Dialogues of the Dead

She turned away with affected indifference and said, “There’s a boat down there. I’ll take a look.”

He glanced downstream. Thirty yards or so, just before the creek entered the tarn, a flat-bottomed boat was moored.

The policeman in him wanted to say, No. Don’t go near. This could be a crime scene and the less we contaminate it the better.

Instead he said, “Yeah, why don’t you do that?”

He’d only seen one drowned body before, but that had been enough to demonstrate what water without and decay within could do to weak human flesh. Rye looked shaken enough already without that.

She moved away, and he stooped and with both hands took hold of what looked like a waxed outdoor jacket. It was difficult to get a grip but finally he succeeded and began to drag the body out of the water.

“Oh shit,” he said as he got the torso on to the bank.

It was a body all right, but not all of it. Or not all a body. Or only part of a body. Or a body with a bit missing. In fact, was a body a body if you didn’t have all of it?

Which questions of semantics were only occupying his mind to divert it from the fact that the corpse had no head.

He forced himself to concentrate.

From the look of it, the head hadn’t been detached through the depredations of water life. In fact he doubted very much if this fast-flowing freshwater stream harboured denizens capable of inflicting such damage.

No, if he had to make a quick pathological guess based on the evidence of his eyes, he’d say that it had been chopped off. And it had taken several blows.

He dragged the corpse fully out of the water and stood up, glad to put even the distance of his height between himself and the monstrous thing at his feet.

He looked to see where Rye was.

She had clambered aboard the moored boat and was stooping over something.

Now his police training got the upper hand. This was beyond doubt the scene of a crime. He recalled the advice of a police college training officer. “At a crime scene, put your hands in your pocket and play with your dick. That way you won’t be tempted to touch anything else.”

“Rye,” he called, moving towards her.

She stood up and turned to him. Even in these circumstances he could admire the graceful balance of her body as she adjusted easily to the gentle rocking of the boat beneath her feet.

She was holding something, a basket of some kind, the sort that fishermen use, what was it called? A creel, that was it. And she was pulling the straps from the buckles that held the lid down.

She shouldn’t be doing that. And not just because of the risk of contaminating the scene.

No, there was something else.

Precognition, instinct, detective work, call it what you will, but he knew beyond all doubt what was in that basket.

“No!” he cried running towards her. “Rye, leave it!”

But it was always going to be too late.

She pulled up the lid and peered inside.

She tried not to scream or perhaps it was just that her vocal cords were too constricted to produce anything more than a dim echo of the grate of the grindstone on the axehead. For a moment he thought she was going to topple backwards into the water, but her weakening knees flexed, and as if in acknowledgement that something had to go, either herself or what she held in her hands, she hurled the basket from her on to the bank.

It hit the ground, bounced, turned over, and out of it rolled a human head.

Even before it came to a halt at his feet, Hat had recognized that in one sense at least it was not out of place in this setting. If a man has to die, then let him die on his own land.

This was beyond all dispute the head of Geoffrey, Lord Pyke-Strengler of the Stang.

36

the sixth dialogue

Hello again.

Me too. What a wondrously varied path this is you’ve put me on! A Right to Roam Bill which did not need an Act of Parliament to make it law.

Winding through private properties and public buildings, tracking ancient highways and rural byways, and now leading me far from the populous city to the dark heart of the countryside. For it is the path that leads, not I who lead my chosen ones along the path. Indeed it is the path that does the choosing, letting them think always that they advance of their own accord. I myself am merely an instrument.

Or a French horn, maybe. I like the idea of being a French horn.