Читать книгу The Wolf Letters - Will Schaefer - Страница 16

“The hard edge

of a keen-ground knife cuts me now.

Fingers fold me, and a fowl’s-pride

drives its treasure trail across me …”

The Bible, a riddle from The Exeter Book, c. 970 AD

Everything was bright - painfully bright - and at a strange angle. It took a moment to remember the murdered old man, the scalpel, the blood, the dizzy feeling. I was in a room, unnaturally well lit. Had I died? No, my head ached too much. How long had I passed out for? Where the hell was I? I sat up gingerly and looked around. I was in a makeshift bed on the floor of the interview room of the Allminster Central Police Station, and Detective Sergeant Aage Nielsen was sitting at the table two yards away.

“I was just about to wake you, sir. A colleague has brought water and some hot tea for you.”

My hangover was crippling, and swiftly worsening in the harsh light. “What time is it?” I croaked.

“It is five in the morning, Mr Haye. How do you feel?”

“Bloody awful.”

“Can you stand?”

Before I could answer, Nielsen came over, helped me from the bed and sat me at the table. “I have had a doctor look you over twice already, Mr Haye. I can assure you that you are not seriously harmed, although you no doubt feel unwell at the moment.”

A cup of steaming black tea, a jug of water and a glass were on the table in front of me. The hangover pounded on the inside of my skull. I moaned and propped my face up on my hands, shutting my eyes to block out the almost blinding light. Suddenly I felt depressed, unable to fathom the violence of the night before as it returned to me in terrible flashes.

The glass looked filthy. I wiped it with the blanket Nielsen had dropped onto my shoulders, but the blanket was also dirty and I spread what looked like thin fat all over the glass. I used my shirt to clean it, and poured some water out of the jug. It tasted good, and I had two more.

“What happened to that man on the bed, Mr Nielsen?”

“He was murdered, sir.”

I shuddered: I had seen one human being murder another. “Why?”

“I do not know yet.”

“It was horrible. That man … cut him open …”

“Tell me everything you saw,” said Nielsen, “starting at the beginning. Please do not leave anything out, however unimportant it may seem.”

I told him everything I could remember. Dinner and a few pints with my best friends. The message from the publican. Using the telephone in the hall. I was just making the call when I heard a scream from upstairs. No, I didn’t hear any other voices, or people shouting, nothing like that. Just an old man screaming …

I reached for my tea, which tasted unusually bitter, and continued.

“I’d had a few drinks, and wasn’t thinking, and I rushed up the stairs. I opened a door, but the room was empty. I tried another, and saw a man in white clothes gutting the old man on the bed. The old man looked frightened out of his wits. I fought the white man briefly, but he smashed a bottle of something on the wardrobe and I got dizzy. I couldn’t see properly, my head was spinning. Then the man jumped out of the window - the closed window - for some reason that I didn’t understand. I vaguely remember looking out onto the street below, and seeing he was gone. Then I passed out.”

“It was chloroform,” said Nielsen. “He had an entire bottle of it. That’s what put you to sleep. Tell me more about this man in white clothes.”

I thought hard. “He had brown hair. He looked about forty, forty-five years old. Everything he wore was white, even his shoes. It looked like a uniform, a male nurse’s uniform, perhaps.”

“How tall was he?”

“Shorter than I am. Say five-five, five-six. He moved very quickly. And he seemed extremely tough. I’m a handy boxer, but when I hit him he didn’t make a sound. Not even a whimper.”

“You had consumed several pints of beer before this. Do you think you simply didn’t hit him particularly hard?”

“No. I distinctly remember hitting him very hard in the ribs with my knee. Another thing I noticed was that the room smelled completely disgusting when I got there.”

“That was the old man’s small intestine.”

“What do you mean?”

“The small intestine is full of half-digested food. If it is split open, it releases a foul smell, a mixture of excrement and stomach acids.”

Remembering the smell made me feel unwell, and I sipped my tea as though its bitterness would wash my palette clean. It didn’t. It tasted awful. But Nielsen did not give me the chance to dwell on it.

“Is there anything else you remember about him, sir?”

“His eyes were extraordinarily bloodshot, and he had a strange look on his face.”

“Please be more specific than that.”

“He looked …” I paused, searching for the right word. “Ah, he looked cold.”

“Cold, sir?”

“It looked as though he had no feelings at all. He did not look angry, or hateful, as you might expect a murderer to look. His face was blank, as though he was in a trance of sorts.

There was simply nothing in him. And he moved so quickly, it was -”

Nielsen stopped me. “Please finish your tea, Mr Haye. You must translate something for me.”