“Not for fun,” he said, cutting her short. “I’ll see you later.”
Amelia let him go—yes, of course, later . . .
The spiral staircase led up to an attic room. A bed twice the size of the one in his hotel room sprawled beneath the skylight. On the floor, piles of books—fiction and non-fiction—and technical reviews. Osborne switched on the Mac on the desk, and while it was coming on went and had a look at his shoulder blade in the en-suite bathroom. The blow with the club had left a sizeable hematoma. He took a sachet of white powder from his overnight case, sniffed a long line on the cabinet shelf, and went back into the bedroom, feeling weightless. There, he connected to the internet, glanced feverishly at his watch—two in the morning—and typed in the name Nepia.
There wasn’t much information available, but he eventually found a mention of him on a site devoted to tattoos. An activist at the time of the Bastion Point occupation, Joseph Nepia had since dedicated himself to the art of the moko. No photographs of him, but a few of his work. Once a highly regarded tattooist in South Auckland, Nepia had been retired for years. No available address. He would have to check in the police records, but Joseph Nepia was someone else who seemed to have vanished into thin air.
The moon was visible through the skylight. Tagaloa’s tattoos had to mean something. According to tradition, mokos were an honor reserved for rangatiras, chiefs or aristocrats, as opposed to tutuas, the common people—let alone taurekarekas, slaves. A moko was like a signature, a coat of arms representing the merits of the person who wore them. The depth and thickness of the line was an indication of rank. It sometimes took months, or even years, to “complete” a chief’s tattoo. Osborne examined the digital photographs: to judge by the mokos on Will Tagaloa’s face, the young Maori had reached an elevated rank.
He continued looking at the various available sites devoted to the art of the tattoo, filling the bedroom with smoke. After a slow, laborious search, Osborne at last came across an engraving dating from the nineteenth century, the portrait of a Maori chief sporting the same mokos. Exactly the same. They belonged to the Hauhau movement, started by the fanatical self-styled prophet Te Ua Haumene, whose followers recycled the language of the Biblical Apocalypse to arouse the warlike passions of the Maoris.
These mokos, for all their refinement, were war tattoos.
* * *
Looking sexless in her white coat, Amelia was bustling around the corpse. A strange sight, this little dragonfly flitting about in the pale light of the basement.
“I’ve taken a first set of samples,” she said, seeing Osborne at the foot of the stairs, “concentrating on the tattoos. I’ll try my best to get the first results by tomorrow night. No one takes much notice of me in the lab right now.”
Osborne nodded, staring into the distance. The Maori’s body had swelled, distended by the gases impregnating the tissues. Little bubbles of white foam were oozing from the nose. The top of the skull was open and the sight of all those gelatinous substances was fairly disgusting. Nothing so far explained how the doorman of a swingers’ club had become a follower of Hauhau. That was such an old story, going back to colonial days.
“Did you find anything? Amelia asked.
“The tattoos belong to an old sect,” he replied. “An anti-British cult.”
Amelia stared down at the cranium. “What’s that got to do with this case?”
“I don’t know. But with those tattoos on his face, I doubt that Tagaloa was ever planning to go back to his job as a doorman. Which is strange, because according to the cloakroom girl at the club Tagaloa was supposed to be coming back to work on Monday.”
“Meaning what?”
“Meaning something’s going to happen between now and Monday.”
“What?”
“No idea.”
Two days. They still had two days. Amelia yawned in spite of herself. Her lack of sleep was catching up with her and, judging by the bags under her eyes, it was clear she could barely stand. It was five in the morning.
“And what do we do with him?” she asked, pointing to the corpse on the stainless-steel table. “If you want a complete postmortem, we’ll have to keep him cool for a while.”
“How long do you need?”
“Six or seven hours, at least. Probably more. It also depends on what I get from the first samples.” She glanced at her tulip-shaped watch. “It’s impossible to finish now. Unless I phone in sick and stick at it all day, but that won’t get us very far. I still have to go to the institute to do the tests.”
Amelia was right. They couldn’t leave the body like that, exposed to the air. The smell would attract flies, or else someone could arrive unexpectedly and find it.
“Don’t you have a cold room?” Osborne asked.
“This isn’t a butcher’s shop,” she retorted, removing her surgical gloves. “Let me remind you I don’t usually dissect human beings here, just owls and field mice.”
Osborne moaned inwardly. Yes, there was the deep freeze, but the body was too large to go in there, not to mention that the muscles would soon stiffen and they would have to wait about twelve hours before they relaxed.
Reading his mind, Amelia came up with the only possible solution. “We have to cut him up.”
Osborne had a taste like ground glass in his mouth. “Cut him up?”
“Yes, saw his legs off and put the trunk in the deep freeze. It ought to fit.”
Amelia’s voice was suddenly as cold as ice. She was undergoing a transformation. A transformation in reverse: the butterfly was returning to its chrysalis, its larval state.
Osborne said nothing but they were now as pale as each other. Saw his legs off . . .
He looked at the deep freeze, the body on the table, the weariness on Amelia’s face—and the underlying fear. He, too, was afraid. He had killed a man, the feeling was still diffuse, but it wasn’t over yet. Saw his legs off . . .
“You just have to wrap him in this,” she said, taking two large black plastic sheets from a sliding drawer. “There are several electric saws on the shelf. Take the strongest. I’ve had my fill for tonight.” She put a white coat down on the steel table. “Here, I advise you to put this on.”
Fleeing his golden eyes beneath the fluorescent light, Amelia went up to bed, leaving him alone in the cellar with the corpse.
A ghost passed by in the silence of the basement. Osborne sniffed the little bit of cocaine that was left in his pocket, swallowed the bitterness, and, avoiding the corpse’s peeled face, set about his ghastly task.
At first it was relatively easy. The saw sliced into the flesh as if into butter, but before very long it became a nightmare, a nightmare that was all too real. The saw buzzed, and particles of bone flew off, falling everywhere, on the steel table, on the tiled floor. When he cut into the femoral artery, blood spurted in his face. He was soon covered in warm blood. He gritted his teeth and tightened his grip on the saw, which just kept right on cutting into the boy, this boy he had shot at point-blank range and was now dismembering, cutting in half, as if he had to pay his debt to the death he had brought with him. He was a bird of ill omen, his arms paralyzed with the effort and disgust of it all.
