“This business has nothing to do with Melanie,” he bellowed. “How many more times do I have to tell you?”
“That’s not what she says.”
“She doesn’t know what she’s saying! Can’t you see what a state you’ve gotten her in?”
Wavering between fear and anger, the girl had retreated to the far end of the toilet.
“What’s worrying you exactly?” Osborne said. “That she’ll talk? What are you afraid she’ll tell me?”
“Melanie’s fragile,” Melrose roared, “and you’re a brute. I’ll make sure your superiors hear of this.” He grabbed his daughter by the wrist. “We’re going home!”
His jaws were quivering with anger. Melanie looked imploringly at Osborne, but he was impassive.
“You’ll pay for this,” Melrose muttered.
They walked out without it being clear who he was referring to.
* * *
A quarter moon illumined the night. Not a living soul on the lawn, just a few rabbits that cocked their ears at his approach.
It was two in the morning by the time Osborne approached the left wing of the Medico-Legal Institute. As far as he remembered, the surveillance cameras were at the entrance to the building. In the lobby, the night security guard had his feet up on the desk, reading a sports magazine, half asleep.
Accustomed to this kind of exercise, Osborne climbed on the roof and noiselessly forced open one of the sliding windows. Breaking in like this could get him in a lot of trouble, but he hadn’t been able to get much information from police records and he couldn’t access the file without Gallagher’s go-ahead—which would be like asking a lamppost for directions.
He quietly closed the window, lit his Maglite, and crept toward Moore’s office—the new Chief Medical Officer had taken over his predecessor McCleary’s lair. The postmortem reports on the bodies discovered in the mass grave may have been wiped from Fitzgerald’s computer, but the originals had to be here. Apart from which, he’d never been convinced by the suicide story, and needed to set his mind at rest.
Osborne found Moore’s office, pushed a chair against the door in case he was interrupted, opened the metal drawers, and started to search.
Fitzgerald’s file looked thin in the torchlight. When he opened it, the first things he saw were the digital photographs. They were like a blow to the heart. Pieces of skin and blood and bone and brain matter were everywhere. Some had hit the wall and trickled down onto the tiles. Osborne gulped. Fitzgerald lay on the floor, still holding his service revolver, a .38. But he didn’t have a face: he had shot himself in the mouth and the hydrostatic shock had shattered his cranium.
The sight of his friend in that state was truly terrible, and Osborne had to suppress the wave of anger that rose in him and concentrate on the postmortem report. There was no getting away from it: the weapon used had indeed been Fitzgerald’s own service revolver, according to ballistics Fitzgerald had pressed the trigger himself, and they’d found traces of powder on his fingers and his prints on the grip. Osborne grimaced. Jack Fitzgerald really did seem to have killed himself. Damn it, why had he done something like that? What about his wife? His daughter? It was beyond comprehension.
He put the file away and continued his feverish search.
K for Kirk. The serial killer.
A handful of sheets comprised the postmortem reports on the victims found in the mass grave: Kathy Larsen, Mark Wilson, Kirsty Burrell, they were all there. Even the fourth body had been identified now: Samuel Tukao.
These photographs were just as horrible as the others, and the details particularly gruesome. All the victims had had a bone cut out—a femur. No reason was put forward for this. According to Chief Medical Examiner Moore, who had taken over the case, Kirk seemed to have been practicing some kind of cannibalistic, sacrificial ritual. Animal remains had also been found in the mass grave: pigs, chickens, opossums. Osborne continued reading, increasingly intrigued.
Kathy Larsen’s death had taken place on December 25, Kirsty Burrell’s on December 27, Mark Wilson’s on December 30. All in the space of one week. Only Tukao’s death predated them—estimated at two months earlier.
That made Samuel Tukao the serial killer’s first victim.
Something especially unpleasant struck Osborne. According to the reconstruction of the skeletons, all the victims had had their necks or skull broken, but Samuel Tukao had also had several teeth torn out—incisors, canines—in addition to which, Moore had also found burn marks on his skin. He had been tortured to death.
As for the femurs removed from the bodies, they had disappeared.
4.
Hana had said she would come back on weekends from her Maori school, but she never did. Never. Had that stolen kiss at the bus stop disgusted her so much? Paul waited every Friday evening for her to appear, but to no avail. Was she trying to get away from him? Or punish him for his boldness? Or was it that she simply didn’t give a damn about him?
It was on the bus one day that one of the Douglas sisters told him in a deceptively casual way that Hana was spending her time at her grandparents’ marae9 on West Coast Road. They’d had a letter from her. Hadn’t he? The stupid girl was laughing.
Paul followed up her lead.
He found out that Pita Witkaire had been a professor of Maori at the university before devoting himself to the promotion of native culture. He was said to be an activist, but it was his wife, Wira, who was particularly well known. A rangatira10 of high rank, Hana’s grandmother was considered a walking encyclopedia, the guardian of the ancestors’ knowledge.
341 West Coast Road. That was the address. As Hana hadn’t returned, he decided to go and see for himself.
Paul took the bus very early one Saturday morning, with a whole series of knots in his stomach instead of breakfast. Hana had advised him to leave the neighborhood where they had grown up, but to go where? Her grandparents’ marae? Was this a way of asking him to join her?
At the bus station, he changed onto another bus that would take him out of Auckland. It was hot in spite of the air conditioning, fat Maori women were fanning themselves in the next seats, half dozing, and the closer he got to the marae, the more his trepidation grew. At last, after a slow journey through the hills, the driver wished him a good day and dropped him at the side of the road.
West Coast Road stretched for several miles, from the endless suburbs of Auckland as far as the hills. Here, the bush reasserted itself. The undergrowth that lined his way was full of silvery pongas, puipuis, and other giant ferns. From the road, the houses were barely visible.
Number 341. There was a smell of dry wood and of the moss that hung along the path. Paul first saw an ocher-colored roof, then hastily tagged prefabricated huts. The place looked more like an abandoned school than a center for native culture. The main building was a bit farther on, hidden behind the branches.
Paul walked around the outside of the building in silence. It was a building the size of a large house, one side of which looked out on a square—the marae itself. Carved according to tradition, the pillars adorning the front of the house were remarkably provocative: huge phalluses reaching all the way up from the ground, grimacing faces of warriors sticking out their tongues, primitive marks of the haka.11 Paul took refuge behind a sprawling fern, as a group of Maoris was just coming out of the whare12, laughing andjoking.
There were about twenty of them. Some of the men were bare-chested, some in shorts. There were women too, and Hana was among them, in a white T-shirt and black shorts, her thighs bare.
The group set off along the path that snaked around the marae. Paul retreated beneath the branches, those brown thighs on a CinemaScope screen in front of him. The Maoris passed him without seeing him, tangled as he was in the vegetation, and gathered in the middle of the marae. Surrounded by these muscular bodies, Hana was smiling as he had never seen her smile before. Her skin was glowing after the short walk, and her tied-back hair left her Amazon face bare. He drank her in from a distance, the way the ocean drinks in the sunset. At last everyone fell silent—a short man had just appeared.
