A Feast of Carrion (Eisenmenger-Flemming Forensic Mysteries) by McCarthy Keith

Author:McCarthy, Keith [McCarthy, Keith]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
Publisher: Endeavour Press
Published: 2015-11-23T05:00:00+00:00

Part Three

Goodpasture’s eyes saw the dawn but their uncomprehending, leaden gaze did not react. They were filmed, and crusted yellow mucous stuck to the lashes and extruded from each inner canthus. His skin was almost leathery in its oleaginous saffron sheen and his hands held a fine tremor. He sat at the small kitchen table unable to sleep: the makeshift bed on the dining-room floor — an old and dirty sleeping bag and a cushion — had not been used now for three nights. The silence that surrounded him condemned him.

He had not eaten for a long time, but he could not have said precisely how long. He had drunk only water and that without thought: indeed all the necessities of living he had performed without higher reasoning, allowing them to be dictated by the more basic, more primitive parts of his brain, for his higher mind was occupied.

And, though it filled his consciousness, it was, in essence, a simple thing.

Grief.

Grief that his wife had died, desolating his existence. Grief that she had gone without forgiving him. Grief that he had done what he had done.

A simple phrase repeated endlessly wherever he looked; why didn’t I tell you? He felt that if only he had managed to tell her everything and thereby allowed her to absolve him, he could bear the loss that he now felt. The possibility that this was no more than a dream could not be allowed to enter his reality, was kept an aborted, sickly thing in a room beyond.

He turned away from the window but it was not with purpose: his mind was incapable of anything beyond impulse and reaction. He looked around the kitchen and saw disjointed objects, each with disjointed characteristics. He saw a cooker, a fridge, a sink, a cupboard, but not a kitchen: when he concentrated on any individual thing such as a chair he saw wood, he saw brown, he saw a shape but he did not see the whole. He tried to concentrate but he couldn’t. It was as if his mind were dying.

“Please, God.”

A punishment. At once it was decided and thus set, the truth, the inescapable.

He sat suddenly down on the chair, partly relieved that it was real. Why couldn’t he cry? Why couldn’t he crumble into complete and utter loss?

Suddenly he knew that she was in the next room, that she was moving through in her dressing gown, round and warm and comforting as she had always been. He rose at once and strode to the doorway and through it.

No one there. There never was.

He half sighed, half sobbed as his head came to rest against the wood of the door jamb. It was as it always was. A ghost, a memory, a tantalizing sense. He knew that she was there but he never saw her, never heard her. Perhaps she was trying to contact him, tell him that he was, truly, forgiven but how could he know if he could never see her? The frustration was sending him into madness.

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