Sacrifice of Fools by Ian McDonald

Author:Ian McDonald
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Monday-Tuesday morning

ROISIN DUNBAR HAS A professional resolution never to be murdered. It’s not the thought of dying violently she hates — she hates the thought of dying in any way. It’s ending up on the pure Protestant porcelain of Belfast City Morgue. Indignity enough to have died violently and been taken away by the police in a black bag, like so much rubbish. Post mortem is the second indignity, the second death. Naked, vulnerable, helpless, you lie under the lights, open for examination. In the first death you might have tried to stop your killer, fight him off, put up a struggle. In the first death all he did was kill you. In the second death they come with their power saws and scalpels and forceps and they do whatever they want for as long as they want. And when they are satisfied, they bag you, tag you, slide you into a hole in the wall and sluice your juice away with the overhead shower sprays. Spiral pinkly down the plughole. Like the shower in the Bates Motel. This is no chocolate sauce.

Dear Police God, let me die a copper’s death: fat and fermented and boozy, with a margarita slipping from my fingers to smash on the sun terrace of the sea-view retirement haciendas in the hills behind Fuengirola. Let twenty grandchildren fly in for the funeral, let them weep, let them curse me to hell when they find out I’ve spent their inheritance on drink and golf lessons. Grant me a gentleman’s death, not a player’s.

Funny; Michael doesn’t feature in this memento mori.

‘Absolutely no other possibility?’

Barbara Hendron unpeels her rubber gloves with sharp, sadomasochistic twackings. She gives Willich the same look of expert condescension Littlejohn uses. They must read the same crime books.

‘Unless we’ve just discovered spontaneous detonation. Like spontaneous combustion, only more dramatic. And whoever did this knows about the mutilations you wanted kept secret.’

The green-scrubbed assistants smirk as they do their things with trolleys and sacks.

‘They’d been dead how long when we found them?’

‘Couple of hours. They’d hardly even started to cool. It’ll all be in the report.’

‘Sunday evening, people everybloody where and no one sees a thing? Who is this, the invisible fucking man?’

‘We’ve checked the door-dog’s memory,’ Roisin Dunbar says. ‘Nothing on it, or the security cameras.’

‘Except the bastard walked right into their conservatory and blew their heads off.’

‘We think we have footprints. Forensic is running them through a neural net.’

‘Littlejohn, are you absolutely sure that an Outsider couldn’t have done this?’ Willich asks.

Grasping at straws. Willich may not be Roisin Dunbar’s contender for the police brain of the century, but she doesn’t like seeing her boss have to eat Littlejohn’s shit by admitting that the weapons-running theory is as fucked as Pastor McIvor Kyle.

‘I keep telling you: their biology makes them incapable of this kind of sexually motivated violence. They’re peaceable non-aggressive folk, unless you threaten their children.’

‘Maybe Kyle knocked a kiddy off his tricycle or something,’ Dunbar says. She needs to be flip in this Godawful place.

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