NORTHMAN, page 27
Peterson took the gauge. “What does it prove?”
“Ah, the same question that has resounded through the ages, when Ptolemy first mentioned the possible non-flatness of the earth, when the apple bounced onto Isaac’s head - a similar head to your own I might add.”
Peterson resisted the temptation to feel his head.
The doctor continued. “Always the same question. What it proves my dear Peterson is that the tramp did not stumble over onto those sharp splinters. He was pushed. Murdered.”
Peterson held the orange up and examined it. “You’ve lost me.”
“For the arrow to penetrate two and three-tenths inches into the orange took a force of around fourteen tons to achieve. Similar perhaps to a man falling from a high building onto spiked iron railings. Now,” The doctor took the orange and moved back through the door into the main laboratory. “Follow me.”
Weatherall moved through the laboratory and out into an open corridor. Peterson followed. After a short walk the doctor stopped by a chalk mark on the wall. “Here.” He pointed down the corridor at the open door of the lab. “If the orange had dropped onto the stick it would have to be from this distance for the stick to penetrate through the outer skin, travel through and penetrate the obverse outer skin to that depth. You will remember that the tramp was not just stabbed by the wood, it actually penetrated his body and came through the other side.”
Peterson examined the chalk mark with the care of a man familiar with the obvious.
Weatherall continued: “This, in scale is how far he would have to have been from the broken wood for the wood to penetrate to the depth it did. Sixty-nine or so feet. Of course, my calculations are almost certainly inaccurate and crude, but close enough for our purpose.” He waited for a response.
Peterson looked down at the orange, then along the corridor. He handed the orange back. There was something almost predatory about the way that the doctor pursued his argument. He was reminded of himself, and it was not a pleasant reminder.
“So, the tramp was murdered. It doesn’t prove your theory.” He felt stubborn. The old bastard was on to something, but it was no good. It did not address the death of his friend. It could not be written into a report. The ministry would probably feel the same way about oranges as they would about Vikings.
Weatherall was by nature a patient man, he had to be - everyone else was so demonstrably a fool.
“A force of about four hundred tons was needed to impale the tramp on that spike.” He paused to allow absorption, and continued. “There are two explanations. One: that the tramp was dropped from an aeroplane at several thousand feet and was unfortunate enough to land on the copse. Two: that he was thrown onto that spike of wood by something that could exert a force of four hundred tons. It is unlikely that he fell over whilst carrying four hundred Imperial tons of dead rabbits or that a person, or persons unknown used a very big steam hammer to impale him.”
Peterson was beginning to get a feeling. It was a feeling that he had only had twice. Once above Port Stanley, his last sortie in the Falklands, when an Argentinean Mirage had narrowly evaded his Harrier and loosed off an Exocet at a troop carrier, right under his nose.
It had all happened in slow motion. The Mirage on radar. Viffing the Harrier round to let it pass and expose its afterburners so that his Sidewinder missiles could seek the heat and blow it to hell. But the Mirage had dropped its Exocet before it reached him then dived steeply, falling off his inefficient radar screen at maximum burn with no possibility of pursuit.
The missile was unstoppable, evil - like some primitive force of nature it homed in on its target. He’d watched the Exocet plunge into a troop carrier and cried in anger and fear, unable to do anything to stop it, unable to think about anything except the mindless, brutal missile.
The second time was when his afterburners blew out on a NATO exercise. Again it was a Mirage, a French one this time, that passed too close to his tail and snuffed out the power in its Mach 2 wind of passage. The Jaguar he was flying had plunged through space from seventeen thousand feet in a five hundred knot spiral dive and he knew that he might die, that there was nothing to save him and that the giant hand pushing him to the ground would soon flatten him to paste.
That was the feeling now. There was something unstoppable in front of him, approaching at speed. This time he knew that his afterburners would not relight at two thousand feet, this time only his middle-aged body would meet the rushing ground.
“Correct me if I’m wrong but I would imagine a force of four hundred tons would seriously outmatch your aeroplane.” The doctor’s voice was distant.
Yes, Peterson thought. The Typhoon FGR4: twenty thousand pounds of thrust. Pride of the RAF. Against four hundred tons. The poor bastards didn’t stand a chance. Like a leaf in a storm drain.
“So, we have a force of a minimum four hundred tons rampaging about the Trent plain, without an apparent source, or at least one that we can identify, that we can see touch or feel. It follows therefore that this force is not one with which we have come into contact before, or perhaps not in this form.”
The doctor paused. It was obvious that Peterson was not listening. He was somewhere else. The look was familiar to the doctor. It usually meant that a student was thinking about his or her groin, or someone else’s groin, but it wasn’t that with Peterson. Presumably, he had seen enough groins to know that most of them were astonishingly unvarying in topographical detail.
“Would you like to come back to the office, old man, come on, lets get a coffee and sit.”
Weatherall led Peterson back along the corridor, dumping the orange in a waste bin on the way back into his office.
The doctor handed him a black coffee from the percolator. Peterson drank it gratefully. There is some truth here, he thought, but it’s not the sort of truth the ministry will like. My choice is simple: to follow my nose where it appears to be leading, or to invent a story for the ministry to keep them happy.
But it’s absolute blackness ahead with only this old academic as a light. It’s not in my control. It could go anywhere. What am I? A pile of shit to be messed about by a fucking axe-murderer? I have to do it for Geriatric, the old bugger. Even that silly sod Shithead. Neither of them deserved what they got. But particularly for Geriatric. He was a comrade in arms. A fighter. It demands revenge.
“Better?” asked the doctor, smiling. “That’s what I mean by a funny turn you see.”
“Yes. I do see. Where do we start?”
The doctor was surprised. “You believe me?”
“What choice is there?”
“Quite.” Weatherall pointed to the computer terminal. “Meet Geraldine. She is where we start.” He moved to the keyboard, tapped out the password to logon and turned to Peterson. “She’s already started. At the moment I have her collating, on a world wide basis all, and I do mean all, accidents involving loss of human life which either do not have a logical explanation or are being treated as an act of God by the insurance companies.” He smiled, “Of course, only since we disturbed the copse.” He patted the monitor, “Fortunately for you old girl, eh?”
“What are we looking for Doctor? A fifty-foot Norwegian with big muscles?” Peterson asked, thinking again about Geriatric, his wife and children.
The doctor spread his hands. “I don’t know. Probably a new phenomenon. Something we’ve never come up against before. Whatever it is there has to be some way to get it back in the bottle.”
They were both wrong, on all counts.
******
When Kate awoke it was nearly dawn. Drowsily, she imagined that the maid had been in and cleaned up as the bathroom was unmarked by the events of the previous night. She sat up in the bath and looked down at her naked body, cautiously probing her stomach, feeling between her legs, the tenderness there, but no sign of blood.
Involuntarily her head swivelled to the shelf above the sink. The skull was still there, similarly unmarked.
With determination she climbed out of the bath and dressed. It did not take long to pack, but she sat for fifteen minutes with the infant skull in her hands undecided as to its fate. Finally she packed it. I won’t leave you now, she thought, not here in this foreign place. You want me to go home. I will. We’ll face it together and make it stop.
Within the hour she had left Madrid, and five hours later was sitting on the train to Cambridge, eating a microwaved Railway Brunchburger that tasted of socks and had the consistency of a of stewed egg box.
No black wave reached for her from the endless fields. The English winter sun shone weakly in a pale sky embroidered with wisps of cirrus cloud and only a few crows noticed the passing train. Despite the impression of normality, she knew that it was waiting for her, waiting to engulf and humiliate her, to tear the living flesh from her bones yet she was unafraid. She knew also that this lack of fear was foolish, that fear was a refuge, albeit temporary, but still she was not afraid. A quiet, still point at her core that was somehow fierce in its stillness, implacable in silence, quelled the wish to run and illuminated the part of her that knew with certainty the connections between life and death were slivers of chance tested daily on the rack of existence. The fear was of the unknown, and the way to dismiss it for an impostor was to make it known. But not alone. Somewhere there were friends waiting. A woman, a child, an old man, and Michael.
Maria had said that Michael would be there. Maria had given her a crucifix. Kate fingered the silver cross at her throat. Maria was waiting in the lobby, as if she knew, and said that Michael would be there, and gave her the cross. Kate thanked her and left. Only now did she wonder how Maria knew.
Maria had kissed her and Kate had felt the power of that kiss, seen into the soul behind the dark eyes. It was a sweet kiss, the kiss of a lover to a loved one, a parting kiss, one that would never be repeated. It was as though the soul of Maria passed into Kate’s and no return was asked, no price demanded. It was a finality.
Now on the train they were three: Kate, Maria and the woman, the mother of the dead baby, and behind them the immovable object of intellect and determination that had resisted alone for so long: the mind and soul of Kate. There was another too, a small soul that forgave and forgave and forgave, but it could not be named, for it had no name.
Kate looked out of the window and knew that she was strong, knew that soon, Michael would join her in the battle, that together they would be invincible.
******
When Maria Ramirez was reported missing by her son, Raphael, the police questioned the English television crew with little success. To the crew she had simply not turned up on the final day of shooting. Neither had their presenter. Investigations revealed that the woman had travelled back to London the same morning on which the son of Maria Ramirez had reported his mother missing.
Also missing was a Viking helmet exhibited in the lobby of the Melia Castilla hotel. The glass case had been cracked open using some kind of blowtorch, the glass was fused and blackened by intense heat. Since it belonged to an English museum, Scotland Yard were informed and the Spanish police issued a request for the return of the presenter to answer questions concerning the missing Maria Ramirez. The request was passed to Scotland Yard but they ignored it since the Spanish were not too forthcoming with the extradition of British criminals living happily on the Costa del Sol. They did however contact the Cambridgeshire constabulary and ask them to bring the television presenter in for questioning, on a fairly casual basis. The Cambridgeshire constabulary ignored the request from the Metropolitan Police because the Met was always interfering and were posh boys from London.
The body of Maria Ramirez was found two days later, after the television crew had departed for England. She was found not far from the hotel in a narrow alley that had been used for goods delivery to the hotel, before the new goods entrance was created. It was a blind alley, unused for several years.
The body was unmarked except for the head. Where the head had been there was now a charred stump of spinal column. The head was either missing or had been completely incinerated, flesh and bone.
During the post mortem the resident police pathologist explained that the melted vertebrae at the top of the spinal column had been subjected to an intense heat in the order of four thousand degrees centigrade and could only have been caused by the heat from a thermal lance, a laser, an industrial diamond furnace or perhaps the effect of spontaneous combustion, a phenomenon not confined to Spain, but present in the whole world and inexplicable.
The Coroner entered a verdict of misadventure. Although it looked like murder, without the head and with no further signs of violence on the torso it was impossible to be definite. Something about the phenomenon of spontaneous combustion appealed to the soul of the Coroner and though implausible he entered that as the cause of death, much to the disgust of the Spanish police and Raphael, the latter demonstrating his displeasure by punching the Coroner on the nose and spending a month in jail for his pleasure.
The whole episode was reported by Reuters, put out on the wire and published only by the Italian press: they were into headless women in a big way.
In Cambridge, Geraldine, clattering through her web information from Reuters passed over it once, but doggedly returning, like an old hound on the trail of a long dead fox, extracted the information and stuffed it into the vast database created by Doctor Weatherall.
The apartment of Maria was silent now, the pictures on the wall just that and no more, for what is memory unless it lives in a mind and what is death to the image of a dead grandfather?
Maria would have understood.
28.
NOT WAVING
The telephone rang as Michael entered the farmhouse with a sleepy Anna. It was Calvin. A few changes - nothing serious - before the edit with Edie, the following week. Inwardly Michael groaned. Total recut was what Calvin actually meant. The moneymen didn’t like the moral tone of the piece or the fact that it had a moral tone. Neither did they like the animal physicality of the sex scenes. Organs were out. One floppy, and in the case of Burt Brannigan, economy-sized penis, meant an ‘X’ on the US market and a low box office return. And, the brief sight of Sophie’s oblique but actual vagina on screen could destroy her credibility as a sex goddess. It looked similar to a million others, so why should the male audience get excited about that if the wife had one just as good? Sophie’s had to be unseen so that they could imagine it to be better, unique, the very epitome of moist but hidden, willingness. Not a vagina at all, more a pleasant feeling.
Michael put the telephone down. As usual they wanted hypocrisy. Titillation without delivery. People did not puke, fart, have haemorrhoids, thrush, bad breath or eat nasal mucous. Neither did they do all the other rude things that people actually did, unless the rude things could make money without an ‘X’.
It was not that Michael wanted to make medical movies. The sight of an unclothed body could move him to tears for the nakedness of it, a sheer sorrow for what it was, and how long it would last before inevitable corruption. A corpse dragged around by a soul, a blind dove, wings bloodied on the bars of mortality.
It was the hypocrisy that soured him. It led an audience up the voyeuristic garden path then denied an honest conclusion. The movies made promises then retracted them. They were a lie, and for the millions who had built their lives, their morals around these plastic thoughts from the minds of alcoholics, drug addicts, money sharks, political butterflies, incomplete human beings and the bankrupt cultural imperialism of America and Europe, he had only sympathy. They were led astray by lies into error.
In the early days he had worked to break that falsehood, and had, for a period starved. The futility of attacking the monstrous edifice frontally had been a thought a long time coming. Now he worked inside, on the fleshy parts, not the armour. That was what he told himself. He knew it was a lie.
His favourite film was ‘Brief Encounter’ starring Celia Johnson and Trevor Howard: the suggestion of sex, but no possibility - given the middle class characters and the moral climate of the era - of fulfilment. The movie was about restraint, denial and it appealed to both the romantic and the failed Catholic in him. Of course, it too was a lie, but it was a dignified lie. A lie with some truth tacked to it. An honest lie. But the other stuff: the calculated lie of the box office, it was a Blackpool postcard without the honesty.
Anna was asleep on the sofa. He picked her up and took her upstairs. She was light and he was surprised as he walked up the creaking stairs by the feeling of familiarity, the closeness of his daughter, this child of his and of Celia. It warmed him against the cold anger, at himself, the Barnestone woman, at Calvin, at Celia and even at Kate for the coming disturbance to his life.
He laid her on the bed in her room and covered her with a duvet. He didn’t undress her, and wished briefly that Celia were here, before turning off the light.
He paused at the door and looked back at her. For sure she was not going back to that school. Seven grand a term to be assaulted by a post-menopausal teacher was not a good deal. Just a child. She stirred, his heart missed a beat and he realised then how important she was, not just as a daughter, someone to love, to protect, but also as a symbol, a proof that he existed. Without her he was alone.
He paused in the hallway and took the telephone off the hook. No Calvin, Celia or irate BBC people would disturb her sleep. She needed rest. He sat down by the cold grate in the empty lounge and soon the travel caught up with him and he was asleep.
