House of flies, p.2
House of Flies, page 2
‘Like I said, I think you need to come over and see this for yourself.’
‘Okay. I just want to grab a bite to eat. I haven’t had time for any breakfast yet.’
‘Uh-oh. I wouldn’t, if I was you.’
*
It was only a five-minute drive to HM Coroner’s Office on Falcon Road. Jerry parked in Afghan Road opposite, but as he dodged across to the other side of the street he narrowly missed being run over by a number 49 bus. Oh well, he thought, at least they wouldn’t have had far to carry me to the mortuary.
He gave a flirty double-click of his tongue to red-haired Kirsty in reception, and she blew him a kiss in return. Then he took the claustrophobic lift upstairs. The Martian was waiting for him in the laboratory, as well as Dr John Crowe, the forensic pathologist, and his assistant Zahir, and DCI Butcher.
Everybody in the Met called Derek Grant ‘the Martian’ because he was skinny and bald, with huge protruding ears, and he spoke in an other-worldly monotone. Dr Crowe, on the other hand, was tall and flamboyant with tangled grey hair, and he always sounded as if he were playing the lead in a Shakespearean tragedy, even when he was simply asking Zahir to pass him a retractor.
Jerry thought that DCI Butcher could hardly have had a more appropriate name, because he was burly, with florid cheeks and fingers as fat as sausages, and he looked as if he should be wearing an apron and chopping up pork ribs behind a counter.
‘So what’s the SP?’ asked Jerry.
‘I’m totally baffled, me,’ said DCI Butcher. ‘I’ve never seen nothing like this in all my thirteen years. And I mean, never, with a capital N.’
‘Here, see for yourself,’ said Dr Crowe in his booming voice. ‘I can’t say that I’ve ever come across anything like this either – even in cases of advanced decomposition.’
The Reverend Wymarsh was lying naked on a stainless-steel pathology table, his ribcage protruding like the victim of a famine. Dr Crowe beckoned to Jerry to come closer.
‘You see these massive contusions around his neck? He was manually strangled and that was undoubtedly the cause of death.’
‘So what’s so unusual about that? Strangling doesn’t account for too many murders, does it? Only about seven per cent. But that’s still about fifty every year.’
‘Ah, but what I’ve never encountered before is this,’ said Dr Crowe. With his blue nitrile-gloved fingers, he levered down the Reverend Wymarsh’s jaw, so that his mouth gaped wide open. Inside, Jerry could see that it was crammed full with black feathery objects, and when he looked closer, he realised that they were flies.
All he could say was, ‘Jesus.’
‘According to DCI Butcher here, the churchwarden who found him said that his whole bedroom was buzzing with flies. He opened the window and most of them flew away. But it was only when I started my examination here that I discovered all these flies in his mouth, almost as if he’d been trying to swallow them. At a rough estimate, there must be more than a hundred of them. Musca domestica, most likely, the common housefly. I’ll be able to count them exactly, of course, once I’ve photographed them and scanned them, but Derek here thought you ought to see them first-hand, in situ.’
He pulled down his surgical mask and blew his nose with a tissue. Then he said, ‘It doesn’t do you any harm to eat flies, if that’s what the reverend was trying to do. They’re no different from any other food.’
Jerry peered closer into the Reverend Wymarsh’s mouth. He had seen flies crawling over dead bodies before, but never so many, and never filling up a victim’s mouth. ‘You don’t seriously think he was having them for breakfast, do you? That’s enough to make a maggot gag.’
‘Well, I very much doubt it,’ said Dr Crowe. ‘But “maggot”, that’s a most appropriate word, because that’s what I simply can’t understand,’ said Dr Crowe. ‘The time period in between the reverend’s last appearance at evensong and when he was discovered the following morning was not nearly long enough for him to start to decompose. Even if he had, and a female fly had deposited eggs on him, it takes at least a day for fly eggs to hatch into maggots, or larvae. Then it takes the larvae approximately two weeks before they become pupae, and a further six days for them to emerge from the pupae as fully developed flies.’
‘Right, thanks. I think I’ve seen enough now,’ Jerry told him. He was beyond grateful that the Martian had warned him not to eat anything before he came here. ‘So what you’re telling me is that these flies were all grown up before the Reverend Wymarsh was strangled?’
‘Yes. No question about it.’
‘If that’s the case, where did they come from, and how the hell did so many of them get into his bedroom? And even more to the point, how did so many of them manage to fill up his gob?’
‘We have absolutely no idea,’ said the Martian. ‘That’s why I called you. I’ve already been in touch with Professor Gregory Yearling. He’s an entomologist up at Oxford, and he’s going to come down later today and examine these flies for us. He’ll be able to let us know if there’s anything unusual about them, although Dr Crowe says they seem to be perfectly ordinary, so far as he can tell.’
Jerry took a last long look at the Reverend Wymarsh. The Martian had not said so directly, but Jerry knew why he had called him. He obviously suspected that there could be some less-than-natural cause for the swarms of flies that had filled up the reverend’s bedroom when he was strangled. Maybe their appearance had been nothing more than a freak of nature, but what, exactly? Maybe the Reverend Wymarsh had been breeding flies, although God alone knew why he should be.
‘Let me have a word with DI Patel,’ said Jerry. ‘She probably knows more about flies than I do. I’ll give you a bell later.’
DCI Butcher said, ‘There’s a caff up the road. Let’s go and have a coffee and I’ll fill you in on the rest of this shitshow.’
Jerry was about to follow DCI Butcher out of the laboratory when he saw a single fly emerge from the Reverend Wymarsh’s mouth and crawl over his lower lip.
Jerry looked over at the Martian and the Martian could only shake his head. Even now, some of the flies were still alive.
*
‘It’s not only the bloody flies that’s got me scratching my head,’ said DCI Butcher, as they sat down in the blue plastic chairs in Al’s Place Café. He had ordered a bacon sandwich, but Jerry still felt as if he could taste flies in his mouth, and contented himself with a cup of black coffee.
‘So what else?’ he asked DCI Butcher.
‘Most of all, how did the perp gain access to the rectory, and how did they get out again afterwards? Both doors were locked. The front door was the old-fashioned type, and needed to be locked from the outside when it was closed. The kitchen door still had the key in it.’
‘Windows?’
‘All closed.’
‘Any fingerprints or footprints?’
‘Don’t know yet. But the Martian’s team will be checking the door handles and the banisters and the floors with UV. They’ll also be testing the reverend’s bedcovers for DNA because the perp must have pulled them up to cover him.’
‘But you have no idea at all how the perp got in, or how they left?’
‘Absolutely none, Jerry. Not unless they came down the chimney like Santa.’
DCI Butcher’s bacon sandwich arrived, and while he was taking his first wolfish bites, Jerry thoughtfully sipped his coffee.
‘What about motive? Do we know of any threats that anyone’s made to the Reverend Wymarsh? Any personal problems?’
DCI Butcher chewed and swallowed, and then he said, ‘DI Baker and the rest of the team are over at St Gratus right now. I’ve got them taking statements from the two assistant priests and the parish administrator and anybody else involved in the church – you know, just to find out if the Reverend Wymarsh might have trodden on anybody’s toes. He was widowed, but we’ll be looking into the possibility that he might have started up a new relationship, and if so, who with.’
‘Do we know of any religious sects in Clapham who might have it in for Christians?’
‘Only a bunch of Druids, and you could hardly call them terrorists.’
‘Druids believe in human sacrifice, don’t they? It was Druids who made those wicker men, wasn’t it, and stuffed people inside them, and burned them alive?’
‘I don’t think the Druids in Clapham would be up to that. They’re about ninety years old, most of them, and they couldn’t make a wicker shopping basket, let alone a wicker man. I can’t see any of them breaking into a rectory in the middle of the night and strangling the vicar. They’re probably all asleep by half-past eight, smelling of cocoa.’
Jerry finished his coffee. He realised that the Martian and DCI Butcher had called him in because the murder of the Reverend Wymarsh did appear to have some supernatural elements about it, but maybe that was only because they couldn’t work out how it had been done, and it needed more than routine policework to solve it. To be fair, though, he had no idea himself how the perpetrator might have managed to break into the rectory, or where those swarms of flies might have come from, and what they signified, if anything.
‘Like I told the Martian, I’ll go back to the station now and have a rabbit with DI Patel,’ he told DCI Butcher. ‘I can’t guarantee that she’ll have any more of a clue than me, but she knows a lot more than I do about ghoulies and ghosties and things that go bump in the night.’
DCI Butcher wiped his mouth, screwed up his paper napkin and tossed it on to his plate. ‘I hate investigations like this. I fucking hate them. Give me an out-and-out shooting any day of the week.’
3
It had started raining again by the time Brenda and her little boy, Michael, arrived at Wandsworth Cemetery. It was only a fine drizzle, though, and today was the only day that Brenda had been able to get off work. Michael should have been at school, but Brenda had rung them and told them that he had an earache.
Actually, it had been a year yesterday that her husband, Philip, had been killed. His van had been struck from behind by a 20-ton truck on the M25 because the truck driver was texting on his phone. When Brenda had arrived at the hospital, the mortuary assistants had not allowed her to see him.
As they walked along the path between the hundreds of grey gravestones, Brenda was carrying a bunch of thirteen white roses, one for every year that she and Philip had been married. Michael’s memorial offering was a bag of Haribo jellies because his father had always managed to sneak one whenever he was eating them, and winked at him, and laughed.
When they reached Philip’s grave, however, Brenda was concerned to see that it was cordoned off with blue-and-white police tape. Three uniformed constables in yellow high-viz jackets were standing beside it, as well as a cemetery officer.
Philip’s marble headstone was still standing, but when she came closer Brenda saw that his grave itself had been dug up, and that it was surrounded by heaps of dark soil and gravel.
‘My God, what’s happened?’ she asked the policemen. When she looked down into the grave, she saw that the coffin was still lying there, but its lid was tilted to one side and Philip’s body had gone. All that remained was the green good-luck gnome that Philip had always taken with him to work, and which she had asked the undertakers to tuck into his coffin beside him.
‘Sorry, madam,’ said one of the constables. ‘Is this someone you knew?’
Brenda was so shocked that she found it difficult to speak.
‘That was my husband. That was – where is he? What’s happened to him?’
‘I’m afraid there’s been an unauthorised exhumation,’ said the cemetery officer. He had thick-rimmed glasses and a ginger moustache, and he looked so much like Brenda’s old geography teacher that she almost thought it could have been him. ‘It occurred sometime during the night.’
‘Who did it? What for? Where have they taken him?’
‘I’m afraid we have no idea who could have wanted to disinter your husband’s remains, or how they did it, or why. And neither do we know where they could be now.’
‘We’re waiting for the crime scene specialists to show up,’ the constable told her. ‘The detectives dealing with this case will be here in a minute too.’
Michael started to cry, tightly clutching his bag of sweets. ‘Where’s Daddy? Where’s he gone?’
Brenda’s eyes filled with tears too, but she put her arm around him and said, ‘Don’t worry, sweetheart. The police will find him for us.’
‘But why did they take him? Why? He’s dead, Mummy! He’s dead!’
Brenda turned to the constables. ‘I’d better take him home. Look – here’s my mobile number. Please call me as soon as you find out anything.’
‘Of course, madam. In any event, the detectives will be wanting to talk to you. Could you give me your address as well?’
Brenda took hold of Michael’s hand and together they walked back towards the cemetery gates. Brenda was unable to stop herself trembling and she stumbled twice. Michael was still sobbing and kept turning his head to look back at Philip’s desecrated grave. A forensic services van had just arrived, closely followed by two unmarked cars.
It took less than ten minutes for Brenda to drive to their semi-detached house on Broomwood Road, but all the way she felt as if were dreaming. Because it was only drizzling, the windscreen wipers flopped from side to side with a series of rubbery squeaks. Michael had stopped sobbing, but as soon as she opened the front door he kicked off his shoes and ran up to his bedroom without saying a word.
Brenda hung up her raincoat and went into the living room, still feeling unreal. A large framed photograph of Philip stood on the bookcase, and he was smiling as if he knew where his body had been taken, and was trying to make up his mind if he should tell her. He had always been a joker.
Brenda dropped down on to her knees and let out a howl like a bitch in pain.
*
Because it was still drizzling, DI Simon Fairbrother returned to sit in his car while the three-strong forensic team carried out their preliminary examination of the grave and its surrounding area.
DS Audrey Morrison and DC Iniko Okeke remained standing outside, but DI Fairbrother had only just recovered from three weeks of Covid and he was not keen to risk a relapse.
All the same, he switched on his windscreen wipers now and again, so that he could clearly see the forensic technicians as they climbed in and out of the grave in their white Tyvek suits, like three giant snowmen. He could also see them taking samples from the heaps of soil and gravel and circling around the adjacent gravestones, scanning the grass with UV lamps for footprints.
He had already talked to the cemetery officer, but the cemetery officer had only been able to admit that he was clueless. He was waiting now for the forensic team to give him their initial assessment, and then he would take DS Morrison around to interview Mrs Brenda Harris, the widow of the missing deceased. Maybe she would have some idea why his remains had been disinterred.
All he had discovered so far was that Philip Harris had been buried here about a year ago, but that only made the removal of his remains even more mystifying. Who on earth would want to steal a body that was already starting to decompose?
DI Fairbrother knew that the rate of decomposition could vary greatly, depending on whether a body had been embalmed or not, and whether the coffin was wood or metal. Sometimes, holes were drilled in coffins to speed up the rate of decay, but some bodies took up to ten years or even longer before they were reduced to a skeleton. However he had been buried, though, DI Fairbrother reckoned that Philip Harris would have been in a fairly slimy state by now.
Another half-hour passed, and then one of the forensic technicians came up to his car and tapped on the window. When he put the window down, the technician peeled off his face mask.
‘Hi, Steven,’ said DI Fairbrother. ‘Got anything to tell me?’
‘Not a lot. I think the right word for this particular shout is “bamboozling”. We’re going to be here for a few more hours yet, I can tell you. We may even have to come back tomorrow, after we’ve done some more tests in the lab.’
‘What are you bamboozled about, if you don’t mind my asking?’
‘Principally, the condition of the coffin lid and the way the soil was deposited.’
‘Steven – somebody dug him up, for whatever reason. What’s so bamboozling about that?’
‘The point is that nobody dug him up. Not so far as we can tell.’
‘What do you mean? If nobody dug him up, how was he taken out of his coffin?’
‘He wasn’t taken out. It doesn’t look that way, anyhow, although we’ll be running a lot more tests, like I say. What I’m telling you is that everything points to the coffin lid being broken open from inside and the soil being scrabbled away upwards, by hand.’
‘What? He broke out of his coffin himself? That’s impossible. He’d been dead for a year.’
‘I know, but if by some miracle he was capable of digging, he wouldn’t have had too far to dig. The coffin was buried only a little more than three feet deep. That’s the minimum allowed by the Local Authorities’ Cemeteries Order, provided the soil is of suitable character. You know, not too sandy, nor nothing like that.’
DI Fairbrother stared at the technician as if he were mad.
‘Steven – didn’t you hear what I just said? He’d been dead for a year. He was probably half rotted. You’ve seen those zombie films. He probably looked like one of those, only worse. And you and I know there’s no such thing as zombies. The only walking dead that I know of is that old biddy who cleans the toilets back at the nick.’
The technician gave him a Gallic shrug. ‘I’m only telling you what the evidence tells us. We found numerous abrasions on the inside of the coffin lid. They look very much like fingernail scratches, as if the occupant had been struggling to get out. And that’s not all. If somebody else had dug him up, the gravel that was spread on top of his grave would be underneath the excavated soil, instead of the other way about, which it was.’
