Read Online The Elder Ice: A Harry Stubbs Adventure by David Hambling - Free Book Online

Conquering Hero: the heavyweight Mickey, his associate who had tried to club me with so little success, and the one who had tried to run.
    “What happened here? Who did this?”
    “I wanted to ask you the same,” said Renville. He looked down at the bodies with distaste. “This is highly irregular, Stubbsy, highly irregular indeed. I expected much better from you, really I did. I thought you was in a respectable trade now, not getting mixed up with murderers.”
    “This situation is none of my making,” I protested.
    “Isn't it, though? These men appear from thin air, with no purpose but assaulting your person, and then they show up again slaughtered like pigs, right on my patch. I can't see that this is nothing to do with you, however I try, and I did expect better.” He let out a sigh and faced me. “In any case, the pertinent facts are these. Certain informants discovered that these men were camped out here—navvies and the like often use the place as informal accommodation. I approached personally last night with the intention of carrying out an interview and discovered this sorry scene you find here.”
    I continued to walk around, scrutinising the bodies from different angles, looking about them in the straw. “Were they beheaded post-mortem?”
    “That would not seem to be the case.” Arthur squatted beside me. “As near as I can tell it, Stubbsy, decapitation occurred coincident with and at the same time as actual death. But really! What kind of savages are you dealing with—Hottentots? Borneo head-hunters?”
    He went on, and I lost track of his words. This was very strange indeed. I’ve done my time behind a butcher’s counter, and I’ve seen meat cut, chopped, and sawed with a dozen instruments. I’ve seen it cut with sharp blades and blunt ones, by real masters and by raw apprentices. But no instrument I could recognise had cut those severed heads. The meat had been cut very cleanly, and the ends had an odd finish to them—pickled pork would be the closest comparison I could make, or perhaps seared. The meat had not been cooked but treated in some way.
    “Stubbsy, what are you doing there?”
    I twisted some straws together and poked at the vertebrae sticking out of Mickey’s neck then inspected the matching end. I did the same with a second body. A cord of muscle and skin remained on one side as though the killer had not quite caught that one squarely. “Were they killed from in front or behind?” I asked.
    “I don’t know—why’s it matter?”
    “I don’t know, either. The cut is perfectly even. You can’t tell if it’s left to right or front to back or what. If you were to have the sharpest blade in the world, you couldn’t cut so cleanly. And it didn’t cut the bone, neither, but it cut through the spinal cord inside the neck bone… how can that happen? Have you ever seen anything like this?”
    “Don’t look at me, Stubbsy.”
    “Maybe it was some sort of electrical saw, or surgical instrument,” I said aloud.
    “Or shrapnel.”
    I shook my head. I had spent the war lugging sixty-pound bursting shells, and we had suffered the effect of counter-battery fire by German fifteen-centimetre guns. One man might be decapitated, but not three, and the mess was far greater.
    “Not much blood,” Arthur added. He had calmed down now and was looking at it more rationally. “The straw soaked up what there was, but there wasn’t much to begin with.”
    Something stirred in the straw, and I had the horrible impression that one of the heads was moving, working its jaws to speak something except it had no breath.
    “Garn!” shouted Arthur, and a rat scuttled away through the straw. It had been chewing at the soft meat of the severed neck. “Vermin everywhere.”
    Then I saw the biscuit tin. It was open and lying empty a few feet away from one of the bodies. Next to it was a white object that proved to be a piece of crumpled tissue paper. There was, of course, no sign of what it had