Whispers of the Dead

EPILOGUE

IT WAS RAINING in London. After the vivid sunshine and lush mountains of Tennessee, England seemed grey and dull. The tube was busy with the tail end of the evening rush hour, the usual day-worn commuters crammed into each other’s personal space. I flicked through the newspaper I’d bought at the airport, feeling the usual sense of dislocation as I read about events that had happened while I’d been away. Coming home after a long trip is always like finding yourself transplanted a few weeks in the future, a mundane form of time-travel.

The world had gone on without me.

The taxi driver was a polite Sikh who was content to drive in silence. I stared out at the early evening streets, feeling grubby and jet-lagged after the long flight. My own street looked somehow different when we turned on to it. It took me a moment to realize why. The branches of the lime trees had been barely shading green when I’d left; now they were shaggy with new leaves.

The rain had slowed to a drizzle, varnishing the pavement with a dark gloss as I climbed out and paid the driver. I picked up my flight bag and case and carried them to the front door, flexing my hand slightly when I set them down. I’d taken the dressing off several days before, but my palm was still a little tender.

The sound of the key turning in the lock echoed in the small hallway. I’d put a stop on my post before I’d gone away, but there was still a forlorn pile of fliers and leaflets on the black and white floor tiles. I pushed them aside with my foot as I carried the cases inside and shut the door behind me.

The flat looked exactly the same as when I’d left it, except dulled by several weeks’ accumulation of dust. I paused in the doorway for a moment, feeling the familiar pang of its emptiness. But not so sharply as I’d expected.

I dumped the case on the floor and set my flight bag on the table, cursing as a heavy clunk reminded me what was inside. I unzipped the bag, expecting to be greeted by the reek of spilt alcohol, but nothing was broken. I set the odd-shaped bottle on the table, the tiny horse and jockey perched on the cork still frozen in mid-gallop. I was tempted to open it now, but it was still early. Something to look forward to later.

I went into the kitchen. There was a slight chill in the flat, reminding me that, spring or not, I was back in England. I switched the central heating back on, then as an afterthought filled the kettle.

It had been weeks since I’d had a cup of tea.

The message icon on my phone was flashing. There were over two dozen messages. I automatically reached out to play them, then changed my mind. Anyone who needed to contact me urgently would have called my mobile.

Besides, none of them would be from Jenny.

I made myself a mug of tea and took it to the dining table. There was an empty fruit bowl in its centre, a slip of paper lying in it. I picked it up and saw it was a note I’d made before I’d left: Confirm arrival time w. Tom.

I balled it up and dropped it back in the bowl.

Already, I could feel my old life starting to reclaim me.

Tennessee seemed like an age ago, the memory of the sunlit garden of dragonflies and corpses, and the nightmare scenes in the sanitarium, starting to assume the unreal quality of a dream. But it had been real enough.

Forty-one bodies had been recovered at Cedar Heights; twenty-seven from the grounds, the rest from the spa and treatment rooms. Kyle hadn’t discriminated. His victims were a random mix of age, sex and ethnicity. Some of them had been dead for almost ten years, and the task of identifying them was still going on. The wallets and credit cards he’d saved speeded the process to an extent, but it soon became apparent that there were more bodies than there were IDs. Many of his victims had been vagrants and prostitutes whose disappearances weren’t always noticed, let alone reported.

If Kyle hadn’t felt the need to prove himself, he could have carried on indefinitely.

But not all the victims were anonymous. Irving’s body had been recovered from the same chamber as Summer’s, and amongst the others who had been identified three names stood out. One was Dwight Chambers. His wallet and driver’s licence were in the pile in the sanitarium’s kitchen, and his body was found in the spa, confirming York’s story about the casual worker he’d hired at Steeple Hill.

The second name to ring alarm bells was that of Carl Philips, a forty-six-year-old paranoid schizophrenic who had gone missing from a state psychiatric hospital more than a decade before. Not only were his remains the oldest that had been found at the sanitarium, but his grandfather had been the founder of Cedar Heights. Philips had inherited the derelict property but never bothered to develop it. It had lain fallow and forgotten, inhabited only by the termites and dragonflies.

Until Kyle had put it to use.

But it was the discovery of the third ID that caused most consternation. It belonged to a twenty-nine-year-old morgue assistant from Memphis, whose faded driver’s licence was lying on the cabinet under the victims’ photographs. His remains had been recovered from undergrowth by the pond and positively identified from dental records.

His name was Kyle Webster.

‘He’d been dead eighteen months,’ Jacobsen told me, when I’d called her after seeing a news report on TV. ‘There’re going to be questions about how an impostor could have secured a job in the morgue, but in fairness his documentation and references were authentic. And there was enough of a resemblance to the real Webster to fool anyone who only had old photographs to go on.’

I supposed it was in keeping with everything else he’d done. The man we’d known as Kyle Webster had delighted in misdirection all along. It shouldn’t have come as a surprise that he’d slipped into the life of one of his victims as easily as he had the sloughed skin from their hands.

‘So if he wasn’t Kyle Webster, then who was he?’ I asked.

‘His real name was Wayne Peters. Thirty-one years old, from Knoxville originally, but worked as a morgue assistant in Nashville and then Sevierville, until he disappeared off the map two years ago. But it’s his background before then that’s interesting. Father unknown, mother died when he was an infant, so he was brought up by his aunt and uncle. Extremely bright by all accounts, did well at high school and even applied for medical college. Then things went sour. Around the time he was seventeen school records show he suddenly seemed to lose interest. He didn’t make the grades he needed and wound up working for the family business until it went broke when his uncle died.’

‘Family business?’

‘His uncle owned a small slaughterhouse. They specialized in pork.’

I shut my eyes. Pigs.

‘His aunt was his last remaining relative, and she died years ago,’ Jacobsen went on. ‘Natural causes, so far as we can tell. But you can probably guess where she and the uncle were buried.’

There was only one place, really.

Steeple Hill.

Jacobsen also gave me one other piece of information. When Wayne Peters’s medical records were examined, it was found that as a teenager he’d had several operations to remove nasal polyps. They’d been successful, but the repeated cauterizations had resulted in a condition known as anosmia. Insignificant in itself, it answered the question Gardner had raised in the spa at Cedar Heights.

Wayne Peters had no sense of smell.

The recovery operation at the sanitarium was still going on, the grounds being dug up to ensure no more victims’ remains were concealed. But my own role there had ended after that first day. By then not only had other faculty members from the Forensic Anthropology Center joined the effort, but the scale of the operation meant that the regional DMORT—Disaster Mortuary Operational Response Team—had also been called in. They’d arrived with a fully equipped portable morgue unit, and less than twenty-four hours after Paul and I had first climbed through its fence, the sanitarium and its grounds swarmed with activity.

I’d been politely thanked for my help and told I’d be contacted if my presence was required beyond the statement I’d already given. As I’d been driven through the ranks of TV and press vehicles camped beyond the sanitarium’s gates, I’d felt both relief and regret. It felt wrong leaving an investigation like that, but then I reminded myself that it wasn’t really my investigation.

It never had been.

I’d been prepared to either extend my stay in Tennessee for Tom’s memorial service, or even fly back for it later if I had to. But in the end there had been no need. Regardless of what factors had contributed to it, Tom had died in hospital of natural causes, and so the formality of an inquest had been avoided. I was glad for Mary’s sake, even though it left a sense of unfinished business. But then what death doesn’t?

There had been no funeral. Tom had donated his body for medical research, though not at the facility. That would have been too disturbing for his colleagues. Mary had been dignified and dry-eyed at the service, standing beside a plump middle-aged man in an immaculate suit I didn’t at first realize was their son. He carried himself with the faintly irritable air of a man who had better things to do, and when I was introduced to him afterwards his handshake was limp and grudging.

‘You work in insurance, don’t you?’ I said.

‘Actually, I’m an underwriter.’ I wasn’t sure what the distinction was but it didn’t seem worth asking. I tried again.

‘Are you staying in town long?’

He looked at his watch, frowning as though he were already late. ‘No, I’m catching a flight back to New York this afternoon. I’ve had to reschedule meetings as it is. This came at a really bad time.’

I bit off the retort I’d been about to make, reminding myself that whatever else he might be, he was still Tom and Mary’s son. As I walked away he was looking at his watch again.

Gardner and Jacobsen had both attended the ceremony. Jacobsen had returned to work already, the dressing on her shoulder all but invisible under her jacket. Gardner was still technically on sick leave. He’d suffered a transient ischaemic attack—a mini-stroke—from being held for so long in the chokehold. It had left him with slight aphasia and loss of sensation on one side, but only temporarily. When I saw him the only noticeable after-effect was a deepening of the corduroy-like lines in his face.

‘I’m fine,’ he told me, a little stiffly, when I asked how he was. ‘There’s no reason I can’t work now. Damn doctors.’

Jacobsen looked as pristine and untouchable as ever. Except for slightly favouring her left arm no one would have known she’d been shot.

‘I heard a rumour that she’s up for a commendation,’ I said to Gardner, while she was offering her condolences to Mary.

‘It’s under review.’

‘For my money she deserves one.’

He unbent a little. ‘Mine too, for what it’s worth.’

I watched as Jacobsen spoke solemnly to Mary. The line of her throat was lovely. Gardner cleared his throat.

‘Diane’s still getting over a tough time. She broke up with her partner last year.’

It was the first hint of a personal life I’d had about her. I was surprised he’d offered the information.

‘Was he a TBI agent as well?’

Gardner busied himself brushing something from the lapel of his creased jacket.

‘No. She was a lawyer.’

Before they left, Jacobsen came over to say goodbye. Her grip was strong, the skin dry and warm as she shook my hand. The grey eyes seemed a little warmer than they had, but perhaps that was my imagination. The last I saw of her she was walking back to the car with Gardner, graceful and athletic beside the older agent’s crumpled figure.

The ceremony itself was simple and moving. There had been no hymns, only two of Tom’s favourite jazz tracks to start and close: Chet Baker’s ‘My Funny Valentine’ and Brubeck’s ‘Take Five’. I’d smiled when I’d heard that. In between had been readings from friends and colleagues, but at one point the solemnity was broken by a baby’s crying. Thomas Paul Avery howled lustily, despite his mother’s best efforts to calm him.

No one minded.

He’d been born not long after Sam arrived at hospital, perfectly healthy and squalling his annoyance at the world. Sam’s blood pressure had caused the doctors some concern at first, but it had returned to normal with remarkable speed after the birth. Within two days she’d been back at home, still pale and hollow-eyed when I’d visited, but with no other visible signs of her ordeal.

‘It seems more like a bad dream than anything else,’ she admitted, when Thomas had fallen asleep after nursing. ‘It’s like a curtain’s been pulled across it. Paul’s worried I’m in denial, but I’m not. It’s more like what happened afterwards is more important, you know?’ She’d been gazing down at her son’s wrinkled pink face, but now she looked up at me with a smile so open it broke my heart. ‘It’s like all the bad doesn’t matter. It’s wiped everything else out.’

Of the two of them, Paul seemed to be finding it harder to deal with what had happened. In the days immediately afterwards, there was often a shadow in his face. It didn’t take a psychologist to know he was reliving the ordeal, still cut by how close they’d come, and what might have been. But whenever he was with his wife and son the shadow would lift. It was still early days, but looking at the three of them together I felt sure the wounds would heal.

They usually do, given time.

My tea had gone cold. With a sigh I stood up and went to the phone to play back my messages.

‘Dr Hunter, you don’t know me, but I was given your number by DSI Wallace. My name is—’

The sound of the doorbell drowned out the rest. I paused the playback and went to answer it. The last of the daylight filled the small entrance hall with a golden glow, like a forerunner of summer. I reached out to open the front door and was overwhelmed by a swooping sense of déjá vu. A young woman in sunglasses stands outside in the sunlit evening. Her smile turns into a snarl as she reaches into her bag and pulls out the knife…

I shook my head, scattering the images. Squaring my shoulders, I unlocked the front door and threw it wide open.

An elderly woman beamed up at me from the step. ‘Ah, Dr Hunter, it is you! I heard someone moving about downstairs and wanted to make sure everything was OK.’

‘Everything’s fine, thanks, Mrs. Katsoulis.’ My neighbour lived in the flat above mine. I’d hardly spoken to her before I’d been attacked the year before, but since then she’d taken it upon herself to turn vigilante. All four foot ten of her.

She hadn’t finished with me yet. She peered past the hall into the living room, where my bags were still waiting to be unpacked.

‘I thought I hadn’t seen you around for a while. Have you been anywhere nice?’

She stared up at me expectantly. I felt my mouth start to twitch as I fought down an urge to laugh.

‘Just a work trip,’ I said. ‘But I’m back now.’