Graham Masterton Death Trance

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necks from the ceiling beams with nooses fashioned of barbed wire. Mr
Dolan found that the cabin's radio telephone had been deliberately put out of
action, and so he rowed with some difficulty back to his fishing camp and
called the police. Upon examination of the scene of the incident, it appeared
that whoever had committed the homicides had forcefully gained access to the
cabin with the same woodsman's axe later employed in the killing of Mark
Clare. The perpetrators had killed the boys first; the coroner later
established that their deaths had occurred between nine and ten o'clock on the
evening of May ninth. The two females, however, had been taken to the main
bedroom, where they had been bound together in the manner in which they were
eventually discovered by Mr Dolan, and sexually assaulted. Both of them were
raped repeatedly, and later examination of the semen ejaculated by their
attackers established that there were four different men involved in the rape.
The females had been hung and strangulated early the following morning,
probably less than an hour before Mr Dolan approached the cabin. A twenty-two
rifle was found in the living room with a jammed magazine, indicating that the
members of the Clare family had attempted to protect themselves against
assault. Fingerprints and shoe prints, as well as hair, skin, fibre and semen
samples, are being forensically examined at the headquarters of the RCMP in
Ottawa, and prelimi-
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nary results have already been forwarded to the FBI in Washington.'
Inspector Dulac lowered the hand that had been shielding his eyes from the
sun. He watched Randolph carefully, as if Randolph might be a young son of his
who had just learned to ride a bicycle.
'Do you want any more?' he asked. 'That's just the resume.'
'I think, for the time being, that's sufficient,' Randolph told him, with
intense self-control.
'Do you wish to ask any questions?'
Randolph swallowed and thought for a moment. Then he asked, 'Did nobody see
them? The men who did it?'
'There were no witnesses. The footprints suggest that the men landed by boat
or dinghy just out of sight of the cabin, around the headland, and then made
their way up to the cabin by walking through the woods.'
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Sergeant Allinson put in, 'This of course suggests that the attack was not
spontaneous. The men knew where the cabin was and they approached it with the
deliberate intention of breaking in. They were not just passing fishermen who
took it into their heads to butcher your family.'
Inspector Dulac straightened his papers and said to Randolph, 'You might care
to make out a list of all those people you can think of who might dislike you
sufficiently to have contemplated such an act.'
'Nobody dislikes me like that,' Randolph said in a hollow voice. 'Not like
that.'
Inspector Dulac said, 'I have the official police photographs. If you wish to
see them, you may. I must warn you that they are very distressing. But they
will be produced in court when these men are eventually brought to justice and
it is probably better that you see them now rather than later, if you are
going to see them at all.'
Randolph said, 'Very well.'
Sergeant Allinson passed him a brown cardboard-backed envelope marked with the
crest of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. Randolph waited for a mo-
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ment or two, then took off his sunglasses and tugged out a dozen eight-by-ten
colour prints. For some reason he had been expecting the photographs to be in
black and white. Maybe it was all those old gangster movies he had watched
when he was a kid, blood spattered blackly on light grey suits, flashbulbs
flaring white. It seemed to him as if only fairgrounds and pretty girls and
favourite pets should be photographed in colour. Dead bodies should be
monochromatic, like nightmares.
He could hardly recognize John. The whole of John's stomach looked as if it
had been ground up like dark red hamburger meat, and his face was puffy and
swollen. Mark looked more normal and natural until Randolph realized that what
he had taken for Mark's chest and shoulders were two discarded cushions and
that what he was actually looking at was Mark's severed head. It was so
shocking that it was almost ridiculous. How could that be my son? How could
either of these corpses be my sons? But when he reached the photographs of
Marmie and Issa, he began to weep because suddenly the picture was complete;
suddenly the full extent of Mr Dolan's terrible discovery became clear to him;
suddenly he could imagine what it must have been like. Bruised, naked bodies.
Chins jerked upward by tangled barbed wire. Blood, tousled hair and eyes like
the eyes of unfeathered birds that have fallen from their nest.
'Are you all right, Mr Clare?' Inspector Dulac asked, leaning forward and
taking the photographs.
Randolph swallowed, wiped his eyes and said, Til get over it in time. I just
couldn't imagine how terrible it was, that's all. I'm glad you showed me.'
'It is not my invariable policy,' Inspector Dulac said, 'but I believed that
you could cope with it, and I think it is important for you to understand.'
'What can I tell you?' Randolph asked.
'Is there anything you wish to tell me?'
Randolph said, They're dead, aren't they, all of them?'
Inspector Dulac knew that this question was not absurd.
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It sometimes took the relatives of murder victims months, even years, to come
to terms with the idea that their loved ones were actually dead and not simply
missing, or hiding.
He said, 'Yes, Mr Clare, they're dead.'
'Do you believe in reincarnation, Inspector?'
'Reincarnation? No, sir, I regret that I don't. I have to be truthful with
you. Perhaps we would feel better about our grief if indeed we did believe in
reincarnation, if we had some indisputable proof that death is not really the
end. But, unfortunately, nobody can say that it is true.'
Randolph sat in silence, his head bowed, for almost a minute. Inspector Dulac [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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