The wind was blowing against the shutters. Amelia felt somewhat overtaken by events. “I don’t understand,” she said in a whisper, as if the corpse on the couch could hear her. “What’s the connection between Ann Brook’s murder and your story of land and Maori villages?”
“While I was trying to track down the doorman from the Phoenix, I found a Maori with the same tattoos as him in a crummy bar in South Auckland. I was trying to find out who had made these famous mokos when I ran into him.”
Osborne pointed at the couch where the body of the young Maori lay. He let go of Amelia’s hands, which dropped at her sides. She seemed a little lost in her bathrobe. Dead bodies; was that all he could bring her?
She shivered. Now that her hands were no longer in his, they felt quite cold.
“Who is this guy?” she said at last. “One of Ann Brook’s killers?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know if the Tagaloa brothers are involved in the murders, or if they’re a gang, but I need clues, a lead, something.”
“And you’re asking me to do a postmortem? Here?”
“Blood tests, tests on any vegetable or mineral residues in the tissues, as much as you can find about where he’s been living lately. Basically anything you can find, especially about the way he got his tattoos: substances, types of instruments used—”
“What about the police?” Amelia cut in, with a sense that she was speaking with someone else’s voice. “Why don’t you tell all this to the police?”
“Gallagher buried the Griffith case with Moore’s collusion. Joanne Griffith didn’t drown, you know that. I don’t trust anyone. Only you.”
Osborne was looking at her with that damned angel face of his: a highly effective technique that had already earned her three sleepless nights. A dead man to perform a postmortem on. Alone. As an apprentice pathologist, the idea was tempting—as a woman, she had already given in.
“It’s an interesting story,” she said, “but I can’t just turn up at the institute with a corpse under my arm!”
“You have to take the samples here. The tests you can do at the institute . . . Oh, shit!” he said suddenly. “What’s that?”
From the couch, a disgusting smell was wafting over to them.
“That’s the muscles relaxing,” she replied. “The body’s emptying. Well, now”—she suddenly sprang into action—“we can’t leave him there. He needs to be washed.”
Osborne’s eyes lit up for a brief moment: she was agreeing to help him.
“Where’s your lab?”
“In the basement,” she replied. “Get a blanket to carry him down in. You’ll find some in the hall closet. I’m going to get dressed.”
Amelia ran up the stairs leading to her bedroom.
Osborne started by searching the body: faded combat fatigues, no identity papers, but a map of North Island, a few hundred dollars in cash, a sharpened penknife, cigarette papers and, stuck in his belt, a small sachet of grass. Datura, judging by the smell. He had smoked some with Ann Brook. The Tagaloa brothers were indeed dealing to the gilded youth of Auckland. But did that mean they had killed her? He concentrated on the Maori’s tattoos, especially the mokos covering his face. The design was quite dark and very fine. The bluish tinge on the curves around the chin suggested that they were relatively old, but the circles around the nose and eyes were recent: you could still see the little scars on the traumatized skin and the darker color of the lines. The mark of the gang?
Osborne got a blanket from the hall closet. He laid it down on the wooden floor and rolled the corpse in it. The smell of shit was nauseating. From the bedroom, he could hear Amelia talking to herself, saying she didn’t have the appropriate equipment, listing the missing products, predicting poor results for such a high risk . . . She came back down, dressed in jeans and sweater, now completely awake.
“Take him down to the basement,” she said.
Osborne grabbed the blanket and slid the corpse toward the little staircase. The Maori’s head knocked on the steps. It was cold in the basement. The atmosphere was heavy with formaldehyde, and a harsh light fell from the ceiling. There was a stainless-steel trestle table with a channel running the length of it, ending in a pipe feeding the main drainage, a number of electric saws on a shelf, along with scalpels and syringes and bone tongs, some refrigerated lockers, a deep freeze, a sink, a faucet—Amelia had set up a real little lab for herself.
Osborne moaned as he laid the body on the autopsy table—the muscles of his shoulder had gone numb again, and he could barely move it. Amelia was silently collecting her surgical instruments. He noticed three wooden crates in a corner: Amelia also used the basement as a wine cellar.
“Do you have internet?” he asked.
“In the bedroom.”
She had put on a white coat and a pair of plastic gloves. She leaned over the cranium and started examining the tattoos, already in her own world.
“Will you be OK?” he said.
Amelia nodded, her eyes two blue marbles in the neon light.
He went back upstairs.
The house was silent, barely disturbed by the noise of the waves against the rocks. Osborne started by cleaning up the traces of excrement on the couch, and then the blood on his shirt. He went out through the garden, opened the trunk of the Chevrolet, left the traditional patu used by Tagaloa, but grabbed the overnight case and went back to the house and down to the basement.
With the aid of a syringe, Amelia was making a hole in the Maori’s eye in order to extract a small amount of vitreous humor. She was aware of Osborne coming down the stairs, but didn’t look up.
“This is going to take all night,” she said, evaluating the liquid.
Osborne approached the autopsy table—he forgot for a moment that the corpse lying there was the first man he had killed—and took the digital camera from the overnight case. He pointed it at the tattooed face resting on the stainless steel and took three photographs. All close-ups.
“What are you going to do?” Amelia asked, as she poured the liquid into a tube.
“Find out where these mokos come from,” he replied.
Their eyes met. In spite of the situation, Amelia wasn’t angry with him. She loved him, and, alarming as it might seem, she would follow him even in what appeared to be the paranoid delusions of a man who was alone, abandoned, and at the end of his tether.
But her romanticism had its limits. “You still haven’t told me how you got hold of Ann Brook’s hair,” she said.
Osborne stuffed the camera back in the overnight case. “From her coffin,” he replied.
“Oh. So that’s where you hang out at night, is it?”
