The Fall

11

Jud unbuttoned his gold waistcoat as he walked. ‘Do you know what a palimpsest is?’ he asked.

‘Search me,’ Sam said, not taking his eyes off a black mound lying on the grass ahead of them.

‘Some kind of document?’ Zita hazarded.

Jud smiled. ‘Close, but no cigar. Palimpsest. In the old days they’d write on parchment. It was expensive, so they’d use the same piece over and over. For instance, you’d write a letter on it to a friend. He or she’d read it, wash off the ink, then write their own letter on the same piece of parchment, send it back to you, and so on. The same piece of parchment might have dozens of letters written on it, one on top of the other. You could still see the faint handwriting beneath, looking like ghost images. This piece of ground, right from the river to the road, is something of a palimpsest: it’s been used over and over. Before that stone church there was a wooden one. Before that it was a Roman temple. Before that there was a Neolithic one on the same site. You can go down into the church crypt and see a well there, right in the middle of the floor. That’s where Iron Age folk left their sacrificial offerings. See that cobbled section of road across there? That’s Roman. At the top of the field is the line of a prehistoric track, probably one of the old peddler tracks that have criss-crossed Britain for the last 20 thousand years or so; the road still follows the route. These couple of hundred acres have revealed ten thousand years of human habitation, right down to flint arrowheads and bone fishhooks that we’ve dug out of the river bank. And that bump in the grass across there is what’s left of a hermitage. Richard Rolle himself lived there in the 13th Century. Heard of Rolle?’

They shook their heads.

Jud continued in his gravelly voice. ‘Rolle was a mystic. That is to say, he believed he’d managed to find some kind of hotline to God. He wrote a few books about his experiences, before the Black Death put an end to him in the 1300s. Now then.’ He stopped ten paces from the black mound on the grass. ‘What do you two make of that?’

Sam saw Zita wrinkle her nose. But, credit to her, she didn’t turn and run. Sam’s stomach turned over and he instinctively covered his mouth and nose. There was no mistaking what he saw.

‘It’s a cow,’ Sam said. ‘Or, at least, it’s half a cow.’

He took a step closer. The cow had been cut clean down the middle. The front half lay on the grass: forelegs, shoulders, neck and head. Where the cut had been made, two bluish organs that looked like plastic bags sagged from the front half of the body. Sam guessed these were the lungs. A brownish football-sized piece of meat tucked in the middle was the heart. From it, two white arteries the size of hoses protruded. Both were neatly cut. A huge pool of blood had turned the grass a sticky brown mess. Flies hovered above it while yet more swarmed eagerly over the entrails, feeding.

‘Jesus, what a mess,’ Sam breathed.

‘The cruel bastards,’ Zita said. ‘Who’d do a thing like this?’

‘Who indeed? Jud echoed. ‘Just one thing, though: where’s the back end of the cow?’

‘Poachers?’ Sam suggested.

‘Messy way to steal a cow, isn’t it?’ Jud said, thoughtfully. ‘You’d think it’d be easier to steal the whole animal and butcher it later. And how on Earth do you cut a living cow that size so neatly in the middle of a field. Look, someone could have come along with a huge axe and bang!’ He mimed chopping with one arm. ‘Sliced cleanly in two, like you’d cut an apple down the middle.’

The flies buzzed even more hungrily to form a blue-black mist above the exposed internal organs. Sam could smell the raw meat. ‘You said there was something else, Jud?’

‘There is. Follow me.’

They followed again.

Jud talked back over his shoulder at them. ‘Are you noticing what I’m noticing?’

Sam looked down at the grass where Jud was pointing as he walked. ‘I don’t see anything,’ Sam said. ‘Only grass. What is it?’

‘Bear with me. I don’t want to lead you to any conclusions, if I can help it. I’d prefer that you reach them yourselves.’

Sam stared hard at the crisp, spongy grass. He saw nothing unusual.

Zita, folding her arms, looked too, sharp eyes probing.

She didn’t say anything, but Sam had the feeling she was seeing more than him.

‘Here’s another curio,’ Jud said, like he was pointing out an interesting archaeological site. ‘Take a close look at that bottle on the grass.’

Sam dutifully looked. ‘It’s broken,’ he said.

‘Not broken.’ Jud pointed one of his thick fingers at it but didn’t touch it, any more than a cop would touch anything on a fresh crime scene. Sam realised that for Jud the cow and the bottle were evidence. Evidence of what, exactly, he didn’t know. ‘Take a closer look,’ Jud invited. ‘Does it look broken to you?’

Crouching, Zita peered at the bottle where it lay, minus its neck. ‘It looks as if it’s been cut with some kind of saw.’

‘A clean cut at that. In fact, would you say as clean a cut as whatever bisected that cow?’

Zita nodded.

‘A cut cow? A cut bottle?’ Sam asked.

‘We’re amassing some strange anomalies here, aren’t we?’ It was the kind of thing someone could have said with a broad grin. Only Jud’s face was deadly serious. ‘Come on,’ he said, ‘just a little farther. I’ve one more thing to show you.’

It took only a moment to reach it.

‘Oh, my God.’ Zita put her hand to her mouth and her eyes went wide.

It was the front part of a bike. For an instant Sam wasn’t sure why she found a bike’s handlebars, connected by the fork to little more than a half a front wheel, so shocking. It lay on the ground, part of the tyre lying beside it like a black snake. But then he looked more closely.

This time he saw.

This was worse than half a cow spilling its insides back there on the turf.

There was a human hand still grasping one of the handlebars. The attached forearm had been severed midway along. A watch still encircled a wrist that was slick and red with blood. The fingers had uncurled a little from the rubber handgrip on the handle-bars. Sam found himself hypnotised by those still fingers. The fingernails gleamed a bloodless white in the sun. Fine hairs bristled across the back of the hand, which was suntanned and dotted here and there with brown freckles.

‘Again, you’ll notice a clean cut,’ Jud said in a flat voice. ‘It looks as if a surgeon’s amputated it, doesn’t it? No ragged edges, no torn skin… Are you all right?’

Zita had turned away from it.

‘Just give me a moment,’ she said, taking a deep breath. ‘I’ll be fine.’

A thought occurred to Sam. ‘What time does the watch say?’

Jud crouched down, tilting his head to one side. ‘Ten to three.’

‘The same as mine.’

‘And mine.’

‘Jesus H Christ,’ Sam murmured, staring at the front of the bike frame where the hand still gripped the handlebars. Hell, the thing could have been a perverse work of art. ‘Not a pretty sight, is it?’

‘No, not one bit,’ Jud agreed.

‘I guess this one’s for the police to sort the nuts from the screws.’

Jud shook his grey head. ‘I don’t know. I’ve a feeling this might be one case that’s beyond them.’

Zita said, ‘Jud?’

‘Yes?’

‘It’s the grass, isn’t it? It’s two different lengths.’ She looked at Sam. ‘Don’t you see it?’

Sam stared down at the ground.

Call me dense, stupid or just plain myopic, he told himself, mystified. But he saw nothing wrong with the grass.

He gave a puzzled shrug.

Jud walked away from the severed hand half a dozen paces or so, then he stood and looked back in the direction of the amphitheatre and the river.

‘When I was a boy,’ he said, ‘the fair would come every year to the park. I enjoyed it like any other boy – or girl, come to that. But what fascinated me was when they packed up the rides and went. On the way to school on the morning after they’d gone, I’d rush to the park and stand and look at the grass where the caravans and the rides had been. To me it seemed… I don’t know, magical. You could see the ghost patterns of the rides and the caravans and the candy floss stalls in the grass. Do you remember? The grass was always longer where the rides had been. You could stand in a perfect circle of longer grass where the roundabouts had stood. There was nothing magical about it, of course. The grass had just been forced where it had been covered by the rides and the caravans. It had grown faster than the rest of the grass. It was a paler green, too.’

Sam looked back down at the turf.

‘This is all the same shade of green,’ said Zita. ‘But you see it now, don’t you, Sam?’

Sam looked. ‘I see it,’ he said, feeling a burst of wonder. ‘It’s longer at this side of the bike than the other. By no more than half an inch. But it’s definitely longer.’

‘You’ll find it’s the same at the bottle with its neck cut off and the half a cow.’ Jud rubbed his jaw thoughtfully. ‘Also, I’d bet you a week’s pay packet that you’d find the line that marks the boundary between the two different grass lengths runs exactly – exactly – along the line of the cuts in the bottle, the cow and that poor devil’s arm.’

‘You’ve got an explanation for that?’ Sam asked.

‘I have.’ Jud nodded. ‘And, Mr Baker, Miss Prestwyck, I’m pretty sure it’s the same explanation sitting right there in the front of your minds right now.’

Zita said slowly, ‘It’s time, isn’t it? It’s all gone wrong.’