Past Mortem Read Free Page B

penis cut off and then watched as his assailant cooked and ate it? It must have been total agony, mentally and physically, yet it was his choice and you’ve got to suppose he enjoyed it.’
    ‘All right, it happens, but it doesn’t happen very often.’
    ‘Who knows how often it happens when it’s con-sensual? That man in Germany answered an internet search appealing for a person who would consent to be murdered and eaten. The internet has opened the door for loads of activities that in the past would probably never have found physical expression. I mean, who would ever have thought that anyone would dream of such a thing as eating people, let alone advertise for it. But someone did, someone wanted a hot, smooth, silky, frothy, warming, enveloping human corpse to eat and he went looking for it. The only thing more astonishing is that he found a volunteer. The cannibal got an email from his lunch and in due course they met up. They both got their wish. The penis was merely an hors d’oeuvre.’
    ‘All right, all right,’ conceded Natasha. ‘It could be sexual. It could be a black-magic ritual. Who knows? In a previous life Adam Bishop might have been a pincushion. There could be any number of motives, but surely the most obvious one is that this is a builders’ tiff.’
    ‘Tiff? He was stabbed three hundred and forty-seven times.’
    ‘I knew Doctor Clarke would count them.’
    ‘She’s very thorough.’
    ‘She’s a very thorough pain in the arse. Look, those stabs were a warning. Bishop undercut someone, pinched one too many jobs, sold on a truckload of dodgy cement and offended the gyppos. Whatever. Someone needed to make him an example. That’s what this is about. Hard men doing each other in.’
    ‘You can’t say gyppos,’ Newson admonished.
    ‘Tinkers, travellers, boys from the black stuff, call them what you like. There’s a lot of very tough people in the building and associated trades. Bishop made the wrong enemies and they stabbed him to death to warn off others.’
    ‘Stabbed him to death three hundred and forty- seven times with a five-centimetre-long skewer?’
    ‘It would warn me off.’
    ‘I just think it seems like a very mean-spirited little weapon to use to kill so big and violent a man. Not the weapon I’d imagine avenging navvies or double-crossed Tarmac cowboys would choose.’
    ‘Perhaps they wanted to belittle him. You know, a little prick for a little prick, and we all know he did have a little prick.’
    ‘We don’t know any such thing,’ said Newson. ‘No six-hour corpse which has been systematically milked of nearly every drop of blood is going to appear well hung. Honestly, you girls, any opportunity to belittle the penis.’
    ‘It’s our job.’
    ‘Look how many times the attacker stabbed the scrotum. You can’t deny that the pricking is more intense there than on the limbs or back. And there’s also a thick cluster of stabs in the anus. Bishop must have been face down for hours. Look at the photos.’
    ‘Thanks, I’ve seen them,’ said Natasha. ‘I took them, and Mr Bishop’s lacerated arse is something I’m trying not to remind myself of.’
    Newson looked at the photos and was once again sickened to his stomach. These wounds were peculiarly horrible even to someone of Newson’s considerable experience. The killer seemed to have taken such care with his pricks; this was no frenzied attack, it was considered.
    ‘The killer took aim. He took aim three hundred and forty-seven times . He chose each new target carefully, took aim and drove in his spike.’
    ‘That doesn’t make it sexual.’
    ‘No, but it makes it very, very weird, and in my experience of police work, weird rarely happens only once.’

FOUR
    I nspector Newson and Sergeant Wilkie drove to Willesden in Natasha’s Renault Clio, and stood once more before the house in which the horror had occurred.
    ‘I don’t think I’ve ever seen stone cladding on a house as big as this,’ Newson