk as Halter had. Ambrose was suitably impressed and said so.

Congreve and Hawke bade good-bye to the good professor and made their way across a snowy Jesus Green, and so to the labyrinthine maze of gardens, dead ends, and circuitous alleyways leading to the nineteenth-century building that housed the Cambridge morgue. Congreve, who had had reason to visit on numerous occasions, led the way.

The mortuary was to be found in the basement of an old military hospital built in 1879. It had been erected as part of the initiative of Florence Nightingale after the Crimean War to improve medical facilities for the army, Ambrose informed Hawke as they made their way.

“Really?” Hawke said. “Fascinating.”

“Listen and learn,” Congreve replied, not willing to rise to the flick of sarcasm he knew so well. “Look, there it is. Quite fabulous, isn’t it?”

Hawke lifted his eyes from the gravel path and saw a somber black van drawn up in the building’s courtyard. The place was massive and foreboding, dominated by a large clock tower. He didn’t care much for hospitals, and morgues even less. But he was intensely curious about the corpse waiting for them in the basement. One is naturally beset with morbid feelings upon visiting such places, but Congreve seemed to relish the whole idea.

“Impressive,” Hawke said as they entered the dingy grey foyer, and meant it.

The hospital had been built on a grand, traditionally solid Victorian scale, with malevolent green corridors that seemed to go on for a quarter of a mile if not longer. Hawke began to think they would never arrive at their destination. Finally, they entered a creaky musty old lift and began their descent. Hawke felt ever more uneasy in the grim confines.

Hawke, seeing the detective who’d agreed to meet them emerge from a swinging door, strode forward to meet him.

“I’m Detective Inspector Cummings, how do you do, sir?” the fellow said, extending his hand first to Hawke and then to the world-famous criminalist Ambrose Congreve.

“Thank you for taking the time,” Hawke said, shaking the man’s hand. “You’ve met Chief Inspector Congreve, I believe?”

“Indeed. We worked a difficult chase together some years ago. Nice to see you again, Chief Inspector.”

“And you as well, Archie. I understand we’re in for a treat this evening.”

“Not sure I’d call it that. One of the worst I’ve seen, actually. Right this way, gentlemen.”

They followed him down an oppressive green-tiled corridor made hideous by fluorescent lighting and entered the morgue proper. It was precisely as dismal as Hawke had imagined a mortuary of the Victorian era might appear, but an unexpected feeling swept over him just before the detective inspector pulled out the stainless steel drawer and revealed the victim.

Sadness, prompted by the presence of ghosts of all the young lads from Verdun, the Argonne, the Battle of Britain, Dunkirk, and countless dead and youthful souls who had resided for a time in this building. Only the monstrous sight of the mutilated corpse stretched out before him interrupted his fleeting reverie.

“Not a pretty sight, I’m afraid,” Cummings said.

“What the hell?” Hawke said, stifling his revulsion at the sight. “I’ve never seen anything like this.”

Congreve moved around the slab, bending down and peering carefully at various areas of the body before quickly moving on. He had brought a small digital camera and was photographing the corpse from head to toe. There were toes, Hawke noticed, just no fingers and no face. Ambrose took a sequence of shots of what little was left of the visage from every conceivable angle.

“What’s your take, Ambrose?”

“Well. My first thought is lingchi, obviously, known as the ‘death of a thousand cuts’ used in China from roughly A.D. 900 until its abolition around 1905. The term derives from a classical description of ascending a mountain slowly. The executioner grasps handfuls of the fleshy parts of the body such as the thighs and breasts, slicing them away… the limbs are cut off piecemeal at the wrists and the ankles, the elbows and the knees, shoulders and hips. And then…” He paused.

“And then what?” Hawke said.

“After hours of unspeakable agony, the condemned is stabbed to the heart and his head is cut off.”

“And?”

“This is obviously not lingchi, is it? No penetration, no decapitation. And the cuts are utterly uniform in their diamond-shaped pattern, as opposed to random slicing.”

“Well, what then, Chief Inspector?” Cummings said. “It’s got us baffled, frankly.”

“I think this poor fellow suffered a far worse fate than lingchi. Far more insidious and long-lasting. I think he was suspended inside a collapsible mesh cage made of razor-sharp steel wire. The sheer weight of his body would cause the cage to slowly contract, slicing his flesh in the precise geometry of these diamondlike incisions. What was left of the soft facial tissue was removed postmortem. As were the fingertips.”

“Do you recognize the methodology?” Hawke asked him.

“Yes. The Shining Basket, as it’s called. The historian George Ryley Scott claims that many unfortunates were executed precisely this way by the Chinese Communist insurgents. He cites various claims made by the Nanking government in 1927 in his 1940 volume History of Torture. Also, Sir Henry Norman, a writer and photographer whose collection is now owned by the University of Cambridge, gives an eyewitness account of just such an atrocity as this one. A rather lengthy volume published in 1895 entitled The People and Politics of the Far East.”

Hawke was suddenly aware of the stifling heat and the stench of chemicals, decay, and death. He needed air and he needed it badly.

“Thank you so much for your time, Detective Inspector Cummings. I think we’re done for the day here. If you think of anything not in your crime scene report, you can reach me on my mobile at this number.” Hawke handed him his card and made for the exit, because he desperately needed to get out of this house of horrors.

Congreve lingered near the corpse, studying his photographs on the camera’s tiny screen, discussing them with his former colleague. He likes it here, Hawke thought. He’s comfortable.

He’s home.