The man opened his mouth, but no words emerged. Eager to hear the testimony, McBride crouched beside him and said:
“Who did you think you were attacking?”
Again the mouth opened; again no audible words emerged. McBride pressed his suit. “It’s important,” he said, “just tell me who was here.”
The man strove to voice his reply. McBride pressed his ear to the trembling mouth,
“In a pig’s eye,” the man said, then passed out, leaving McBride to curse his father, who’d bequeathed him a temper he was afraid he would probably live to regret. But then, what was living for?
INSPECTOR Carnegie was used to boredom. For every rare moment of genuine discovery his professional life had furnished him with, he had endured hour upon hour of waiting for bodies to be photographed and examined, for lawyers to be bargained with and suspects intimidated. He had long ago given up attempting to fight this tide of ennui and, after his fashion, had learned the art of going with the flow. The processes of investigation could not be hurried. The wise man, he had come to appreciate, let the pathologists, the lawyers and all their tribes have their tardy way. All that mattered, in the fullness of time, was that the finger be pointed and that the guilty quake.
Now, with the clock on the laboratory wall reading twelve fifty-three a.m., and even the monkeys hushed in their cages, he sat at one of the benches and waited for Hendrix to finish his calculations. The surgeon consulted the thermometer, then stripped off his gloves like a second skin and threw them down onto the sheet on which the deceased lay. “It’s always difficult,” the doctor said, “fixing time of death. She’s lost less than three degrees. I’d say she’s been dead under two hours.”
“The officers arrived at a quarter to twelve,” Carnegie said, “so she died maybe half an hour before that?”
“Something of that order.”
“Was she put in there?” he asked, indicating the place beneath the bench.
“Oh certainly. There’s no way she hid herself away. Not with those injuries. They’re quite something, aren’t they?”
Carnegie stared at Hendrix. The man had presumably seen hundreds of corpses, in every conceivable condition, but the enthusiasm in his pinched features was unqualified. Carnegie found that mystery more fascinating in its way than that of the dead woman and her slaughterer. How could anyone possibly enjoy taking the rectal temperature of a corpse? It confounded him. But the pleasure was there, gleaming in the man’s eyes.
“Motive?” Carnegie asked.
“Pretty explicit, isn’t it? Rape. There’s been very thorough molestation; contusions around the vagina; copious semen deposits. Plenty to work with.”
“And the wounds on her torso?”
“Ragged. Tears more than cuts.”
“Weapon?”
“Don’t know.” Hendrix made an inverted U of his mouth. “I mean, the flesh has been mauled. If it weren’t for the rape evidence I’d be tempted to suggest an animal.”
“Dog, you mean?”
“I was thinking more of a tiger,” Hendrix said.
Carnegie frowned. “Tiger?”
“Joke,” Hendrix replied, “I was making a joke, Carnegie. My Christ, do you have any sense of irony?”
“This isn’t funny,” Carnegie said.
“I’m not laughing,” Hendrix replied with a sour look.
“The man McBride found in the test chamber?”
“What about him?”
“Suspect?”
“Not in a thousand years. We’re looking for a maniac, Carnegie. Big, strong. Wild.”
“And the wounding? Before or after?”
Hendrix scowled. “I don’t know. Postmortem will give us more. But for what it’s worth, I think our man was in a frenzy. I’d say the wounding and the rape were probably simultaneous.”
Carnegie’s normally phlegmatic features registered something close to shock. “Simultaneous?”
Hendrix shrugged. “Lust’s a funny thing,” he said. “Hilarious,” came the appalled reply.
As was his wont, Carnegie had his driver deposit him half a mile from his doorstep to allow him a head-clearing walk before home, hot chocolate and slumber. The ritual was observed religiously, even when the Inspector was dog-tired. He used to stroll to wind down before stepping over the threshold. Long experience had taught him that taking his professional concerns into the house assisted neither the investigation nor his domestic life. He had learned the lesson too late to keep his wife from leaving him and his children from estrangement, but he applied the principle still.